Historia komunikacji na tle historii idei i historii mentalności

This article focuses on a relatively new area of communicology and communication research, which is the history of communication. The historical approach to communication phenomena (or “reflexive historicising”) is derived from some important and influential fields of communication research, e.g. the Toronto School of Communication, ritual view of communication, intellectual history and history of mentalities (Annales School), cultural anthropology and others. This paper intends to investigate the position of communication history among other branches of modern humanities as well as its relation to some significant approaches in social history and cultural anthropology, namely the history of ideas (or intellectual history) and history of mentalities. This article outlines the origins and current state of communication history and connects its main fields (mostly the history of collective images or representations of communication) with the two above mentioned approaches.