ISTORY IS ONE of the few disciplines to boast a muse, Clio, thanks to the academic intelligentsia of Alexandria who assigned her to our craft. The muses are, of course, female. If any among them has partaken more than others of the nature and destiny of woman in a man's world, it is Clio. Look at the very purpose and structure of this conference. It is organized as a series of pairings or couplings. Although at the center of the inquiry, history does not pose the questions. We are foregathered to scrutinize Clio's value as a partner, present or future: Is she a satisfactory helpmeet? Can she, does she, could she enrich the performance of her partners from other disciplines in the academic quadrille? How shall Clio deport herself in this dating game? For good and for ill, the only thing she is really good at is dates. In both senses of the word: date as a measure and locus in time, and date as an exploratory erotic encounter which can lead to a gratifying relationship of indeterminate duration. Clio's fixation on dates in the first sense is deep and serious. The calendar is for her a kind of sacred book, but it has ill equipped her to establish an autonomous existence or a full-bodied faith. Every other discipline defines itself either by its subject matter, the terrain or objects of its study (like anthropology, literary criticism, biology), or by pursuing principles through rigorous internal mental procedures to create a world of meaning (philosophy, mathematics). Not so history. It has neither turf nor principles of its own. Historians may choose their subject matter from any domain of human experience. At times, we have had universal historians, who have aspired to make the whole world their oyster. In more modest moments, historians have made the oyster their world-as when they study a small episode: a diplomatic incident or, nowadays, a peasant festival or a single text. But always historians have been concerned with describing their objects of study under the aspect of change, under the or-