Reimagining the past: Historical imagination in theory and practice

Abstract

Historical imagination is not merely an auxiliary tool in historical understanding but its constitutive condition—a claim articulated consistently across Collingwood’s re-enactment, Dilthey’s Verstehen, and Gadamer’s fusion of horizons, and supported by cognitive neuroscience. Yet despite this foundational status, historical imagination remains conceptually under-specified in history education research, and the empirical work documenting its importance has not provided a theoretical account of why affect is constitutive of historical understanding or how it operates. This paper addresses that gap directly. Drawing on hermeneutic philosophy, cognitive science, and history education research, it proposes a three-part framework of analytical, hermeneutic, and moral imagination. A central contribution is the identification of two levels at which emotion functions: an initial appraisal-driven response through which students register the human significance of historical material (Erlebnis), and a sustained affective understanding in which that response is contextualised and constrained by evidence (Verstehen). The Collingwood–Retz tradition of disciplined re-enactment underpins analytical imagination; the Dilthey–Gadamer tradition of interpretive engagement underpins hermeneutic imagination. Rather than prescribing a pedagogical sequence, the framework functions as a diagnostic lens enabling teachers to identify which form of imaginative work is at stake, recognise systematic absences, and scaffold historical understanding in more integrated ways.