You may well have heard of the furore surrounding King’s College London’s recent decision to get rid of roughly 10% of its academic staff, including (perhaps most controversially) its Chair of Palaeography, currently held by David Ganz. I’ve been trying for months to raise a big enough head of Daily Mail-esque columnist steam to vent some anger about this downsizing… but I just can’t do it. I’m angry, but probably not for the reasons you might expect.
If Kings were instead talking about getting rid of a Chair of Etymology (perhaps sponsored by the authors of all those annoying books about banal words that seem to have taken over bookshop tills?), a Chair of Phrenology, or indeed a chair in any other of those useless Victorian sub-steam-punk nonsensical technical subjects, nobody would bat an eyelid. All the same, palaeography is arguably an exception because raw historical text is almost a magical thing: ideas written down have a slow life far beyond that of their author’s, making palaeography the art of keeping written ideas alive.
Yet one of the things muddying the waters here is that there are two quite distinct palaeographies at play: firstly, there’s the classic Victorian handwriting collectoriana side of Palaeography, by which vast collections of hands were amassed and (as I understand it) spuriously positivistic developmental trees constructed; while secondly, there is a modern technical, forensic side to the subject more to do with ductus, and closely allied with codicology. What the two sides share is that practitioners are good at reading stuff, and like to help people to read stuff they want to. Yet to my eyes, the dirty little secret is that the ductus / forensic side of the subject is rarely integrated with the craft knowledge / practitioner side of the subject.
Yet historians will always need to read texts: and the number of manuscripts scanned and available on the web must be at least doubling each year. So at a time when accessible texts are proliferating, why is palaeography itself in decline?
For me, the root problem lies in history itself. When I was at school, History was taught as The Grand Accumulation Of Facts About Grand Men In History (which, though a nonsensical approach, was at least a long-standing nonsensical approach): while nowadays, the ascendancy of Burkeian social history has turned vast swathes of the subject instead into a wayward empathy fest – Feeling How It Felt To Feel Like An Unprivileged Pleb Just Like You (but without a plasma screen and iPhone) In The Very Olden Days. No less nonsensical, no less useless.
Actually, my firm belief is that taught History should not be a recital of that-which-has-happened, but should instead be the process of teaching people of all ages how to find out what happened in the past for themselves. When I look at contemporary events and documents (dodgy dossiers, Dr David Kelly, Jean Charles de Menezes, etc), I interpret our shabby public response as a collective failure of history teaching. We are not taught how to think critically about documentary evidence, even though this is a skill utterly central to active citizenship.
And so I think History-as-taught-at-schools should be about primary evidence, about reliability of sources, about practising exercising judgment. Really, I think it should start neither with Kings & Queens nor with plebs, but instead with codicology and palaeography: if you believe in the primacy of evidence, then you should teach that as the starting point. It’s everything else about history that is basically bunk!
Personally, I would re-label codicology as “material forensics” and palaeography as “textual forensics” (I’m not sure how serious people are about wanting to rename the latter ‘diachronic decoding’, but that’s almost too ghastly a Dan-Brown-ism to consider), and would build the first year of historical curricula in schools around the nature and limits of Evidence – basically, the epistemology of pragmatic history. To me, the fact that palaeography only kicks in as a postgraduate module is what we should be ashamed of.
So, who signed Palaeography’s death warrant? Not King’s College’s vastly overpaid administrators, then, but instead all those historians who have chosen not only to back away from primary evidence but also to teach others to do the same. David Ganz should be teaching school teachers how to inspire children around evidence: and it is our own fault that palaeography has become so stupidly marginalized in mainstream historical practice that the King’s College administrators’ desire to get rid of it can seem so reasonable.
Trying to pin blame on King’s College is, I would say, missing the point: which is that we collectively killed palaeography already. If the overall project was to get rid of romantic, delusional, denialist History (and much social history as practised has just as romantic a central narrative thread as the Big Man history it aimed to supplant), fair enough: but rather than leave a conceptual vacuum in its wake, it should be replaced with skeptical, pragmatic History (based on solid forensic thinking and an appreciation of the internal agendas behind texts). I believe that this would yield good critical thinking skills as well as exactly the kind of good citizenship politicians so often say is missing.
But… what are the chances of that, eh?
First of all, pause for happy jig or fish-slapping dance, whichever suits you.
CiphMys is back.
(couple of hops/slaps more)
But about paleography – why not amalgamate with Historical/Industrial Archaeology or even plain archaeology. Paleography is an extension of precisely th same forensic-historiographical approach.
Ah well, when I’m Chancellor..
PS I don’t agree with you about how history should be taught. For younger children, adventure is the thing; the adventure of historical action becomes – as an *extension* of the first but at a later age – an urge to discover more; and then the analytical skills can be introduced, but are best taught by-the-way when the children discover discrepancies for themselves, and only at the age they are pre-disposed to shred and criticise authorities of all kinds – i.e. about 15 or 16 years of age. At present one sees too much emphasis (here, at least) on the pragmatics of analysis, and it is so boring for the majority that they are being turned off the whole discipline for life, having gained the idea that its all confusing dishonest bunk anyway.
Diane: these things happen. *sigh* Can a fish-slapping dance be happy too?
Ultimately, “material forensics” should be the same thing across disciplines, while “textual forensics” would take in epigraphy, palaeography, and various other disciplines: yet what is missing is anybody who really gives [what used to be called] a tinker’s cuss about any of them. (Apologies to any passing tinkers, who have doubtless cleaned up their act in the 21st century).
Diane: well, I suppose my viewpoint is all about how to teach applied skepticism to children, whether in history, science, politics, whatever. Understanding the limits of evidence isn’t really something that should be grafted on as a postgraduate module – surely all the bad critical habits are hugely ingrained by then? If people valued skepticism as a powerful positive force, then perhaps they’d find a way of communicating that effectively. To me, the prerequisite shouldn’t be teenage rebelliousness but a sense of curiosity about how things really work, which I think is present from about 6 years onwards. 🙂
I agree wholehartedly, Nick. I was taught in my documents course, in the psychology department, that studying the original document, not comments on, or opinions about, the original document, is appropriate to understanding.
My currently favorite quote reinforces:
“Neither the voice of authority, nor the weight of reason and argument are as significant as experiment, for thence comes quiet to the mind” –Roger Bacon
Don Latham
Hi Nick! I too am sorry to see they’re contemplating eliminating the paleography chair; after all, I’m the one who’s always wanted a valid paleographic analysis of the VMs. Have you ever approached Ganz about this?
I also agree with the need to teach critical thinking, and to refer to the evidence in whatever field. With the proliferation of info and mis-info due to the Net, it’s that much more important!
Glad to see you’re still posting!
Cheers,
Dennis
It looks as if the Chair has actually been abolished though there’s talk of resurrecting it at some future point with a different remit (presumably to avoid falling foul of the employment laws):
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=303202385890&v=wall
I believe the petition is still open for signatures but is unlikely to have any effect:
http://www.petitiononline.com/spkcl10/petition.html
Surely university-level history is still taught from primary sources, and how the hell do you do that without palaeography? Or does History now start in 1800 or 1914?
It would of course be cynically opportunistic to take advantage of David’s redundancy to ask him to cast an expert eye over the Voynich, wouldn’t it? ;o)
No – children have to be amused, and entranced by learning itself, first of all. Then later you can set about helping them become efficient analytic thinkers. Because, forty years down the track, people will remember the joy of learning history, and keep an interest in it. It’s not really important for a child to be focussed on being right; its vital that they learn to revel, and to know what it feels like to catch the ‘bug’.
Palaeography is not the only victim of this scandal, for computational linguistics is also threatened with the axe:
http://www.vmdarde.free-online.co.uk/
Though Shalom Lappin is a member of the dispensible sounding Philosophy Department his work combines symbolic logic with linguistics on lines which may ultimately result in a rigorous semantics of human language. However I see on the KCL website that there is still to be a taught MA in Critical Methodologies with a compulsory core course on Reading Theory and Reading Practice (‘no knowledge of French required’).
Philip: Ummm… don’t they know that Google is applied computational linguistics? How have the KCL administrators managed the clever trick of simultaneously living under a rock whilst in an ivory tower? Madness. 🙁
Nick: Easy if you’ve got your head in the proper place. 😉 KCL’s in good company, look at BP!
Dennis: I realise you’re upset with BP, but I would point out that following the accounting style of modern transnational corporations, BP as an entity is probably no more ‘British’ than you, no matter how annoyingly cliched its chief exec comes over as. =:-o
Nick: We’d be just as upset if it were ExxonMobil. They seem to have done a better job with the Exxon Valdez, admittedly a much easier problem.
Many thanks for your concern about the decision at King’s College: perhaps you will be able to get the College to explain where I went wrong, and when they decided that a unique Chair was a burden.
David: I don’t think you did anything wrong at all – rather, I think it is the collective decision of the historical teaching community through the 1980s and 1990s to downplay the importance of palaeography that is ultimately at fault. Conversely, looking forward I feel that new-style palaeography – that is, as a ‘forensic truth-seeking methodology’ – is on the up (which is where the paradox lies here), and that is where palaeographers should perhaps be looking towards.
My opinion is therefore that where the College is at fault is that its conception of palaeography is perhaps a decade or more out of date with how 21st Century historians have come to view the subject. Not sure if that’s much help to you, but that’s the way it looks from over here. =:-o
As part of my middle-school history education here in Michigan we were taught about primary sources and secondary sources &c. That seems like as far as you can go without introducing the specifics of palaeography, which are too technical for middle school and besides aren’t essential to the truth-seeking you want to get across.
What little college history I’ve taken has been based on transcriptions of primary documents; usually excerpts, with punctuation added and text translated where necessary. Well, even our Middle English and Old English classes were based on transcriptions with added punctuation. Pictures of original documents are invariably shown as an explanation of why transcription is necessary. (“Look at all those funny little letters!!”)
I’ve taken an independent hobby-like interest in palaeography, but I don’t know what modern palaeography really is like, since I’m using free, 100-year-old books off the Internet Archive (and from used bookstores) to study it. They tend to be worried about such nonsense as which writing is high-quality scribal work, in addition to tracing lineage.
I tend to wish palaeography were more like linguistics, talking about allographs and the structure of graphemes, and sociolinguistic-style discussion of ‘written dialects’ (hands), &c. &c. Not that linguistics is a totally well-founded field (language remains tricky to characterize), but a linguistic approach might make all forensic document analysis more well-founded.
Daniel: I suppose to my particular way of thinking, history is a gigantic riff on what can be inferred from evidence – so teaching schoolchildren about the trustworthiness and limits of evidence (and how to go about digging it up) almost as a parenthetical afterthought will always seem somewhat back to front to me. 🙂
Our secondary education system has been using the teach-research-method style for a while, and it hasn’t gone terribly well, leading to the very type of false identification and we-are-all-ordinary sort of writing you describe.
I think that teaching of the older kind in lower levels was valuable because it was an adventure, filled with extraordinary people and world-changing events. It appeals to children of that age, who still feel that life is an adventure and that they have a destiny. The broader context also allows them to keep finer details and primary sources in perspective. Otherwise all you get, it what we’ve got. People hunting justifications for an idea based in nothing, and thinking that footnotes are proof of an argument.
Hearing people say that they’ve written their essay and now have to “find a few quotes” chills me to the marrow.
I’ve been asking about for colleagues willing to do a guest post related to Voynich palaeography and codicology – not a hope. Won’t touch the subject of this manuscript.
Wrote to a palaeographer, too – answer came back in evocatively unorthodox form, saying in effect that since the Beinecke or some other web-page says Brambaugh deciphered the manuscript that nothing more need be said.
So there you go. That’s the sort of image ms Beinecke 408 has in the wider world.
🙁
Diane: …welcome to my world. 🙁
Another suggestion just received – that I get in touch with Ralph Hanna.
(This person is surprised to hear that Newbold’s decipherment was not accepted.)
Nick –
I don’t suppose your library includes a copy of Hanna’s
Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts?
I’m up in the mountains at the moment – it’ll be weeks before I can get hold of a copy. If you have – what if anything does he have to say about punctuation – specifically periods, their date of introduction, use of the ‘comma-like’ against the dot type… oh, and anything on horizontal ‘paragraph’ spaces – not chapter spaces.
*fingers crossed*
– same for anyone else who might have light to shed here.
http://www.summer.ceu.hu/codicology-2013
*sigh*
quire markings – Aberdeen bestiary 12th & 13thC
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/codicology.hti
Do any Voynicheros know these people well enough to provide an introduction?
http://www.medioevoeuropeo.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=252:training-school-in-codicology&catid=64:trainingschool
Diane: I know David Juste from the Hungarian codicology / palaeography summer school, I met him at the Warburg Institute several years ago. He since moved to Australia, but apparently is now back in Europe.
Not surprised. 🙂
Want to toss a hat through the door for me?