[MEDIEV-L:56198] So Called Historians at the Local Bookstore
The message below is shared with the generous permission of the author of
this discussion. There are excellent and useful comments, well worth ones
thought, regarding ways to judge the value and quality of sources.
Determining what to believe and what to take with a grain of salt is a
difficult part of any research process and this article adds some
constructive ideas towards the conduct of this thought process.
This discussion may be viewed below my signature lines. Many thanks go to
Elizabeth Dachowski of Tennessee State University for permission to share
these ideas.
Sincerely,
David Dillard
Temple University
(215) 204 - 4584
jwne@temple.edu
<http://daviddillard.businesscard2.com>
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Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:42:52 -0500
From: Elizabeth Dachowski <edachowski@bellsouth.net>
Reply-To: MEDIEV-L@listproc.cc.ku.edu
To: MEDIEV-L@listproc.cc.ku.edu
Subject: [MEDIEV-L:56198] So Called Historians at the Local Bookstore
It's easy to warn people off one particular book or author, but I think it
might be more valuable to discuss what historians look for in a book. As I've
become more experienced as a historian, I've read fewer and fewer bad books (in
terms of content, not necessarily style) because I've learned to what to look
for in them. Here's what I look for when I'm browsing in a bookstore or
library:
Documentation is usually the first thing I look at after the title (the form of
documentation doesn't bother me too much--as that's often dictated by
publishers or editors, who might prefer endnotes to footnotes or discourage
in-text references in favor of those annoying end-of-work notes that refer back
to page and a key phrase rather than risk scaring readers away with note
numbers--but the presence of some sort of documentation seems essential to a
good work of history). Primary sources (especially if the author is reading
them in the original language) are a good indication that the author has done
his/her own research, but might not be present in a work that aims to summarize
the "state of the question" by looking at a wide range of secondary sources.
Secondary sources should be academic sources (not wikipedia or a college
textbook or the New York Times, for example) and mainly up-to-date at the time
of writing (some sources from the 1800s might indicate thorough research, but
little or nothing from the 20 years or so prior to initial publication suggests
that the author is relying on half-remembered and poorly checked "facts" from a
long-distant college course). If a book is intended for a non-academic
audience, documentation might be minimal but there will probably be other clues
that the author has done his/her homework and really confronted issues (in the
acknowledgments, for example, or in a "further readings" section or even in
discussions of sources and arguments in the text).
Once I've flipped through the bibliography and notes, I'll start thumbing
through the text itself. I personally like to see some discussion of sources
and disputed evidence in the text, though some authors will relegate this
information to notes if it interferes too much with the narrative line. I also
like to see some attempt at understanding historical actors in terms of their
own society. It is valuable to step back and say how we (21st-century people)
would evaluate an action in moral/ethical terms, but that should be an aside
after actions have been looked at in terms of medieval values (or early modern
values in the case of Weir's works).
Red flags for me include haphazard documentation (no citations for pages and
then suddenly a footnote for a trivial fact that is of marginal importance,
especially if the source cited is a textbook or encyclopedia), constant
reference to the "feelings" or "thoughts" of the historical actors
(particularly if I know that the only evidence we have for them are chroniclers
or legal texts and not even diaries or personal letters--more so if there is no
qualifier such as "might have thought" or "must have felt"), and lots of
irrelevant description of physical setting and clothing (some is good to
understand what's going on or even just to give the reader a feeling of
immediacy, but lots of details that have no relationship to the topic at hand
always seem to me thrown in to mask the fact that the author doesn't have a
handle on the cultural context--or maybe the author is angling to have the work
turned into a costume drama).
There are also certain topics that will cause a book to get special scrutiny
from me: anything to do with women in the Tudor dynasty (either by birth or
marriage), the Templars, Stonehenge (or any other famous megalith--if I can
imagine Leonard Nimoy doing a special on it, then I consider myself lucky if
10% of the books on the shelf are of any value whatsoever)--you get the idea.
There are lots of very good books on these topics but there are even more very
bad books out there. I also shy away from books that try to sell me a sweeping
generalization, usually highly flattering to one ethnic group ("How the Irish
Saved Civilization" or "How the Scots Invented the Modern World:The True Story
of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It ")
or feeding into common stereotypes ("A World Lit Only by Fire").
Elizabeth Dachowski
Tennessee State University
edachowski@bellsouth.net
edachowski@tnstate.edu
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