In the year 1742 there appeared in Leipzig a book 600 pages in length and divided into 753 paragraphs: I mean Johann Martin Chladenius' Einleitung zur richtigen Auslegung vernünfftiger Reden und Schrifften [Introduction to the Correct Interpretation of Rational Speech and Writing]. Chladenius lived from 1710 to 1759 and was active in Wittenberg, Leipzig, Coburg, and Erlangen. In addition to philosophical and theological works, he published an Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft [General Historiography] ten years after the Einleitung. If we begin a presentation of literary (that is, specifically not theological or legal) hermeneutics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with Chladenius, we must mention at the outset that he and his hermeneutic work were long forgotten, and are still virtually unknown today. His name appears in none of the long encyclopedia articles on the topic; and even Joachim Wach, who, as far as I can tell, was the first to call attention to Chladenius' hermeneutics again, treated only the Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft in the first volume (1926) of his three-volume Geschichte der hermeneutischen Theorie im 19. Jahrhundert: das Verstehen [History of Hermeneutic Theory in the 19th Century: Understanding]. Not until 1933, in the third volume of his work, did Wach mention and briefly discuss the Einleitung. Prior to Wach a few works on historiography referred to Chladenius. For instance, Bernheim, in his Lehrbuch der historischen Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie [Treatise on Historical Method and the Philosophy of History] (1889), said that Chladenius was the first to “try to define in greater detail the relationship of historical method to general epistemology and to logic” – something no one after him tried again for a long time.