Deconstruction taught critics to look not only for what is expressed in a text but for what is hidden or suppressed as well. The New Historicism makes a political issue of such acts of suppression, always looking for the way minority positions have been silenced in literature. But to comprehend this approach fully, we must look more carefully at its intellectual heritage.

To understand the New Historicism, we must then begin from the fact that it is a species of historicism, a doctrine developed in the nineteenth century, largely as a result of the thinking of Hegel. Historicism is the view that all thought is historically determined--not just historically conditioned, as no rational person would deny, but historically determined, a much more specific and hence questionable claim. For historicists, all human beings are creatures of their historical moment, bound by the horizons of their age. Anyone living in the Middle Ages must necessarily think in a distinctively medieval manner.