The similarities and differences between humanities research and the empirical sciences are hard to define, but in his Methodology of the Humanities paper, James C. Raymond uses a ‘nested boxes metaphor.’ In this essay I’m going to explain firstly this ‘nested boxes metaphor’. After this I will tell something about a lecture of Orlanda Lee, the former Head of the Humanities Department at University College Utrecht and a researcher in the field of Medieval History. She gave a lecture about a case study on Women’s Medicine in the Middle Ages. This case study is a good example of the nested boxes metaphor, so therefore it will be used to illustrate this. Nested Boxes Metaphor Firstly I am going to explain the ‘nested boxes metaphor’ which James C. Raymond describes in his essay Rhetoric: The Methodology of the Humanities (1982). The ‘nested boxes metaphor’ describes the relation between the different methodologies of academic inquiry. There are four different groups in the academic field, which you will also see if you look around on a campus: scientists, nonscientists, rhetoricians and artists. Each group has a different way of treating their subject, but they also interrelate. Scientists do empirical research and have laboratories. They have to prove everything before it can be seen as truth. Nonscientists are divided into two groups: a group which constructed a self-contained symbol system (mathematicians, logicians and computer scientists) and those who haven’t. The rhetoricians do research without the benefit of laboratories or special symbol systems. They sometimes work as scientists (insisting on empirical evidence and statistical probability) but most of the time they use enthymemes, which means that they use rhetoric devices to attack a subject. The last group, the artists, produces things, instead of knowledge. They are engineers or producers of fine arts. Raymond uses the nested boxes metaphor to explain the methodology of the humanities and to illustrate the relations between the various groups, which you can see in image one. You have four