Ego-Documents: The Last Word?

This article examines the concept of ‘egocuments’ from a historiographical perspective. It looks at its origins in the 1950s in the work of the Dutch historian Jacob Presser, at its revival in the work of Rudolf Dekker and his group from the 1970s onwards, and at the considerable expansion the notion was subjected to in the early 1990s by Winfried Schulze. The article argues that we should be aware of the noticeable differences between using the concept in twentieth-century history, as Presser did, and its usage in the context of early modern history.