Tag Archives: the craft

Microhistory: size matters

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Brodie Waddell

Last week I had the privilege of attending a workshop on ‘Writing Microhistories’ at Jesus College, Cambridge. It was quite simply an excellent event, due partly to the healthy diversity of speakers – from eminent sages like Keith Wrightson to a gaggle of precocious grad students – and partly to the (uncharacteristically) loose, informal nature of the discussion. It was the questions and conversations, rather than just the papers themselves, that made the day so stimulating.

The workshop had a whole series of highlights, including Wrightson’s ruminations on famous Geordies and some juicy gossip with the grad students over post-workshop drinks. However, I’d like to hone in on one particular question that came up in a variety of forms that day: Are ‘microhistories’ about scale? 1

The term ‘microhistory’ will probably be very familiar to most of you, but I’ll borrow from the summary provided by Duane Corpis for an interesting looking course at Cornell as it’s a solid introduction and easily accessible:

Microhistory is a particular methodological approach to the study and writing of history. The aim of microhistory is to present especially peculiar moments in the past by focusing on the lives and activities of a discrete person or group of people. By illuminating the trials and tribulations of ordinary people in their everyday lives, microhistory aims to show both the extent of and the limits upon human agency, i.e. the ability of individuals to make meaningful choices and undertake meaningful actions in their lives. By analyzing what might often seem to modern readers as strange and bizarre events and socially marginal peoples, microhistory offers a more inclusive understanding of who and what matters within the discipline of history. By emphasizing everyday life, microhistory forces us to re-think traditional approaches to history that focus on seemingly more important political events and actors. Finally, by looking at the “micro” level of social activities and cultural meaning, microhistory challenges approaches to the study of history that emphasize the need to quantify, generalize, or naturalize human experience or to find and impose normative and abstract historical laws, structures, or processes on the historical changes of the past.2

The prefix that separates ‘microhistory’ from other ‘history’ suggests that its defining feature is its size, namely it is history on a small scale. Certainly the most famous studies with this label focus on only a single person or place. The book that supposedly started it all – Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1976) – illuminates the peculiar world of a sixteenth-century Italian miller. Natalie Zemon Davis concentrated on a French peasant couple in The Return of Martin Guerre (1983) and Robert Darton’s ‘The Great Cat Massacre’ (1984) zoomed in on the actions of a small group of apprentices on a particular street in 1730s Paris. All of these studies share a scope that is severely and unapologetically limited when compared to more traditional histories.

The tools of the trade?

Yet etymology can be deceptive, because ‘microhistories’ seem to be more – or maybe less – than simply ‘small histories’. Although many of these histories centre on the lives of a single individual (Menocchio the miller, Bertrande the wife, Ralph the scrivener, Benedetta the nun), they are not biographies. Likewise, biographies of the great and the good are not microhistories despite the fact that they limit themselves to the story of a single life. Ian Gentle’s recent history of Oliver Cromwell may be academically rigorous and intellectually stimulating but it is somehow fundamentally different from Ginzburg’s Menocchio or Davis’s Bertrande.

In a related way, I think microhistory is distinct from local history. Here too similarities of scale mask innate differences. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s narrative of medieval Montaillou (1975) is the story of a whole village, not merely a single extraordinary individual or family – it explores the lives of all the villagers, heretical and orthodox alike. Yet Montaillou is almost always categorised as ‘microhistory’ whereas an equally famous and important local study, W.G. Hoskins’ book on Wigston Magna (1959), is not. The well-known histories of early modern Terling (1979) and Whickham (1992) by Keith Wrightson and David Levine went even further. Like ‘microhistories’, they were deeply analytical and challenged prevailing interpretations, almost the exact opposite of the antiquarianism of old-fashioned English local history. Nonetheless, they still appear to me to be essentially different from the explorations of Montereale, Artigat, Montaillou and la Rue Saint-Séverin offered by Ginzburg, Davis, Le Roy Ladurie and Darnton.

So, if ‘microhistories’ are not simply ‘small histories’, what makes them distinct? Is it their interest in ‘strange and bizarre events and socially marginal peoples’? Or the personal nature of their sources? Or their reflective and open discussions of methodology and the limits of historical knowledge? Or perhaps it is really a ‘continental thing’, well beyond the abilities of us depressingly practical Anglos on this side of the Channel?

I’d really like to hear your thoughts, which I hope will be the starting point for a subsequent post.

[Update: The follow-up is here]

Footnotes

1 I should also thank the MA students in my seminar at Birkbeck a couple of weeks ago, who had plenty of interesting things to say about the issue of ‘scale’, and two colleagues – Samantha Shave and Mark Hailwood – who discussed this with me over coffee.

2 Duane Corpis, course description for ‘Deviants, Outcasts & other “Others”: Microhistory and Marginality in Early Modern Europe’ (2010). See also the Wikipedia entry, which is a bit less helpful, or this article by Ginzburg (gated; ungated) and the many others available on JSTOR.

The impotence of being reviewed…

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Jonathan Willis

Following Brodie’s post last month on ‘Twelve reasons to buy my book, or, The ancient art of self-promotion’, I started thinking about what is one of the most exciting stages of the subsequent post-publication process: that is, the point at which the first review appears. This post is therefore a reflection on my own experience of being reviewed.[1] The book in question is my Church Music and Protestantism in Post-Reformation England, which was published by Ashgate in their St Andrews Studies in Reformation History series in May 2010.[2] A modified version of my PhD thesis, the book charts the impact of the reformation on religious music, and the role of religious music in shaping the English reformation (OK, so I couldn’t resist a quick plug!).

A jog rather than a sprint

One of the inevitable by-products of the academic system is the development of a ‘feedback loop’. This starts at school, and continues through university, including the process of PhD supervision, and even the viva. I think most of us have a deep-seated desire to be told how well we’ve managed to perform a given task: I’m minded here of Lisa Simpson’s desperate plea to Marge when the teachers go on strike and Springfield Elementary closes: ‘Grade me…look at me…evaluate and rank me! Oh, I’m good, good, good, and oh so smart! Grade me!’ All of which is a slightly roundabout way of making the point that, once you’ve released a book into the world, it’s only natural to want to know how well it has been received. Well, you may be in for a bit of wait. Books have to be sent out to a journal, received, processed, allocated, sent out to a reviewer, received and read even before the review can be written, which can itself take a fair bit of time. Manuscripts have to be typed up, sent in, proof-read, and scheduled for publication in a particular issue. How many of us have ever taken more than the allocated time to submit a book review? Need I say more! My first review appeared just over a year after the book was published, which isn’t an especially long time by any means, and two and a half years in I suspect that there are still several more in the pipeline. Glance at the list of books available to review on the Sixteenth Century Journal website, and there are still plenty of titles from 2010 awaiting their reviewer…

More a trickle than a flood

Briefly, and for the same reasons outlined above, it therefore follows that different journals will take varying amounts of time to publish their review of your book. The rules here are slightly different for game-changing books by field-shaping authors. When Eamon Duffy or Alexandra Walsham release a new monograph, it’s a fair guarantee that the reviews will appear thick and fast, while journals vie with one another to ride the crest of the publication wave. But I think that the experience is different for the majority of (especially) first books and their authors. The sheer volume of work being produced in the field is so overwhelming that it might take a long time for your turn to come around. For example, the October 2012 issue of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History features reviews of several books published in 2009.

The Journal

Past and Present famously do not review books, of course, but most of us have an idea of the top journals in our particular area, and would probably like to see our book being reviewed there. But, and again for the reasons outlined above, it’s not wise to be too fussy, and it is frankly exciting to see a review of your work being published anywhere! My experience is of two reviews in major, large-circulation journals (History and the Journal of British Studies) and two in smaller, more specialist publications (Ecclesiology Today and Anglican and Episcopal History).

The Reviewer

Again, most of us would probably like to see our work being reviewed by one of the leading practitioners in our field, but the reality is that you could be reviewed by anybody, from the greenest PhD student to the loftiest of munros [for an explanation of this term, see this previous post by Laura Sangha]. The thing to remember is that a review is no less valuable for that! I feel lucky in that two people whose work I already knew and respected very much reviewed my book (Eric Carlson and Andrew Foster), but the other reviewers also brought valuable insights and have helped me see and think about the book in different ways, as well as addressing the concerns of a broader constituency of readers.

The Good News

I’m delighted to say that although it is at times a slow and frustrating process, my experience of being reviewed has been an entirely pleasurable one (so far). Everyone likes having nice things said about them, and a few positive reviews finally close the ‘feedback loop’ I mentioned at the start. I feel that it would be remiss of me to pass up the opportunity of quoting a few highlights(!): Eric Carlson commented that the book used ‘an exceptional range of sources’ and that ‘the prose has flashes of genuine wit and elegance’. Sarah Williams picked up on ‘careful and exhaustive archival research’. Andrew Foster wrote an extremely kind review, calling it a ‘truly exciting, ground-breaking book’, displaying ‘amazing erudition whilst also providing a compelling read’. And Jonathan Gray remarked that the book was ‘learned and thought-provoking … a detailed, meticulously researched monograph’.

The Bad News

Given that we research and write in a universe of finite time and resources, most of us are probably aware that even the most polished work has, if not shortcomings, at least areas of particular strength and therefore (by extension) of relative weakness. A good review will highlight these, but in a proportionate and constructive manner. To pick a few nuggets from my review sample, this was not (as one author pointed out, I imagine with eyebrow raised) an introductory textbook; another noted that it shed light on far more aspects of life in early modern England ‘than one might suppose from the title’ (ouch!). Finally, another commented that the final chapter was perhaps the ‘least satisfying’, because – as I would be among the first to admit – much archival work on parish music still remains to be done.

In Conclusion…

In conclusion, my experience of being reviewed is that it is a slow but ultimately rewarding process. It certainly isn’t the be-all and end-all though. If anything, the most rewarding feedback I’ve had has come in the form of unsolicited emails or personal approaches at conferences and elsewhere from people who have read and enjoyed the book. It’s also made me think very differently about how I review other people’s books. I’d be interested to hear what experiences monster readers have had, either as reviewees or reviewers. Is it always plain sailing…?

[1] My book has been reviewed four times so far since it came out in May 2010: by Eric Carlson in History, 96.323 (2011), p. 368; by Andrew Foster in Ecclesiology Today, 45 (2012); by Jonathan Michael Gray in Anglican and Episcopal History, 81.1 (2012), pp. 106-17; and by Sarah F. Williams in Journal of British Studies, 50.3 (2011), pp. 753-755.

[2] Jonathan Willis, Church Music and Protestantism in Post-Reformation England: Discourses, Sites and Identities (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).

An archival miscellany: a warning, a rat, a blog and another warning

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Brodie Waddell

October was a rather busy month. My first term of teaching and marking at Birkbeck has meant that I know a good deal more about eighteenth-century London infrastructure, English Civil War veterans, and the historiography of the Reformation than I did a few weeks ago, but research and blogging have been neglected.

I have, however, come across a few tasty tidbits that deserve to be shared with the world. This is, in some ways, simply a continuation of the conversation (here and here) we’ve been having about archives.

A warning

An archivist friend passed this on and, like all good jokes, it contains at least a kernel of truth.

Having worked in the Borthwick for a year, I can say with some certainty that it would be entirely possible to use the limbo between the public reading room and the strongroom to erase someone with a ‘misplaced’ inkblot or an ‘accidental’ torn page. So be sure to greet your archivist with a friendly smile … or risk the posthumous disappearance that befell some soviet dissidents.

A rat

Or, to be more specific, Sir Henry Cole’s Rat (c.1830). As folks at the National Archives describe it…

At 15, Henry Cole, later to find fame as organiser of the Great Exhibition began working with the records of the British government. Shocked at their poor condition he pioneered reform of what became known as the Public Record Office – now The National Archives. This rat, with a stomach full of chewed document, was used as evidence for the poor condition of the records.

Sir Henry Cole’s Rat (c.1830): The National Archives, E 163/24/31

Yep, that’s right. We owe the wonderful institution that we once called the PRO, founded in 1838, to a rat stuffed with irreplaceable manuscripts. And archivists, being the dedicated – one might say obsessive – guardians of history that they are, created a special foam case to preserve this momentous rat for posterity.

A blog

Ever wanted to know what happens behind the scenes at a busy city archive? Of course you do! Well, if the Huntington’s Verso blog isn’t fulfilling all of your archive-blogging needs, check out the team at York who are describing their on-going project to catalogue the city’s immense civic records. Although not specifically ‘early modern’, it does have some fascinating ‘lucky dips’ (what we here call ‘found art’), including councilmen watching naughty films and railwaymen complaining of mouldy fish cakes, as well as some very pretty visual maps of the archives themselves.

If you’re a historian – professional or amateur – I think it can be immensely profitable to get a sense of how archives (and archivists) work. Sure, the difference between ‘functional’ and ‘structural’ arrangements may not sound especially interesting, but it can make a real difference to how you go about your research.

Another warning

This one comes from Tim Hitchcock, and is rather more serious. I think he makes the point I was trying to make here much more effectively than I ever could.

For both technical and legal reasons, in the rush to the online, we have given to the oldest of Western canons a new hyper-availability, and a new authority.  With the exception of the genealogical sites, which themselves reflect the Western bias of their source materials and audience, the most common sort of historical web resource is dedicated to posting the musings of some elite, dead, white, western male – some scientist, or man of letters; or more unusually, some equally elite, dead white woman of letters.  And for legal reasons as much as anything else, it is now much easier to consult the oldest forms of humanities scholarship instead of the more recent and fully engaged varieties.  It is easier to access work from the 1890s, imbued with all the contemporary relevance of the long dead, than it is to use that of the 1990s.

Without serious intent and political will – a determination to digitise the more difficult forms of the non-canonical, the non-Western, the non-elite and the quotidian – the materials that capture the lives and thoughts of the least powerful in society – we will have inadvertently turned a major area of scholarship, in to a fossilised irrelevance.

It would be a cruel irony to digitise vast new swathes of text and images only to discover that we’ve accentuated the very biases that scholars have been fighting against since at least the 1960s. That is not to say that we shouldn’t try to make ever-more sources freely and easily available online – just that we should beware the consequences of grabbing the ‘low-hanging fruit’ and neglecting less accessible sources. We must make a real effort to move beyond ‘the musings of some elite, dead, white, western male’ and save other voices ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity’.

Update (13/01/13): The York archives blog did a new ‘Lucky Dip’ post that early modernists might like which looks at a late seventeenth-century Chamberlain’s Account Book.

REED all about it – Part II: Angelic sheep-stealers, iconophobia, and the unaccountable longevity of ‘Merry England’?

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Jonathan Willis

Last month I wrote a REED-related post about a minor scuffle at a church ale in Bere Regis in 1590, but this time I would like to highlight a more significant and well-known case, to my mind one of the real gems of the REED material: the controversy surrounding the performance of the Whitsun plays in Chester during the early 1570s.[1]  There was a rich history of sacred drama in Chester going back at least as far as the late fourteenth century, including plays to celebrate Easter, midsummer, and Corpus Christi.  By the sixteenth century, it was held that the ‘old and Antient Whitson playes’ held annually in the city were ‘first made Englished and published by one Randall Higden a monk of Chester Abbey, and sett forth and played at, and by the Citizens of chester charge In the time of Sir Iohn Arneway Knight, and Major of Chester Anno 1268’.[2]  In 1571-2 the plays were still going strong, and detailed guild accounts give a fascinating insight into both the performances themselves, and the degree of time, effort and resource which went into their preparation.  The Smiths, Cutlers and Plumbers’ Records for that year recorded 3d for equipment (a ‘touyle’), 1s 4d for casting costs (‘seekinge our players’), and 7s 8d worth of beef to sustain them ‘for our genrall rehearse’, along with two whole cheeses and spices for the meat.[3]   An amateur dramatics group, like an army, evidently marched on its stomach, as payments for bread over three separate rehearsal days totalled 4s 10d, and to quench the assembled thirst there was 10s worth of ale and 9d of small ‘beare’.  Alongside the players, payments were also made to musicians and minstrels, as well as 4s 2d ‘to the clergy for the songes’, implying a close relationship between the professional religious institutions of the city (quite possibly the choir of Chester Cathedral) and the amateur efforts of the trade guilds. Continue reading →

Fantastic Thoresby – Part I: Dangerous Diaries

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Laura Sangha

Ralph Thoresby, 1658-1724.

The time has come to introduce many-headed monster readers to my current historical obsession: Ralph Thoresby (1658-1725). Thoresby, the son of a wool merchant, was a well respected antiquarian and topographer, a dissenter who conformed to the Church of England later in life, a husband, a father, a historian, a fellow of the Royal Society, the owner of a museum, a prolific correspondent, and a diarist. Over the summer, I had the pleasure of delving into Thoresby’s diary, which was transcribed and published by the Reverend Joseph Hunter in 1830. Future posts will deal with the content of the diary, which reveal a likeable, pious, and reflective man, but reading it also got me thinking about the ‘diary’ as a historical document, and it is this that I will deal with in this initial post. Continue reading →

Eric Hobsbawm: some personal reflections

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Brodie Waddell

Busy though I may be, I can’t help but note the death of Eric Hobsbawm and offer a few thoughts.

No doubt our readers will already be familiar with Hobsbawm and his work. If not, the lengthy obituary in the Guardian or this article by the historian Mark Mulholland will make clear his perhaps unmatched contributions to historical knowledge, both popular and academic.¹

Eric Hobsbawm at his typewriter. Source: John Brown via Jacobin.

Rather than recount his fascinating life or delve into his most famous works, I’d like mention how he (unknowingly) touched my life at a couple of important moments.

The first took the form of his book Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz (1998) which I received as a gift for, I believe, my seventeenth or eighteenth birthday from my infinitely thoughtful uncles. At the time, I was vaguely interested in history but my contact with truly artful historical writing was negligible. Then I opened this book and found an essay entitled ‘Political Shoemakers’:

The political radicalism of nineteenth-century shoemakers is proverbial. Social historians of a variety of persuasions have described the phenomenon and assumed it needed no explanation. A historian of the German revolution of 1848, for example, concluded that it was “not accidental” that shoemakers “played a dominant role in the activities of the people”. Historians of the “Swing” riots in England referred to the shoemakers’ “notorious radicalism” and Jacques Rougerie accounted for the shoemakers’ prominence in the Paris Commune by referring to their “traditional militancy”. Even so heterodox a writer as Theodore Zeldin accepts the common view on this point. The present paper attempts to account for the remarkable reputation of shoemakers as political radicals.²

The essay goes on to provide plenty of colourful examples drawn from across the globe, but by the time I’d read the first sentence I was already hooked. The image of the militant shoemaker, writing radical manifestos and taking to the barricades, was simply too wonderful for a nerdy teenager to forget.³

Not long after receiving Uncommon People, perhaps in my first or second year as an undergraduate, I came across his Primitive Rebels (1959) in a used book store. I think this may have been the first time I found a work of history that was not only interesting and politically appealing, but also made an important argument about the nature of past societies. Indeed, the book almost single-handedly created a whole new analytical category: ‘social crime’.⁴ I’m not going to claim it was the light on the road to Damascus that turned me into a budding historian, but in retrospect I think it helped to push me in that direction. It’s no accident that the undergrad module I put together for this year includes a week focusing on the debate that this concept spawned.

Hobsbawm’s writing room, reassuringly messy. Source: Eamon McCabe via the Gaurdian.

And then, many years later, whilst looking around for something to do at the expiration of my fellowship at Cambridge, imagine my delight at being invited for an interview for a post at Birkbeck. Founded in a tavern as the London Mechanics’ Institute back in 1823, this was the place that Hobsbawm made his academic home when become a lecturer there in 1947. He was still its nominal President when I applied there last year and, despite being in his nineties, my colleagues recount vivid memories of him still occasionally strolling into the department to chat and of course frequently showing up at conferences to engage in conversation (and disputation) with historians less than half his age. I am saddened to have never met him myself, but I hope that in some very small way I can help carry on his legacy at this wonderfully unusual institution.

I would be very curious to hear how some of the monster’s other heads or perhaps some of our readers encountered Hobsbawm’s work. Does anyone have any stories to share?

Footnotes

¹ See also this nice little collection of quotations from the great man himself. The final one ‘On his writing room’s bookshelves’ is particularly pleasing.

² ‘Political Shoemakers’ was co-authored with Joan Wallach Scott and originally published in Past & Present, no. 89 (1980), pp. 86-114

³ Note that this also means, strangely, that I read Hobsbawm before reading E.P. Thompson or Christopher Hill, two other members of the Communist Party Historians Working Group, whose work I cite infinitely more often.

⁴ The Wikipedia article on ‘social bandits’ isn’t bad, but for a more detailed recent discussion, see John Lea, ‘Social Crime Revisited’, Theoretical Criminality, 3:3 (1999) [ungated]. For early modernists, the work on this by Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh and E.P. Thompson, especially but not exclusively Albion’s Fatal Tree (1975) and the responses it provoked, is essential reading.

The Conference Phenomenon

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Laura Sangha

Ideally, my opening gambit on the many-headed monster would have been drawn from the research I have been doing over the summer. But as my first foray into blogging has coincided with conference season and the start of a new academic year, I have decided to offer a meditation on the former, though stay tuned for a series of posts on my summer ‘found art’ in the not too distant future.

As I entered the sixth hour of a train journey back from the European Reformation Research Group annual conference and the biannual Reformation Studies Colloquium in Durham last week, I found myself considering the phenomenon that is the academic conference. My relationship with ‘conferencing’ is probably similar to many others – sometimes they are a hassle, but they undoubtedly enrich my intellectual landscape and an early career academic certainly cannot afford to ignore them. Although expensive, time consuming, occasionally archaic, and sometimes disappointing, our discipline would be vastly impoverished without them – and in fairness, usually something can be salvaged from even the most disastrous event. And when they work well, they can really fly: assisting in the development of individual projects, establishing creative bonds between researchers, or providing the jumping off point for important proceedings and collections.

Plenty of ‘munros’ to be ‘bagged’ at this roundtable. L-R: Roger Bowers; Anne Dillon, Steve Hindle, Patrick Collinson, Alexandra Walsham, Tara Hamling, Brian Cummings.

The little name badge, the undrinkable tea and coffee, the gruelling programme, the bored looking chap on the book stall and the delegate snoring softly at the back of the room – these are all indispensable elements of the conference, but what is it that allows us to deem them a success? Here’s what I would hope for:

All the world’s a stage

The primary purpose of the conference is of course to showcase current research. The conference is the place to get my face and work known, as well as to find out about current trends in my research area, and to contact scholars working in similar areas. They are designed to encourage the exchange of ideas, and if you are lucky the responses, questions and comments on your paper will help you to develop your research in unexpected or unlooked for ways.

The Knowledge

The overall effect of a conference can be rather like attending thirty back to back mini-lectures, so it is inevitable that I learn a lot along the way. As my career has progressed, this aspect has become much more important – when I was a postgraduate I probably could follow about fifty percent of papers, but as my own knowledge has expanded I find that I am rarely completely lost these days.

Munro Bagging

A munro is a peak standing over 3,000ft (914m) above sea level, and you ‘bag’ a munro by climbing one. Some of my colleagues and I consider meeting and talking to eminent historians an academic equivalent to this, and we like to swap notes on how many renowned profs we have ‘bagged’ at the end of a conference. My broader point is, keynotes and plenary sessions give me the opportunity to see big name historians in action, as well as the chance to actually intellectually freestyle with them. Meeting your heroes can of course be a nerve wracking business (what if she’s a Tory? what if he’s got egg in his beard? etc), and I often find yourself trying to sneak a look at someone’s name badge so that I don’t find myself asking Professor Big-Wig what year of her PhD she is in. But sitting down to breakfast to find your entire bibliography sat at the table is (a) cool and (b) a wonderful opportunity to make an impression or pick someone’s brain.

Communitas

Linked to the previous section, this is undoubtedly the aspect of conferences that I most enjoy – the social side. Conferences are places to meet people, and to catch up with colleagues and friends (particularly at the bar in the evening, when many a morning session has been ruined). But from a professional point of view, the contacts I make and renew at a conference are an important part of my career development – just like at the early modern court, patronage and networks make academia tick. If you play your cards right you can identify seminar speakers, potential collaborators, external examiners, edited collection contributors or future colleagues. What’s more – we are all in it together. There is nothing like a two, three, or even four day conference to create an esprit de corps that will endure long after final talk is over.

So that’s what I think makes for a stimulating, intellectually (if not physically) invigorating meetings of minds. I’d be interested to know if people agree.

Christopher Hill, class hatred and the many-headed monster

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Brodie Waddell

In 1965, Christopher Hill published an essay entitled ‘The Many-Headed Monster’, from which this blog takes its name. The piece begins, of course, with a quote, but he then lays out much of the argument right on the first page:

Most writers about politics during the century before 1640 agreed that democracy was a bad thing … ‘The people’ were fickle, unstable, incapable of rational thought: the headless multitude, the many-headed monster.

According to Hill, the ‘class hostility’ of the propertied elite was deeply engrained in how they wrote and thought, so that ‘dread and hatred of the masses’ emerged in literature, philosophy and theatre.¹

It is difficult now to imagine that this was ever an important, novel argument. Today, historians of early modern England are well-aware of the distorting prejudices that shaped the way ‘the landed classes’ saw the actions of their supposed ‘inferiors’. We have, for a few decades at least, worked to read such sources ‘against the grain’ rather than to accept uncritically the words of the wealthy, educated men who provide so much of our source material.

‘Hydra’ from Edward Topsell’s The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents (1658). Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries: UH Digital Library.

But in 1965 this was not the case. Certainly there were already many good historians who thought carefully about the biases inherent in their sources and I would be very surprised if Hill was the first to make this point about Tudor and Stuart elites, but the essay still served an important purpose. It surveyed the wide-reach of this paranoia amongst the ‘better sort’ of people, setting it out in clear and unambiguous detail. Indeed, one weakness of the essay is its repetition – one reads quote after quote from authors expressing their fear or hatred of the ‘lower orders’. How many times do we really need to hear seventeenth-century toffs denounce ‘the ruder sort’ as ‘a violent flood’ or ‘foolish flies’ or ‘untamed beasts’ or ‘vile caitiff wretches’?

Hill nonetheless performed a valuable service by implicitly critiquing those scholars who had ended up (perhaps unconsciously) adopting the distorted perspective of their sources. One of the more well-known examples is Max Beloff, whose discussion of later Stuart food riots clearly owed much to the harsh descriptions of the unrest recorded in the state papers. Although it was only in 1971 that E.P. Thompson made Beloff notorious by criticising him directly, Hill’s essay showed the dangers of failing to account for the ‘class hatred’ of the English gentleman.²

Beyond this methodological point, Hill went on to show how these stereotypes influenced the course of the ‘Great Rebellion’ of the 1640s. Fear of the ‘giddy multitude’, he argued, actually shaped historical events. But perhaps this is a topic for another time.

For now, I’ll just close with a question: Do our own biases (as educated, middle class professionals) mean that we continue to often unconsciously imbue those of our well-off predecessors? Or maybe has nearly half a century of ‘reading against the grain’ left us less able to understand the genuine anxiety of a seventeenth-century gentleman faced with a crowd of ‘base and disorderly people’?

Footnotes

¹ Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are taken from Christopher Hill, ‘The Many-Headed Monster’, in his Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (1975), pp. 181-204. It was first published in C.H. Carter (ed.), From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation: Essays in Honour of Garrett Mattingley (1965).

² E.P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, 50 (1971), p. 76, citing Max Beloff, Public Order and Popular Disturbances, 1660-1714 (1938), p. 75.

On the merits of dust

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Brodie Waddell

Mark’s recent post – and the related questions that come up at EMOB, Tim Hitchcock’s blog, and elsewhere – got me thinking a bit more ‘about the relative merits of (cheap, easy and efficient) access to digitised primary sources on one hand, and to (often expensive, labour intensive and time-consuming) hands-on access to original materials on the other’.

This is something that I’m conflicted about too. On the one hand, I have an emotional and aesthetic preference for the dusty originals. On the other, I often find at least as much useful material in the clean, searchable digitised sources.

At a practical level, I’m inclined to throw in my lot with the digitisers. Wonderful resources like EBBO, ECCO, TCP, EBBA, BHO, OBO and LL opened up new worlds to me (especially when I was a student in Canada) and to many other scholars. Without them, much of my work would be impossible or, at the very least, about ten times slower.

An information related to the theft of two pewter pots, from the Middlesex Sessions Papers, dated March 1760, digitised at London Lives.

Nonetheless, I believe that there is another consideration that is rarely mentioned in discussions like these: there is an undeniable tendency for digitisation to reinforce existing biases in source use. Before digitisation began, people tended to use printed works more than manuscripts and to use southern English (especially metropolitan) archives more than distant archives. This makes perfect sense: if you are based at Oxford or Cambridge or flying into London from North America, why wouldn’t you focus on the sources accessible there. Digitisation has made this bias even stronger. Print has been digitised before mss and southern/metropolitan archives have digitised more than less central ones. (See, e.g., the sites mentioned above and also TNA and the ERO.)

What this means is that one often finds historians extrapolating from the same types of evidence, with the same innate biases, rather than drawing on anything even approximating a ‘random sample’. Indeed, I often find myself doing this, so I don’t blame anyone else for doing the same.

In contrast, I’ve been privileged to have had the opportunity (i.e. time, funding) over the last few years to be able to regularly trek to a range of different county record offices and to simply dive into their material for a particular period to see what I find.  As a result, I feel like I’ve gained a genuinely stronger sense of what was going on than I would have had I been constrained by the limits of digitised material as it exists now or even as it continues to expand in the near future. I can see now that some previous historians may have mischaracterised events and periods purely because they were unable to explore a range of local material.

Obviously this isn’t something everyone, or even most historians, is able to do, so I unhesitatingly endorse all the good work that is going into digitising ever-more material and making it accessible to a much wider audience of researchers. Still, we must guard against the temptation to think that the great masses of sources that have been digitised somehow represent a more balanced source base merely because they are now so numerous. Biases remain and they may even be growing stronger.

PS: As Gavin Robinson is showing with his series blogging a soldier’s letters from the English Civil War, even when a manuscript source has previously been transcribed and printed (and will be eventually digitised), it’s often worth revisiting the original. Earlier editors sometimes made hilarious errors or took liberties with the text that can completely change the meaning.

Huntington Library Treasures

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Mark Hailwood

Days before I boarded a plane to Los Angeles to spend my summer as a research fellow here at the Huntington Library, I came across this article in the Times Higher Education supplement. Needless to say, the following quote only added to my sense of anticipation: ‘One of my friends said that if she died and went to Heaven, she would expect St Peter to ask for her Huntington reader’s card at the pearly gates.’ Six weeks later, and I can see where she was coming from.

But there was something else from that article that I carried with me across the Atlantic – a question mark about the relative merits of (cheap, easy and efficient) access to digitised primary sources on one hand, and to (often expensive, labour intensive and time-consuming) hands-on access to original materials on the other. The article echoed a sentiment I have often heard expressed at an academic conference or seminar series: historical research may be a lot easier today due to advances in digital technology, but as a result something valuable has undoubtedly been lost. But what?

Too often, the arguments deployed here reach for an intangible, almost mystical quality to doing good old-fashioned grubbing in dusty archives. That handling original sources is somehow more righteous; it allows us to ‘get a better feel’ for our sources; in some way by touching centuries old parchment we can almost touch the past itself. I often find myself thinking in these ways after a day in the archives, but as a historian who is trained to judge arguments in a detached and ‘rational’ manner, I have to admit that they don’t add up to a very concrete or convincing case. As a historian that has done a reasonable amount of work on both digitised print material, and on fusty manuscript legal records, I can’t honestly put my finger on a tangible difference in the quality of research I produce from each. Even if exploring one does contain a greater sense of adventure than the other.

It was with this jumble of thoughts on my mind that I bunked off from the library for a few hours to take a look at a new exhibition of ‘Huntington Treasures’. It’s hard to imagine a more star-studded collection of early modern books together in one place: an original Gutenberg Bible, which was the first major book produced on a printing press anywhere in the world; the Ellesmere Chaucer, one of the earliest collections of the Canterbury Tales produced around the turn of the 15th century; a first folio edition of Shakespeare’s collected plays from 1623; first editions of works by Hobbes, Locke, Ben Jonson… I could go on. I was, of course, appropriately impressed

There was something exhilarating about seeing original editions of these landmark texts, but I wasn’t prepared to let that steamroller my lingering uncertainty about the innate superiority of consulting originals over reproductions. What as a historian had I really gained from seeing these texts up close and personal? I wasn’t convinced that it brought me any closer to how contemporaries would have connected with these works: venerated in an exhibition hall, in a glass case, as a ‘treasure’ rather than as reading material. There were aspects of the ‘materiality’ of these books that could provide more tangible insights for the historian to take away: the sheer size of a Gutenberg or King James bible meant that reading it would have required some supporting apparatus, whereas a single sheet broadside ballad could be read on the move or in any position (think hefty hard-back versus kindle, perhaps). The act of reading one or the other would have been very physically different, and would have therefore been experienced, approached and understood as a distinct type of reading activity. Sure, but I didn’t really need to travel 5000 miles to see the originals to figure that out.

I am, admittedly, trying to be provocative here. I wouldn’t disagree that there is value in consulting original materials rather than relying exclusively on digital reproductions. That said, I do think that historians should be asking themselves to come up with far more rigorous explanations as to why that’s true.