Mini Skirts in the Baroque
History. So ambiguous. Facts and arguments are collected from the past, yet interpreted in the present. This can set a historical event into a broader context, but risks injecting contemporary prejudices into it. Can we ever recreate the worldview of the 17th and 18th centuries?
The easy answer is no. All is relative. Since the 1960s this has been the fashionable intellectual position. And certainly when you look at the historiography of the last century we see huge variations in interpretation from one generation to the next – mostly influenced by the main intellectual trends of the time (Freud, Marx, social democracy, neo-liberalism to name a few).
Nevertheless, many of the core facts remain un-changed; though often added to, giving more colour, to allow for a greater range of interpretation. This qualifies a purely relativist account of history. There is much room for opinion and disagreement, for ideological manipulation, but it is all limited – the world of fact sets its borders.
For history is life itself – we cannot escape our own perceptions! But if we step before a passing car there will be bruises. There is a world outside us. And nearly all of us agree about certain facts: in London by the River Thames there is a Houses of Parliament. How we interpret them is another matter – the mind appears quiet elastic on how it represents its perceptions.
Apart from its own intrinsic value, we can’t understand the world without it, history is also a metaphor for the mind. The bungling of hard fact with shaky thought. Though Schopenhauer was very dismissive of history – its just the accidental phenomena of life, and therefore less important than literature that grasps immediate perceptions, and contemplates their essential Idea; the true source of knowledge. This view needs qualification. If history is seen as an attempt to understand the past as we try to understand the present (and to understand the present by studying the past), with insight and warm sympathy, of hard fact and penetrating reason, then it does have the power of creative thought. And the best history is like this – see Peter Brown’s marvellous The Rise of Western Christendom.
We interpret, manipulate, collect and collate, and a new wave of scholars washes it all away…
What remains of the 18th century, through Namier, Holmes and Clark? A few agreed facts and opinions; and these common denominators, is this the truth – some skimpy underwear, when all the ball gowns of interpretation have been removed?
This also is too easy, for these thinkers have to be filtered too – some historians have more hard facts, while others wear someone else’s clothes. Keith Thomas in another rich article,this time in the LRB, sums up the problem (my emphasis):
My notes are voluminous because my interests have never been very narrowly focused. My subject is what I think of as the historical ethnography of early modern England. Equipped with questions posed by anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers, as well as by other historians, I try to look at virtually all aspects of early modern life, from the physical environment to the values and mental outlook of people at all social levels. Unfortunately, such diverse topics as literacy, numeracy, gestures, jokes, sexual morality, personal cleanliness or the treatment of animals, though central to my concerns, are hard to pursue systematically. They can’t be investigated in a single archive or repository of information. Progress depends on building up a picture from a mass of casual and unpredictable references accumulated over a long period. That makes them unsuitable subjects for a doctoral thesis, which has to be completed in a few years. But they are just the thing for a lifetime’s reading. So when I read, I am looking out for material relating to several hundred different topics. Even so, I find that, as my interests change, I have to go back to sources I read long ago, with my new preoccupations in mind.
Christopher Hill believed in reading everything written during the period (provided it wasn’t in manuscript), and everything subsequently written about it. He used to buy every remotely relevant monograph when it came out, gut it and then sell it. Like him, I try to soak myself in the writings of the time… I am likely to pick up half a dozen quite separate points relating to a variety of different subjects. Because I am as interested in the attitudes and assumptions which are implicit in the evidence as in those which were explicitly articulated at the time, I have got into the habit of reading against the grain. Whether it is a play or a sermon or a legal treatise, I read it not so much for what the author meant to say as for what the text incidentally or unintentionally reveals.
Thomas ends with the reflection that a scholar can have too many notes. This seems right – is history a form of stamp collecting, a well organised museum, or is it an attempt to understand the world? I believe it should be the latter. However, because it is based on interpretation it is more likely to be suspect – it may not live so long in those glass cases as the Greek and Chinese vases. Better understanding, which is less reliable. This sounds like a paradox. It might be the truth.
The easy answer is no. All is relative. Since the 1960s this has been the fashionable intellectual position. And certainly when you look at the historiography of the last century we see huge variations in interpretation from one generation to the next – mostly influenced by the main intellectual trends of the time (Freud, Marx, social democracy, neo-liberalism to name a few).
Nevertheless, many of the core facts remain un-changed; though often added to, giving more colour, to allow for a greater range of interpretation. This qualifies a purely relativist account of history. There is much room for opinion and disagreement, for ideological manipulation, but it is all limited – the world of fact sets its borders.
For history is life itself – we cannot escape our own perceptions! But if we step before a passing car there will be bruises. There is a world outside us. And nearly all of us agree about certain facts: in London by the River Thames there is a Houses of Parliament. How we interpret them is another matter – the mind appears quiet elastic on how it represents its perceptions.
Apart from its own intrinsic value, we can’t understand the world without it, history is also a metaphor for the mind. The bungling of hard fact with shaky thought. Though Schopenhauer was very dismissive of history – its just the accidental phenomena of life, and therefore less important than literature that grasps immediate perceptions, and contemplates their essential Idea; the true source of knowledge. This view needs qualification. If history is seen as an attempt to understand the past as we try to understand the present (and to understand the present by studying the past), with insight and warm sympathy, of hard fact and penetrating reason, then it does have the power of creative thought. And the best history is like this – see Peter Brown’s marvellous The Rise of Western Christendom.
We interpret, manipulate, collect and collate, and a new wave of scholars washes it all away…
What remains of the 18th century, through Namier, Holmes and Clark? A few agreed facts and opinions; and these common denominators, is this the truth – some skimpy underwear, when all the ball gowns of interpretation have been removed?
This also is too easy, for these thinkers have to be filtered too – some historians have more hard facts, while others wear someone else’s clothes. Keith Thomas in another rich article,this time in the LRB, sums up the problem (my emphasis):
My notes are voluminous because my interests have never been very narrowly focused. My subject is what I think of as the historical ethnography of early modern England. Equipped with questions posed by anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers, as well as by other historians, I try to look at virtually all aspects of early modern life, from the physical environment to the values and mental outlook of people at all social levels. Unfortunately, such diverse topics as literacy, numeracy, gestures, jokes, sexual morality, personal cleanliness or the treatment of animals, though central to my concerns, are hard to pursue systematically. They can’t be investigated in a single archive or repository of information. Progress depends on building up a picture from a mass of casual and unpredictable references accumulated over a long period. That makes them unsuitable subjects for a doctoral thesis, which has to be completed in a few years. But they are just the thing for a lifetime’s reading. So when I read, I am looking out for material relating to several hundred different topics. Even so, I find that, as my interests change, I have to go back to sources I read long ago, with my new preoccupations in mind.
Christopher Hill believed in reading everything written during the period (provided it wasn’t in manuscript), and everything subsequently written about it. He used to buy every remotely relevant monograph when it came out, gut it and then sell it. Like him, I try to soak myself in the writings of the time… I am likely to pick up half a dozen quite separate points relating to a variety of different subjects. Because I am as interested in the attitudes and assumptions which are implicit in the evidence as in those which were explicitly articulated at the time, I have got into the habit of reading against the grain. Whether it is a play or a sermon or a legal treatise, I read it not so much for what the author meant to say as for what the text incidentally or unintentionally reveals.
Thomas ends with the reflection that a scholar can have too many notes. This seems right – is history a form of stamp collecting, a well organised museum, or is it an attempt to understand the world? I believe it should be the latter. However, because it is based on interpretation it is more likely to be suspect – it may not live so long in those glass cases as the Greek and Chinese vases. Better understanding, which is less reliable. This sounds like a paradox. It might be the truth.
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