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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Wiley has located a couple of additional pieces on the supposed, let's call it, "paradigm crisis within History". These always interest me.
The Ruffian below reckons that Historians (and others) are making themselves stupid. Wish I had thought of that. It is a great title.
What I like is that it features a heated debate over a specific example. Henry Cort “the so called father of the iron tradeâ€
Cort introduced in the 1780s a process that led to a quadrupling of Britain’s iron production over the following twenty years, making Britain one of the world’s leading iron producers. Or so ortho thought, until recently.
Out of nowhere along comes a proposed refutation, and a new explanation, that Cort was not the inventor at all but he had claimed credit for a process which had been collectively invented by 76 enslaved factory workers or “Black metallurgistsâ€.
https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/stories-are-bad-for-your-intelligence
Let battle commence. What are the facts. Where are the primary sources?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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There was some nice support for our 'the truth is always boring' campaign in the piece
| Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories which gain attention and make ‘impact’. But anyone in the business of reporting on reality - scholars, scientists, journalists - ought to be suspicious of narrative, even if they use it. So should those of us who consume these reports. Just because information is conveyed in narrative form doesn’t make it false, but it does mean that it’s going to seem more true than it is. |
I've signed up with this Ruffian bloke to see what else he's got to say. I'd never heard of your Henry Cort though I must have come across him many times. He sounds desperately under-reported now he's been discovered to have been over-reported.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Let's say you're the Chief Minister under one or other of the Tudor monarchs -- you know, Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, William Cecil, studs like that. How many full scale pukka biographies would you expect to be written about you in the ensuing four or five hundred years? We've all got our own ideas as to what is appropriate if historians (and serious literary types) are on the ball.
So what about a Chief Minister who served under three Tudor monarchs? A mate of mine has just written The Great Survivor of the Tudor Age, the Life and Times of Lord William Paget. It's not a full scale pukka bio (he's a descendant honouring an ancestor) but it's damn good and it's the first time anyone has written pretty much anything about the dude. When you make a list of the sort of characters who have had the academic kitchen sink thrown at them -- often, often -- that's a bleedin' disgrace.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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In the days when we we were taught proper history -- Tudors and Stuarts -- every schoolchild was treated to a heartwarming but cautionary tale that went like this:
| The young Prince Charles (i.e. soon to be Charles I) took his best friend, the Duke of Buckingham, on a madcap venture to Spain to seek the Infanta's hand in marriage. The Spanish court was somewhat taken aback by this and sent the pair packing with fleas in their ears. |
This demonstrated
(a) the imbecilic foolhardiness of Charles I
(b) the unsuitability of the foppish Duke of Buckingham for high office
(c) the inadvisability of having any dealings with Spaniards.
I assumed this to be true. I had no reason to doubt it, and anyway it wasn't very important in the greater scheme of things. I am reading a book about Ferdinand III, the seventeenth century Holy Roman Emperor. I have learned
(a) The Spanish had invited Charles to Madrid in furtherance of a proposed alliance against France
(b) In the end the Spanish decided to ally themselves with their fellow Habsburgs in Vienna
(c) which majorly affected the Thirty Years War that started with the ousting of Charles' brother-in-law from the throne of Bohemia
(d) Modern European history is an outcome of the Thirty Years War
(e) Modern world history is an outcome of modern European history.
I am not a little annoyed with myself for having been hoodwinked by English historians all this time.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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One of the perils of documenting the past is the extreme uncertainty of even the most familiar things. Take snowdrops (well don't, it's against the law) but they're English as apple pie, right? No, they are native to Anatolia. So when were they introduced? Ah, well, Countryside offered two choices:
A. It was Roman soldiers in Classical times
B. It was British soldiers in Crimean War times. |
Let's split the difference and say it was Richard I on the Third Crusade.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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Roy Vickery, a former botanist at the Natural History Museum (1965 to 2007) and vice-president of the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (2011-4), posted on Facebook about snowdrops
| The general opinion amongst British botanists is that they were first known in cultivation in Britain in 1597, and first recorded in the wild in Britain in 1778 |
This is sort of true. The earliest written record of snowdrops in Britain is in the Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes by John Gerard, published in 1597 and dedicated to William Cecil, Lord Burghley (Gerard, trained as a barber-surgeon, was superintendent of Cecil's gardens). At least half of Gerard's book described plants that he found growing wild in the English countryside, including 180 which had never been documented before, so it seems likely snowdrops predate the book's publication.
Either way, the Herbal may not have been altogether reliable, it underwent several revised and extended editions. According to Wiki it was largely a plagiarised English translation of Cruydeboeck (herb book), a herbal by Rembert Dodoens, a Flemish botanist and professor of medicine at Leiden University, which was published in Antwerp in 1554. It was translated into French, Dutch and Latin and, in 1578, into English.
Dodoens's work was hugely successful and he became known as 'the father of botany'
| This masterpiece was, after the bible, the most translated book in that time. It continued to be republished for more than a century and for more than two centuries it was the mostly used referential about herbs. It is a work with world fame and great scientific value. |
It seems strange that the series of corrections and revisions were still under Dodoens's name, reminiscent of the shenanigans surrounding Casanova's memoirs
| The Cruydeboeck's Latin version published at the Plantin Press in Antwerp in 1583 under the title Stirpium historiae pemptades sex sive libri XXXs was a considerable revision. It contained new families, enlarged the number of groups from 6 to 26 and included many new illustrations, both original and borrowed. It was used by John Gerard as the source for his widely used Herball (1597). Thomas Johnson, in his preface to his 1633 edition of Herball, explains the controversial use of Dodoens' work by Gerard.[c][17] The Latin version was also translated back into Dutch and published in 1608 in Leiden by the Plantin Press of Frans van Ravelingen under the title Crvydt-Boeck van Robertus Dodonaeus, volgens sijne laatste verbetering... etc. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rembert_Dodoens
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Anything with the name Plantin in its c.v. is bad in my book. Though rather appropriate in this case.
What I find most significant though is how an obscure housewife in Berkshire, England with a knowledge of snowdrops that approximates to my own ("they're like bluebells but white") is to be preferred on the subject over a botanist at the Natural History Museum and vice-president of the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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How can anyone know which are native and which are alien? If an origin is, err, somewhere on the European mainland, it is a total mystery to Wiles which is native, unless, say, plant A is only ever found at Haskins, and in back gardens.
Snowdrops grow in damp woodlands, are we really saying that Britain never had any?
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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I am after all the expert on slipping up in damp woodlands.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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If they grow best in low, damp, British woodlands, it's obvious they must be native to the dry upland steppes of Anatolia. Get a grip, Wiley.
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