Historians are, by profession, suspicious of things. Words are our stock‐in‐trade. This is not to say, of course, that historians have never had recourse to nonlinguistic sources. From the use of archaeological evidence in the nineteenth century to Marc Bloch's brilliant notion that the intricacies of medieval landholding patterns could be deciphered by observing the interwar French countryside from a small plane, historians have looked beyond the holdings of archives and libraries.1 Scholars of the ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds, and of science and technology—those whose written sources are limited or whose very object is material—have pushed the evidentiary boundaries the furthest, although some modernists and social and cultural historians have also used visual, material, and musical sources.2 Despite these initiatives, however, most historians view words as the most trustworthy as well as the most informative sources; everything else is merely illustrative or supplementary.