It merely focused on the identification of sources and nothing more. While it focuses on the text, it implicitly subordinates the literary work to history. Art merely provides us with nice examples of historical truth. Another example might be the use of Crane's The Red Badge of Courage to illustrate the Civil War without any real attention to its specific textual properties. The reverse also occurs.
Literary analysis is used to reveal a historical fact or principle.
Both of these assumptions reflect a mimetic view of art and history. Such a view assumes that historians are able to write objectively about any given historical time period and are able to state definitely the truth about that era. Historians can discover the mindset, the worldview, or the beliefs of any group of people who lived in the past. For example, the Elizabethan world view is presented as a set of presuppositions or assumptions that ALL Elizabethans believed about their world. Redefines the concept of history.