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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 trade”
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 metallurgists”.
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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Hatty
Site Admin

In: Berkshire
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Forgery, it seems, can be as useful to historians as authentic historical documents according to Alfred Hiatt, Reader in Medieval Literature at Queen Mary, University of London, whose numerous books and articles are published by such impeccably academic outfits as Cambridge University Press and Boydell & Brewer
Forgery as Historiography
This chapter contends that forgery should be considered a form of historical writing. It presents evidence to show that, in the Middle Ages, forgeries not only frequently constituted significant parts of archives and other resources for the writing of history, but that forgeries themselves were often the products of historical research on the part of their authors. If forgeries are considered one end of a spectrum of historical writing (rather than the binary opposite of the true historical document) then a nuanced understanding of the relationships between forgeries and genres such as hagiography and the medieval chronicle becomes possible. After discussion of these relationships, the chapter concludes with an examination of the criticism of forgeries during the Middle Ages. Forgeries were often denounced; yet they could also survive denunciation, not because of a lack of critical sense on the part of medieval audiences, but because of the importance of their function as historical writing. |
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/medieval-historical-writing/forgery-as-
historiography/39B194ABCBD887FC0036F65AD2FA8A97
With so many ancient charters now questioned or dismissed outright as 'spurious', 'probably spurious', 'doubtful' etc. I suppose it was inevitable that forged documents might be seen as historically relevant, much like there are faked artefacts that can be valued as much, perhaps more, by collectors than the originals.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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It seems reasonable to Wiley that faked Anglo Saxon ancestors, eg as in Wells, were developed at the same time as faked charters and faked coinage.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
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I'm not so sure about this sequence. Our experience has been that forgers go through historical documents--real or themselves forged--to come up with likely characters and places that suit their purpose. Nor do they seem to be very subtle about it e.g. Ptolemy's maps.
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Hatty
Site Admin

In: Berkshire
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The concluding remark about forged texts in the brief summary was the most surprising (to me)
the importance of their function as historical writing |
It sounds like some historians could be taking the view, in a roundabout way, that a copy of a reportedly lost manuscript has to be accepted as the 'original' even when it's a forgery?
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Hatty wrote: |
It sounds like some historians could be taking the view, in a roundabout way, that a copy of a reportedly lost manuscript has to be accepted as the 'original' even when it's a forgery? |
A post-Conquest A/S charter surely has as much right to be considered as the so-called retrospective effigies ("forgeries in stone") at Wells unless we believe these bishops Sigarus, Burhwoldus, Levericus, Eilwinus, Dudico, actually existed.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wells,_Cathedral_Church_of_
St_Andrew,_Monument_to_Bishop_Dudico_Somerset_1382901_20230818_0112.jpg
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