Quentin Skinner’s seminal 1969 essay “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas“ is widely seen as a definitive defence of genuinely historical approaches to textual interpretation. My paper analyses the previously overlooked draft of this paper, which Skinner presented at a politics conference in 1968. The draft is interestingly different from the published version, in both historically and intellectually important ways. Historically, the differences cast new light on Skinner’s motives in writing the essay, and thus (on his own terms) help us understand the essay better. Intellectually, the differences cast new light on Skinner’s oversights concerning the relationship between historical and philosophical analysis, which is in my view the only important problem with the published essay.