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?
