I’ve been reading more about La Buse & Le Butin, and I have to say I’m not hugely impressed by the research that has been done into either. More books on 18th century corsairs are (as Eddie Elgar might have said) ‘winging their woundabout way’ to Cipher Mysteries Mansions; but if what I’ve seen so far is any guide, I’ll be no less confused in a year’s time.
But really, I think that good historical research is painfully easy to spot, as it combines:-
(1) an appreciation of primary sources (or at least early secondary ones);
(2) a healthy scepticism towards the mythology built up around events and objects; and
(3) empathy towards the people involved (but without a lot of modern back-projection).
Even though we now arguably have better access to primary (or at least closely contemporary) historical sources than ever before, few historians now seem to have the knack for dealing with them properly. Perhaps this is from the slow-motion death of taught codicology and palaeography; or perhaps it’s from the way many of them seem eager to lock themselves into a tightly-specialized silo without no obvious broader-brush historical context or framework to bounce their research against. I guess you’ll have your own thoughts on this, it’s not exactly front page news.
Similarly, the guff that Internet sites pass off as “history” tends to be even more romantic and speculative than even Victorian historians ever managed. In particular, cipher mysteries are so plagued by this rot that I now routinely tell people it’ll take me at least a month to separate what’s real from what’s Maybelline in any new cipher strand – the whole “La Buse / Le Butin” thing is simply the exemple du jour of what is a miserable and much larger trend.
But to my hay-fevered eyes, it’s arguably empathy that I find most obviously lacking. The people of the past aren’t cut-out stick-figures jerking on a historian’s Punch-and-Judy stage, they were real people stuck in uncertain situations, operating blind of their actions’ future consequences. Their decisions were often (quite literally) life-and-death ones; so reducing past lives to mere critical reading textual exercises misses the point.
For me, empathy is that which transcends the details and defies the scepticism: it’s the negentropic force that gives History back the three-dimensionality stripped away by temporal distance, and that pulls the fragmentary pieces together into a sensible whole. Yet… I just don’t see who gives a monkey’s about empathy any more.
Do you?
You can bet your bottom-dollar I do! I care! Passionately! Which is why I have several times referred you to an historical novel which, for me is unique in being full of sympathetic truths about a very famous man and his combined family: Sir Thomas More
The book is “Portrait of an Unknown Woman”. Vanora Bennett. Though it is a novel, she clearly cites her avenues of research (and also her own speculations), as well as citing the website of Jack Leslau (now deceased) http://www.holbeinartworks.org Mr. Leslau’s website may still be available if the full url address is given.
Previously, I mentioned to you that Vanora Bennett is/was a journalist with the Times of London. She may still be.
Furthermore: have you thought about writing a biography of either or both Currier and Tiltman? Maybe as a lengthy prologue to your next “Curse of…..” publication? Recently, the US government began releasing material from Brigadier Tiltman’s archive. Perhaps Currier’s efforts might also be rescued from obscurity?
I still read at about 850 wpm — with 90 percent comprehension/memory retention. Not too bad for a 70 year old woman who has reading ability with only one eye. Eh?
I know, I’m patting myself on the back. But — anything to keep from falling into the senility pit (by whatever terminology is currently being used)!
I hope your angst didn’t interfere with Mother’s Day (on your side of the Pond)?
And yet curiously, Herodotus who does nothing but report the results of his investigations, manages to evoke empathy from the reader. He who has no driving hypothesis, but only a defined aim, by holding no initial hypothesis is free to offer not only his personal opinion but happily to report those with which he personally disagrees.
And his writings for all their willingness to accept evidence that is contradictory have stood the test of time better even than the magnificent and deeply empathetic writings of Gibbon.
In the end, perhaps it is disinterest which matters more?
Just a thought.
This is a very provoking post, Nick.
The temptation to philosophise at length about the discipline’s ethos, ethic (or lack of), method and philosophy is almost irresistable to any historian as I’m sure you know.
But since we are in the bazaar, I’ll be brief.
There are three main classes of history written today:
narrative
analytical
propaganda.
The last is what fills so many online pages. It’s aim is less to enlighten than to gain personal adherents for the individual promoting a particular product of their own imagination, sometimes dignified as hypothesis or even more ambitiously as theory.
The test comes down to this: amateur or professional, if a person is offered evidence which mitigates their previous opinion to they merely ignore the information; do they accept the modification with interest and thanks (after checking it); do they snatch at it, rip off any identifying marks and try to pass it off as their own? And do they add insult to injury by passing the word through the groupies that anyone seen bashing the party of the first part will be suitably promoted?
The point in all this being that propaganda is inherently incompatible with empathy, the latter recognising that lack of partisanship attributed to Klio herself.
sp. *Its*
dang – metaphors are inherently propagandist. I knew that, too.
Diane: I think I’m less interested in whether a piece of work evokes empathy in the reader as to whether it is carried out with empathy for the long-dead. For me, history is at least as much about forensic-style examination (giving a voice to the dead, to the degree that this is possible / reasonable) as about narrative or anything else.
PS: have you read Ryszard Kapuscinski’s “Travels With Herodotus”?
No, I haven’t read it, and now having looked at the reviews I doubt I shall.
I have a weakness for primary, and for academic writing.
The NYT review of Kapuscinski’s book brings to mind two older books which brought the painterly language into novels and art – one is the introduction to Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. The other a work of which I’m fond, a fairly old one by Robert Harbison called ‘Eccentric Spaces’. Neither attempts to write history in painterly language, but in describing scenery and art/architecture, respectively.
I’ve sometimes used the painterly language, as you might call it, as an extra gear in language, when I have to ‘carry people quickly into the time, place and atmosphere in which art was made that is quite unfamiliar to them.
Hope the mix of history and art hasn’t caused to much consternation. 🙂
Diane: Kapuscinski is a far better writer than you seem to infer from the NYT review, though he’s clearly not an historian (it was just a passing comment).
You may think I’ve avoided the direct question, or given too allusive an answer.
It’s true, I have.
That’s because in fact I feel there’s something a little disrespectful about the process – and at the same time I don’t want to seem to criticise others for not feeling as I do.
It’s an issue I’ve thought about a fair bit, because I come up against it with undergrads who’ve learned history from courses carefully designed to suggest that people in the past were ‘just like us’ and that we can ‘relate’ to them.
But underneath it, there’s a presumption that we, in our world, relative wealth, attitudes to life the world and universe are a norm, a standard, the ‘right’ or best way to be.
As an historian I’d dispute that idea, and certainly the idea that in trying to determine motivations for an individual we have much hope at all.
For Voynich related things, you need only compare the popular fantasy that the seventeenth century was more enlightened than the twelfth with the sort of works most often reproduced in Europe in either century.
I know this is still a touchy subject in your part of the world. I recently sat through four hours of lectures on the history of medieval book illumination, lectures delivered by an English specialist, and at the end of it realised that *not once* had the fact that every single manuscript was a product of pre-Protestant monasticism ever been mentioned. The closest was when a monk was described by his pre-monastic noble title and said to have been ‘associated with’ his monastery.
Could anyone really enter the mind of a thirteenth-century person, traumatised by wars, their mind wholly moulded by a different language, different vision of causation, the action of deity and spirits, the sense of place and a history of several millennia in one area?
I don’t thnk so. I don’t try – I paint the landscape as best I can, though.
PS Your remonstration has convinced me. I shall read Travels with Herodotus.
*chastened expression emoticon*
Earlier this year I commented on a non-fictional book “The Monk Who Quit”, Very interesting reading, which I will leave to you, Diane, and Nick to discuss, maybe.
Diane: may I ask if you ‘paint the landscape’ objectively from a twenty-first century perspective or a sixteenth-century one?
SirHubert,
Some resources needed to provide (metaphorically to ‘paint’) appropriate background for the Voynich imagery weren’t available until fairly recently.
These include specific archaeological finds, historical and other analytical papers, refinements in spectroscopic techniques and terms coined for art analysis.
So you could say painting the background accurtely requires use of twenty-first century tools and ‘paints’.
Nick, I have just come back online, after remarking on the remodeling of the Roman College into the Gregorian University earlier today, If you haven’t already done so, you might like to take a look at the offerings (a short video) of Irene Pedretti and Martin Morales, who have recently digitized some thousands of manuscripts/books from the Jesuit archives, some dating to the 1500’s.
Just wait until you catch a glimpse of some of Irene Pedretti’s offerings!
Former records management specialist/paralegal: bdid1dr.
Nick,
I’m somewhat perplexed that you haven’t issued a yea or a nay to whether you’ve had a look at the offerings from the Gregorian University digitizing project. I caught only glimpses, but several of the few offerings were very similar in format, and with more “casual” scribal notations also similar to the Vms.
bdid1dr: given that the Voynich Manuscript predates (without much doubt) the Society of Jesus by roughly a century, the latter is not obviously of huge relevance to me.
Feel free to look through their archives all you like, though. 🙂
Diane:
‘Could anyone really enter the mind of a thirteenth-century person, traumatised by wars, their mind wholly moulded by a different language, different vision of causation, the action of deity and spirits, the sense of place and a history of several millennia in one area?’
Probably not. At least, not in the peaceful West, which is presumably what you mean by ‘anyone’ in this context. I suspect refugees from African conflicts might be able to;. But I think it’s hugely important that we try.
SirHubert,
Funny thing is that we tend to think of those we’ve already defined as “other” in terms we should not like others to use of us: such as ‘you’re like me’ or ‘I know what you’re feeling’. We don’t offer sympathy, or pretend that we are ‘just like’ the people we really appreciate, not to say admire. I cannot understand – speaking of African examples – Nelson Mandela. I shouldn’t dream of patting him on the shoulder and saying re-assuringly that he was ‘just like me’ or that I ‘understood how he felt’. Same goes for most other people, and frankly if someone says that sort of thing to me, a certain coolness is likely to develop immediately. Worst thing about social workers I’ve met – though admittedly I don’t know many – is that they seem so busy putting on other peoples’ shoes, the long walk-and-talk phase never happens.
SirHubert
… though oddly enough, ‘You’re one of us’ seems to affect most of us like a glass of warm milk and honey. Strange.
Diane: for what it’s worth, many of the people I admire most seem to be very different from me indeed. Nor do I feel any particular need to be like them, nor for them to be like me. ‘You’re one of us’ is, I would suggest, a little different – it’s about belonging to a group, which is normally a nice feeling for a proverbially social animal.
I’m not a psychologist and don’t know what is currently accepted about the roles of nature and nurture in determining how humans think and behave. I agree with you that there can be an underlying theme in the teaching of history which takes current human values as a constant, and I feel that this is particularly troublesome because it is implicit. But I think that a version of what Nick terms ’empathy’ is actually the best way to combat that. Asking the question (which appeared once on a British exam paper) ‘ You are a Russian serf in the eighteenth century. How do you feel?’ is fatuous in many ways, but at least it implies that they felt and lived their lives differently from how we do today.
SirH: FWIW, I believe the short answer was “revolting”. Hang all the landlords! 🙂
Fair – we came up with ‘very depressed’!
SirHubert
How do mark a question like that?
SirHubert
speaking of Aristotle and poleis, what intrigues me most in the practice of art-analysis is less any ‘artist’ as individual so much as seeing the world as did the community from which he/she sprang.
It’s an endless fascination because it requires constant expansion of one’s own horizons, intellectually and -in a strange way – intuitively. Not sure where intuition fits in the spectrum between intellectual appreciation and empathy..
I’m no psychologist, either.
Nick, in re my referral to the digitization project at the Gregorian University (and the thousands of manuscripts hidden inside the walls of the older structure): Kircher would not have been aware of them at all. So, much of Kircher’s published works and missionary correspondence would have been based on his experiences. Who, if anyone, had knowledge of what was “entombed” in Kircher’s headquarters?