Historical Disciplines, Subsidiary

collective designation for a number of scholarly disciplines that study particular varieties or aspects of the form and content of historical sources. (In contemporary historical literature, they are sometimes called special historical disciplines.)

The broadest of the subsidiary historical disciplines is the study of sources. The other, narrower disciplines are divided into two large groups: disciplines studying various kinds of sources—each of these deals with its own specific problems from a particular point of view—and disciplines that study a particular kind of source and examine comprehensively the main characteristics of its content and form. The first group includes the study of early texts, archives, genealogy, historical metrology, paleography (and its off-shoots, epigraphy and papyrology), textual criticism, and chronology; the second—heraldry, diplomatics, numismatics, and sphragistics.