What does it mean to be a former speaker and rank-and-file House member at the same time?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is planning to return to Congress as a rank-and-file member, just like the hundreds of other members not in leadership.

“My friends, no matter what title you all, my colleagues, have bestowed upon me — speaker, leader, whip — there is no greater official honor for me than to stand on this floor and to speak for the people of San Francisco,” she told Congress in November. “This I will continue to do as a member of the House.”

What that role actually looks like is to be determined.

When asked about her plans for the next Congress, her office pointed to her last press conference as speaker, in which she said that she plans to have a “strong influence” on recruiting more women and expects it will take time to wrap up certain matters related to the role of the speaker, like providing papers for the Library of Congress and interviews with the historian of the Congress. But her decades of influence are impossible to ignore as she makes room for a new generation of leadership. And historically, there’s not a road map for a speaker to remain in Congress after giving up their leadership role.

“If the new leadership is smart, they will keep Nancy very close to them in terms of consulting her, in terms of using her experience and her knowledge,” said Ray Smock, the first historian for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1983, where he was appointed by then-Speaker Tip O’Neill.

But there’s little precedent for someone in her position simply sinking into the background.

“I would consider her, probably, an unnamed member of the leadership,” Smock said.

Pelosi’s decision to stay in Congress after giving up the speakership was “pretty unusual,” said Matthew Green, a professor and the politics department chair at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.

“The last speaker to do that was Dennis Hastert, but he didn’t actually serve very long after his speakership was over. So, he didn’t really stick around. Technically, Newt Gingrich did, but it was extremely brief,” Green said.

Hastert was reelected in 2006, but Republicans lost the majority — he chose not to run for a leadership position in the new minority. In November of 2007, less than a year into the new Congress, he announced he was resigning from the House of Representatives. Gingrich, on the other hand, announced he was leaving Congress at the end of his term as speaker, just days after he was reelected in 1998.

Typically, the career trajectory for a speaker is that they don’t run for reelection, like Paul Ryan, who served as speaker during the 114th and 115th congresses. Or, like John Boehner, who stepped down in October 2015, they resign from Congress during their term. In other cases, speakers have died while serving in office, like Samuel Rayburn, but this was more common in the mid-20th century, according to Green.

The most famous example of a speaker to return as a rank-and-file member was Joseph Cannon of Illinois in 1911. But the circumstances surrounding the end of his tenure in leadership were completely different, forced by members of his own party to curb his control as speaker. In March of 1910, the House of Representatives debated how to limit Cannon’s power during a 29-hour session. The following Congress, he served as a regular member, but Cannon lost his election in 1912. He was reelected in 1914 as a regular member and continued to serve into the 1920s.

“That’s probably the most extreme case of someone who had almost absolute power over the House and then was removed by his own party from leadership. … And then came back, got elected from his district in Illinois and continued to serve as a regular member after that,” Smock said.

Green said for Pelosi “to choose not to run for speaker again, but to run for reelection and stick around” is “very unusual.”

As for her legacy, unlike Cannon, “There is no question that it’s that Nancy Pelosi will go down in history as one of the most significant leaders that the House of Representatives ever had,” Smock said.

Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.