Thresholds of meaning: metaphor, conceptual change and historical imagination

This essay analyzes the structuring role of metaphors in contemporary historiography by engaging in dialogue with three key works: Key Metaphors for History by Javier Fernández Sebastián, Intellectual History and the Problem of Conceptual Change by Elías José Palti and History and Identity by Stefan Berger. Across three sections, it reconstructs the convergences among these proposals concerning the epistemic function of metaphors, understood not as stylistic embellishments but as figurative matrices that mediate between experience, language and historical interpretation. First, it examines how metaphors shape forms of historical reasoning and grammars of temporality. Second, it analyzes their role as catalysts of conceptual change, particularly in contexts of semantic crisis or epistemic dislocation. Finally, it explores the potential of a historical metaphorology to foster interdisciplinary dialogue among history, philosophy, political theory, visual studies and material culture. What is thus advocated is a critical renewal of historical theory – one capable of training historians who are aware of the tropological substratum of their practice and equipped with tools to intervene in public debates on memory, identity and the uses of the past. Metaphors, in this framework, not only serve to weave historical narratives, but they also make them possible.