Signs and images in the auxiliary science of history

Recenzowane materiały związane z XXI Powszechnym Zjazdem Historyków Polskich (Białystok, 17-20 września 2024 r.) będące również plonem projektu badawczego 'Człowiek twórcą historii' realizowanego w Uniwersytecie w Białymstoku w latach 2022-2024.

This article concerns the place and the role which visual signs (together with visual images) play in the historian's toolbox. Graphical signs may appear alone, as semantic enclaves, but also as part of larger structures in iconographic (visual) sources. Clearly, they are an object of interest in heraldry, sigillography and numismatics. Besides, they are investigated by students of legal archaeology and historical iconography. Furthermore, iconographical sources (containing visual messages) are also included into the classification of historical sources. It is known that they cannot simply be opposed to written sources. Although iconographical sources often reflect the past in their own, special ways, they complement textual sources and vice versa. Together, image and text allow a better understanding of various channels of information - and not only in the distant past. The Author reminds us that signs were created and introduced in order to develop in the recipient an idea of something other than the sign itself, where this 'something' can be understood by physical persons and institutions alike. For this reason, a visual image is never merely a simple depiction, e.g. of an event, but is also, when addressed to a sufficiently prepared audience, a carrier of a diversified ideological content. Those who lived in an iconosphere developing over time, surrounded as they were by visual images, treated images as sources of information. Modern historians do the same. The question asked by the Polish scholar Zenon Piech (i.e. how the science of historical iconography is to be exercised in order to be useful for historians) remains relevant today