I’ve had a nice email from Chris Harris, whose upcoming Voynich Manuscript-themed novel “Mappamundi” (which I mentioned here in June) is due for publication on 29th January 2009. Published by Dedalus, it’s a non-Byzantine sequel to his earlier Byzantine trilogy (if that makes sense): a teeny weeny version of the cover is on the right here.
Which reminds me… an article at the back of this month’s History Today (yes, that issue) made a rather striking claim: that historical fiction steps in to fill the gap left by historians, who have become unable to answer the basic question “What happened?” because they are so hogtied by postmodern notions of relative truth. Hmmm… as with all great lies, there’s a kernel of truth in there. My own take is that there are now so many types of history – archival, social, urban, intellectual, cultural, moral, religious, Marxist, propagandist, technological, political, codicological, forensic, etc – each with their own types of problematic, enquiry, methodology and even truth, that it can be hard to blend them together to tell a complete story. And while it is true that historical fiction offers the hope of a reconstructed holistic history, so too does the best historical scholarship.
Ultimately, I think that history is like a shattered cup, whose shards offer historians multiple ways of piecing them back together: and that once in a while, with just a little luck, we might by doing so glimpse a hitherto unseen Grail, tentatively reconstructed through our persistence and industry. Perhaps this is the romance of History (whichever subfield of it you happen to subscribe to), where novelists dramatize not just the texture of historical events, but the process of historical discovery too – is the romance in the history, or in the historian?