"Christian military history" Topic

Having seen, err, (actually seeing) this sort of alarming thing from the pulpit at MY church, I wonder myself where in the hell have I found myself.? I gotta stop, I gotta stop RIGHT now………………..

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there are lots of different ways and places for people to look at spiritual issues – i wouldn't do the baby and bathwater thing

I always find it intersting to read letters, dieries and after action reports from certain wars.

It's quite intersting.

Like the fact that while there are defenetly refrences to god during the AWI, they are slightly less commen then during the ACW, and even then there aren't that many actualy.

The french during the revolution and Napoleoinc wars, have very little mention of it, while the germans and partucularly the russians have alot more, but even then among the poor iliturate russian serf soldiers you have the the unbeliver.

The French ofcourse were inspired by atleast the theory of age of reason and free thought,
Then you got the germans both catholic and protistants, some of them quite fanatic others less so, and russians most devout on avravge.

The british is the od one out, the whole of british sociaty was more varied, you had the devout christian, you had the apathetic and you had the unbeliver, inn all strada, from private to general, some inspired by the bible other by the age of reason. It's actualy very intresting to read about the diffrences.

People can read and write whatever they want.

I have an issue with people attributing to God things it does not attribute to itself.

Is this not a reflection of white American Christian fundamentalism, that most people observing from the outside, find either laughable or a concern?

It's fairly clear that God decided to remove Stonewall Jackson from this earth in order to allow the Union to win at Gettysburg, and then do the right thing and stamp out slavery and force the seccessionists back into the USA.

**** play inspirational music like when Oliver Wendell Douglas speaks here ****

So did god give us Stonewall Jackson to win agianst the evil big governement godless north, or is it more like the Devil in Damn Yankees.. taking away the youth of Hannibal Joe at the last instant?? I hear cannibals a munchin at a history luncheon… those were the good old days!
JJ

Gentlemen, please – this is a religion-free website. Religion is like a willy – it's fine that you have one, you are allowed to be proud of it, but please don't wave it about in public and don't try to shove it down my throat.

Pat

Gentlemen, please – this is a religion-free website. Religion is like a willy – it's fine that you have one, you are allowed to be proud of it, but please don't wave it about in public and don't try to shove it down my throat.

Pat

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actually being an adopted Liverpool fan, I'd say the same about those who support Man Utd!

For 13th century spanish military history from a very christian viewpoint see this TMP thread on the Cantigas de Santa Maria

Druzhina
sites of wargaming interest

As I Civil War historian who writes books soley from the perspectives of the men who have gotten shot at, I have often come across references to men who prayed before going into battle. Not everyone respected them but the majority of their men allowed them to express their views without condemnation. To many, their faith was a private matter which they did not force upon everyone.

As I continue to probe the war further, by 1864, the Overland Campaign in Virginia I saw the men change as the war became more brutal and extremely close. The references to Christianity dwindled with the ever increasing deaths of their comrades. Despite that, I have found a few references to men who openly expressed their beliefs, but very few. A candle lit in the darkness, as it were.

I used the psalms as chapter headings in my Antietam book because it reflected the horrendous suffering that occurred on the lands owned by the Pacifist German Baptist Brethren.

As an historian, I prefer for the readers to draw their own conclusions, rather than for me to tell them what mine are. Battle is a sad tapestry filled with scenes of extreme heroism to abject cowardice, with expressions of devout faith to absolute evil, which will provoke even the most religious to do things which under normal circumstances they would bever have countenanced.

If you get the chance, read about Desmond Doss, the only pacifist to receive the Medal of Honor while serving on Okinawa in WWII.

Jonathan Riley-Smith is the (academic) father of many prominent historians of the Crusades and the author of some fine studies. He is also a Knight of Grace and Devotion in the Sovereign Order of Malta and a Knight of Justice, Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem.

He has led research into the Crusades as a distinctly spiritual enterprise. This may well have been driven by his beliefs, but it doesn't prevent him being a remarkable historian.

Regards,

Always seemd to me that the devout worshippers of an imaginary sky-father as generals always claim providence for a victory but blamed others for a loss…..Jackson comes to mind…..

A historian who writes from the overtly Christian perspective is not going to be very objective in my opinion. They're not really interested in understanding or uncovering historical facts so much so as they are in proselytizing. If you want to preach, then preach, but don't preach and then call it history, IMHO. If a historian happens to be Christian, but renders a definite professional distinction between the study of history and their own personal opinions, historical objectivity will increase the understanding of the reader regardless of religious persuasion or lack thereof.

Bottom Line, objective thought is objective thought… don't make a bit of difference who you are or who you think you are or want to be… Historians write facts, not opinions.

1. Can you name one historian who was/is truly objective?

2. What are these facts about which you write?

All the historians I work with and study under write opinions base on their interpretation of the 'facts' as presented by (non-objective) medieval chroniclers, administrators, biographers, authors of letters etc.

The honest historian accepts that they (and their sources) have both an individual and cultural bias and works to minimalise it.

Regards,

I'd have to agree on the facts and objectivity point of view – people like Shelby Foote write ACW history with an emphasis on the CSA point of view. Historians are no more truly objectively writing facts than journalists are recording the objective truth about current events – its only when you have been involved in something that gets in the papers that when one reads the story you realise that "only getting half the story" is not even beginning to approximate to how wrong they get stuff

Exactly GNREP8 – historical facts are actually products of systems of representation, which the historian has to interpret.

A critical approach to sources has been around since Hans Delbruck's time (if not before), but it also has to be used to consider both secondary works and one's own research.

There is no more an issue with a practicing Christian historian who uses their personal experiences to gain some understanding of Christians in history than there is for a former army officer (such as myself) to make guarded use of my experiences in my research of medieval warfare.

The problem comes when one over-eggs the pudding or fails to recognise the inherent influence of one's own culture/experience on one's interpretation of data.

Regards,

I teach an undergraduate course on the crusades and I am also a practising/devout Catholic (I prefer the Latin Mass to the post- Vatican II happy clappy singalong- my colleague on the course is an atheist of Scots Presbyterian origins. However, we are well aware that our background has shaped how we have approached the subject and the rationale for the course. In contrast to many other such courses my focus is firmly on studying the crusades from 'within', trying to engender empathy (not to be confued with sympathy) among my students for a subject and period of history few have studied before or understand. This has led me to devote a whole two hour class to the issue of atrocity and brutality in crusading warfare for instance. One of the first things I point out to students is how important it is to be aware of the historian's background and his 'baggage', and of course the elcturer's 'baggage' too! Thus they need to take into account when researching their course assessments what the angle of vision of the various scholars might be. Their values, beliefs and prejudices will shape their reconstruction and interpretation of historical events. Afterall, all history is shaped and coloured by the concerns and aggendas of the present. Just look at the heated debates over the 'Fourth Crusade' 1198-1204- Runcimen versus Queller and Madden; Byzantinists versus Latinists. Constantly labelled the 'unholy Crusade' in trashy pseudo-history books, the real story is one of miscalculation and accident, problems of reacting to events on the ground, made worse by the conspiratorial plotting of a Byzantine prince to divert the crusade from the Holy Land! Runciman's monumental History of the Crusades is still read and believed, yet he was a Byzantine art historian who taught in Constantinople (Istanbul if you wish) and a Presbyterian Scot- so not likely to be empathic to the idea of Catholic penitiential warfare or to a Latin military conquest of his beloved Byzantium! Moreover he invented many of the 'myths' of the crusade too- the blinding of the venetian Doge, Enrico Dandolo, by the Byzantines, which is complete invention.

In the final analysis, it doesn't matter whether the historian is a Catholic, Protestant (which actually isn't a religious identity as there is no such a thing as a 'Protestant' religion, there are Protestantism), Roman Orthodox etc. What matters is how they balance their interpretations of the past with their social, religious and cultural backgrounds with their ability to empathise with the past. Empathy is the vital key to understanding the past, if they fail in that then their reconstructions of the past are ultimately flawed and distorted.

Protestant is not a religious identify as there is no such a thing as a 'Protestant' religion

How to make friends and influence people, welcome to the board! ;-)

I'm afraid Janner it is just a matter of history. 'Protestant' was only originally applied to the German Lutherans, it was not used of Calvinists, Anabaptists etc, etc. Calvinists referrred to themselves as Evangelicals. Lutherans hated Calvinists, Calvinists hates Lutherans, and in the good old tradition of ecumenism Lutherans, Calvinists and Catholics hated baptists. Luther condemned John Calvin and Zwingli as heretics. The notion of a 'Protestant' Cause really doesn't emerge until the Thirty Years War and the creation of the defence leagues in Germany- Protestant Union forces and the Catholic League/Imperial armies.

Ultimately we're just dealing with a vast and colourful array of Christianities, ranging from actual churches to sects. It's all great fun, but as long as it does not impact on how the past is understood, interpreted or presented to the 'public' whether they are high school pupils taking their Highers/A-levels, undergraduates, or more general audiences. History without the religious dimension is a distortion of the past; military history without the religious dimension is likewise a complete distortion of the conduct and perception of past warfare.

I was just teasing Bernard, but I hope you don't suffer with your bowels in the same way as your namesake ;-)

Just because someone just told me, in this day in history (1146) St Bernard of Clairvaux preaches at Vézelay for Second Crusade.

Bernard reading your post of 20th March, do I understand you correctly old boy, because it does appear that you are saying that the destruction of Constantinople during the 4th Crusade was a positive thing, both in the context on the early 13th Cenutury and in the wider history of humanity? If this correct, could you please explain how and why it was so. The final destruction of Constantinople in the 1450s did lead to an increase in aspects of the Renaissance that were positive I would agree, but the 4th Crusade?

You further seem to place the blame amongst the follows of the Orthodoxy rather than your co-religionists from the Serene Republic. Am I, dear fellow, mistaken in this too?

Similarly, do you further favour other crusdes such as that against the Albegensians for example?

I must admit old boy, this is a little out of the purview, becasue I am a child of the Enlightenment and the whig view of history who takes his view of relgion from the likes of Volaire and Frederick II of Prussia.

Is this not a reflection of white American Christian fundamentalism, that most people observing from the outside, find either laughable or a concern?

I think this about sums it up accurately. The Soviet historians writing about the Great Patriotic War had their own bias and, as observed in previous posts, everyone brings their own baggage to the discussion. I suspect the claim to 'christian' history is as a much a marketing opportunity for the authors to leverage sales as to having any novel viewpoint to propound beyond that of a traditional WASP.

You seemed rather surprised at my more positive take n the Fourth Crusade 138SquadronRAF. Yes, I am suggesting that our friends in the Roman Orthodox World shoulder a major part of the blame for the diversion of the crusade from it's original objective of the Holy Land. After, all if it hadn't been for Alexios Angelos escaping to the west and trying to get help from anybody he could to restore his father (Isaac II)to the throne and remove his uncle (Alexios III), the crusade would have managed to avoid any Byzanitne entanglements. I recommend that you read the works of Donald Queller and Thomas Madden on the Fourth Crusade. They have both convincingly destroyed the myths of Venetian-Crusader conspiracy, while Madden has shown the very difficult situation the crusaders found themselves in trying to arrange transport and supplies, and through miscalculation and misfortune finding themselves in debt to the Venetians. Madden has been foremost in looking at the crusade from 'within' as well as from the outside.

The Albigensian crusades were indeed entirely justified in dealing with the threat of the Cathar/bon homme heresy in the Occitan. This will of course not go down well among such enlightened gentleen as yourself, but then I am not enlightened, I am a medieval historian. In the context of the time, and we cannot judge people in the past by our values and beliefs, the extending of crusading privileges to the struggle against heresy was a last resort. Local bishops had been unwilling/unable to deal with them effectively, and secular rulers likewise had been tardy. The murder of the papal legate in 1208 was the final straw which required Innocent III (the greatest of the medieval popes) to use extraordianry measures against them. At the cost of diverting resources way from his ultimate concern of the Holy Land, Innocent sanctioned a crusade. These crusades are infamous for the ferocity of the wrafre, bvut it must be remembered that heretics were not covered by the rules of war and were deemed traitors and blaphemers. The sack of Beziers, famous for the alleged words of the papal legate Arnold Amaury 'Kill them. God will know his own', was an entirely legitimate act according to the laws of warfare in the middle ages. Bezier had been summoned to surrender and hand over the heretics in their population, or abandon their city. The defenders refused and shot at the crusaders. The storming and sack of the city was legitimate and justified. Heresy was viewed as a virus or disease which had to be leansed from the Christian population.

A modern audience has real difficulties in undertsanding the motives and justifications for the 'war on heresy', my job as an academic historian is to get them not to judge the motives but to understand them. A mature student of mine recently commented that the class we had had the week before on atrocity and brutality in crusading warfare (which had looked at the sack of Jerusalem in 1099 and the Albigensian crusades) had 'troubled him'. It made him re-think all he thought he knew about studying history. That is what history, and indeed wargaming, should be about.

So sorry if I have cast doubts on the dominance of Enlightenment myth-history, but the past is far too important to be left to the pseudo-histories and the conspiracy nonsense of Dan Brown and his ilk… oh, have I mentioned the Templars!?

PS: I also teach an undergraduate courses on Byzantium and Its Neighbours and Being Byzantine- so I'm not unsympathetic to the basileos ton autokrator rhomaion and the empire of Christ!1

Of course it is also good to remember that neither the sack of Jerusalem nor the brutality of the Albigensian Crusades were outside the laws of war of the time. Indeed they would remain a feature of war for several centuries thereafter as a study of Wellington' campaigns in the Iberia demonstrates.

What made crusader violence abnormal was that rather than requiring penance it served to cleanse the warrior of their sins. The level of violence itself was quite normal.

Exactly! Killing as penance instead of penance for killing, but there was nothing 'abnormal' about it as it was sanctioned by God. The fusion of pre-existing practices of sanctified violence, pilgrimage and penance, created a 'New way of salvation' (as Guibert of Nogent expressed it) in what we have come to call the 'crusade'- pentitential warfare.

I wish everyone a Happy Easter, believers and non-believers, and hope you have a great time with your families and friends. Enjoy your wargaming!!

This is Bernard of Clairvaux signing off- Deus Vult!!!

Indeed, and the same for next weekend any Orthodox members ;-)

One of the thing that stands out to me is that the Arabs called all of the crusaders "Franks" if I'm not mistaken. Even small formations of knights were entirely feared and respected for their military prowess. Sir Charles Oman recounts a charge, in Syria I believe, by a large formation of mounted "Franks". The opposing army had imbedded large pointed stakes into the ground to protect their central position against an expected cavalry charge and it made utterly no difference as the Franks crashed through it--with horses and men getting impaled along the way-- to slaughter all behind who thought they were well protected.

Now one could quibble about whether or not that actually happened the way it did, but the premise was that their Muslim opponents feared the Franks for their military prowess… which is supported in the historical record… and which is further supported by the fact that Jerusalem was retaken and kingdoms/political entities set up by the crusaders for the long haul and it took a long time for the Muslims to retake all that they had lost. Of course, the crusaders weren't without reproach themselves for not being entirely unified in their effort and on the same page, i.e. less well organized as a whole which is why what they took was taken back. Saladin was a better military commander than all of them, he was their SUPERIOR, and proved it to boot. Now that's objectivity.

Actually no, Saladin didn't recapture all the crusader gains. Antioch, for example remained out of reach and he bounced off Tyre twice. Indeed after the high point of 1187, he failed to win another battle and lost many of his gains to the Third Crusade. The best he could manage was a one all draw against Guy de Lusignan outside Acre on 4th October 1189.

Come on, Bottom Dollar, you can do better than that ;-)

Try googling Sultan Baibars to find a military commander that really caused the crusaders problems…

Thanks for the corrections, Janner. But you've got to agree he regained some choice parts for good. Or no ? Thanks for the search rec. Yes, I see what you're talking about now.

Not quite for good, a certain excommunicated German got Jerusalem back without even spilling any blood ;-)

As a Christian and as a professionally trained historian (got my PhD) I'm always a bit skitterish about books written from an avowedly Christian perspective, especially when it is easy to turn into a "confessional" perspective. On the other hand, history, even if free of religious confessionalism is just as hag ridden, quite often with a "political confessionalism" which slants and shapes the narrative to serve the ends of this or that presentist political movement.

This does not however, as the post-modernists and the deconstructionists assert, destroy the possibility of real truth, or of knowing it. It simply means that there can be many differing interpretations of what happened, and when you get to saying things like "It's Gods will!" which is pretty much what confessional historians of the religous or political stripe assert (Substtute Marx, or Hegel, or Gumby for god, whatever you like) then you're into polemics and not history.

One of the things I firmly believe is that all modern historical error comes from the astounding and absurd belief that we know what motivated people in the past to do what they did, while they themselves did not. That we know their mind better than they, and this of course is the fallacious idea that economics or power or ideas, or social conditions make people do what they do and not what they think are their own motives for doing what they do. That, is the height of conceit.

Let me give you an example.

In my job today, if I wish to get ANYTHING usefull out of the head of the company, I have to get to him before 9:30. The reason is that at 9:30 Kathy, his secretary comes in, and all he wants to do from then on for the rest of the day is to talk about how good Kathys (posterior) looks. He's absolutely worthless for anything else, and as far as I know, he's not sleeping with Kathy.

So I can have real sympathy for historical figures. Here's the Duc d'Choiseul coming in to Louis XV saying "Your majest, here are the orders to dispatch five regiments to Canada to aid the Marquese De Montcalm, and here are the drafts to advance him money to pay his troops and provide presents for the savages and here are the orders for…" and all Louis XV wants to do is talk about how good Madamme De Maintegnon's ass looks this morning.

People are people in every age and while they may make their decisions against the background of their times, nevertheless THEY make the decisions, not Gods, not forces of history, not justice or the lack thereof, not ideas, and not certainly not economics.

1. Can you name one historian who was/is truly objective?

Yes, Sir Steven Runciman (despite what "Bernard" has to say about him being a "Byzantinist"). The whole tenor of Runciman's monumental "A History of the Crusades" is dispassionate; and at the end he sums up negatively: the crusades were, from beginning to finish, a misdirected enterprise that modern thinking deplores. He does not put the blame on anything or anyone, religious or non religious: he simply looks at the complex story and tells it "like it is" the best that any imperfect human can.

(And "Bernard" claims that Runciman is the inventor of "…the blinding of the venetian Doge, Enrico Dandolo, by the Byzantines, which is complete invention"; yet Runciman does not say the Byzantines blinded him; rather, Dandolo as a younger man had been involved in a brawl in Constantinople which resulted in him suffering partial blindness: hardly the same thing as asserting that the Byzantines "blinded him". And the incident does not originate with Runciman: he did not "invent" it: link Apparently it was "a later Venetian chronicler" who wrote about the partial blinding being the result of a brawl in Constantinople. This Professor Jonathan Harris link is the source of that one)

OS, I have some sympathy for concern as to deconstruction gone wild and may be misunderstanding your post, but are you really saying that we should approach history with the assumption that human beings act exactly the same today as in 2000 BC and across all parts of the globe?
That is to say that culture may influence decision making, but the dynamics of the decision making process itself should be treated as a constant (uninfluenced by normative systems)?
You seem to be saying that all decisions are irrational, independent of outside influences with the subject unaware of their motivation for making it.

Bad luck on the boss, by the way, have you tried getting Kathy to make the decisions instead ;-)

As an aside, I'm gobsmacked that Just visiting would consider Runciman's work 'dispassionate' as many (myself included) would argue that it exhibits all the hallmarks of a literary work – good and bad. Still, it just goes to prove that all opinions are based on individual experience, and the inherent danger of thinking that there are such a thing as immutable facts. Everything is interpretation or rather perception based.

"Dispassionate" was an unfortunate choice: I prefer "unbiased, upon further reflection. I believe Runciman displays as much a lack of bias, or "fan boy" interest in any particular aspect/side of the subject, as a historian can muster….

Dear Jenner

NO!!! NOT AT ALL!!!! NOT BY ANY MEANS! In fact I am radically the opposite. I believe that it is impossible to judge the past by the present and one of the most dangeorus things is to assume "we know" what the past felt. Lowenstein's "The Past is a Foreign Country" is essential for an understanding of the past, and can be simplified to this. The past speaks a language very different from what we do. I do not mean specific languages, but the way their world, their universe, their "Weltanschauung" if you will is the same. One can simply look at the Victorians compared to us to see how far this drift has come in a mere 100 years, and for an even greater contrast, consider the meaning of the words "virtue" today and "virtu" in Renaissance Italy. Completely different meanings attached to the same word. Going further back we get to such ludicrous examples as people attempting to apply "Marxist Analysis" "Das Kapital" to an epoch when there was no coinage, no "capital."

No no, one must, as I say, "Take the Past at its word." That is when they say they did something for this reason- that they did it for that reason. The people in the past compared to us are almost alien minds nd we, only with great difficulty can bridge the gap and see the world and the things that impinged on them as they saw them.

My relation of my boss and his secretary and relating it to Choiseul and Louis XV was a bit of humor, not saying it was a parallel case-- a bit of humor in a dry discussion. Causation in history is not always of the elevated or high-falutin' variety. My company misses out on a lucrative contract because the Boss is distracted. Louis XV doesn't like the onerous burden of Kingship so he loses Canada. Unfortunately -- sloth may indeed be universal and eternal, but in no sense was I saying they act the same way all the time.

Let me put it this way. If a person believes in "the boogey-man" then the boogeyman exists. There have been plenty of cases of third world primitives caught on the wrong side of the stream (where the demons reside_ at night who in the morning were found all dead. The mere noises of the night terrified them to death because they had broken the taboo.

OS, I believe that your are making the point excessively. One has only to read a well written biography/chronicle from the middle ages to see that not all that much has changed in human behavior and motivation. What does change is the world-view, i.e. the "science" of a given age alters that more than any other factor: "The facts, Madam, just the facts", can be translated into any lingo in any epoch. And it is the "facts" that people determine truth by. To medieval people, the "facts" were also part and parcel to their religion; the priests possessed the "facts" and dispensed them; poorly, as it turned out, but that wasn't their fault either.

You make much of "alien" minds in other times and places. We are not that different; if we were, then nothing that they wrote would make much sense today. Yet the great mass of early writings make very lucid sense to us now.

When a scholar, or professor in a class, asserts that a historian has made a gaff in attempting to get into the mind of someone like Enrico Dandolo; then proceeds to commit the very same error by asserting that their picture of Dandolo's mind is incorrect, he is revealing the inescapable "fact" of human nature being essentially unaltered throughout our known history. Two errors still do not allow one to be a mind reader; not of contemporaries or those centuries dead. Yet we must try, because we know that motivation remains largely if not entirely unchanged: we want prestige, honor, power and the wealth that creates it, and even others to fear us is preferable to them scorning us. Nothing has changed a whit in the intervening centuries, pick and choose the time and place that you will: they were exactly like us in what they wanted. How they went about securing what they wanted is different, because the background is different; but the people inhabiting that background always have the same emotional spectrum, and their societies impose expectations upon them that we can relate to (and largely be grateful not to deal with)….

Objectivity is a question of degree. Some people are more objective and some people less. No one is absolutely objective, nor absolutely subjective. Historians are the same. The problem I have with post-modern deconstructionists is that they make it a philosophical point to argue objectivity is impossible therefore one shouldn't even attempt to think objectively. They are subjective absolutists by profession (and pay mind you) which gets everyone absolutely no where at best, is retrograde/neo-barbarian thinking at worst, and makes the whole point of understanding the past or even understanding our present a totally pointless effort.

Thanks for the clarification OS – all clear now – and, it's okay, I'd spotted the humour ;-)

I think you're making some big assumptions there just visiting. You've probably already read into it, but if anyone is interested in the history of emotions then as an introduction I suggest, Rosenwein, Barbara H., ‘Worrying about Emotions in History', The American Historical Review, 107 (2002), 821-45. I did a short resume for this article (but be gentle on me ;-) ), PDF link

Regards,

I capitalized words for emphasis

"In an alien environment, separated
from friends and family, they were REPRESENTED as experiencing fear in the form of death, depravation and ruin – both material and spiritual. Fear was often REPRESENTED in situations where…"

To be gentle…

REPRESENTED ? The underlying assumption there is that it didn't happen. How can anyone write about something they question even happened and then call it history ? Why not write a paper about determining if it did happen ? Or explaining why you think it didn't happen ? It's like a paper about an old myth, ie all history is myth passed down to the present as written objectivity doesn't exist. And if its all subjective myth, why bother ? Self-negation.

Jim

PS Sorry, nothing personal, just my non-professional analysis.

Hi Jim,

Thanks for the feedback, represented does not mean it did not happen – far from it – it just means how the author described what happened, i.e. which words, grammatical structures etc. they use to represent what they experienced/believe happened.

In line with your post on objectivity, I do not believe primary sources provide pure 'facts/reality' only the author's perspective on what happened, when, where, how etc.. This they 'represent' in the text. How they represent that perspective will be influenced by many things and the social norms for emotions can be particular tricky. If we do not try to crack the code, we cannot treat the source critically.

In many ways unravelling the code can be a useful way to understand the past, work out why someone might have decided to do something, the social pressures in play (as well as the normal human processes mentioned by OS), for more see p.34. I'm not a deconstructionalist as you describe earlier, but I do think that what the author said and why they said it can be as interesting as what may have actually happened.

All that said, it's not a form of words/definitions I would use in normal conversation. Academic papers can read a bit like the terms and conditions that come with an insurance policy. Whilst in insurance it's the compliance team who are pulling the words apart with a fine tooth comb, in academia it's called 'peer review' ;-)

Thanks again,

Stephen

Janner, a blanket dismissal is not very helpful.

How have I made some "big assumptions", assuming that you take issue with them?

We must begin by taking human nature as essentially unaltered during our species' sojourn on this planet. To ASSUME otherwise must first be supported with "facts" to back up the assumption. The objection to assuming that moderns cannot possibly know the thinking of the inhabitants of earlier epochs is exactly as Bottom Dollar said it: "Self negation" and the death of objective examination. If we are to assume that there is a "code" to crack, in order to truly understand the thinking of the "ancients", then all we have done is interpose an asserted esoterica that eliminates the "uneducated" even further from the debate. I see this move as part and parcel to the human tendency of elitism, i.e. pride and snobbery. Scholars are prone to this at least as much as any other demographic of "learned" persons.

For example: I am not convinced that, when I read Eleanor of Aquitaine's words of grief at the news of her son Geoffrey's death in Paris, because of a tournament injury, there is something "alien" going on here. A mother's grief at the loss of yet another child is an emotion that is precisely comparable to the same feeling of loss today; and to assume that, just because mothers tended to lose half their children before the age of five, they were somehow "alien" in their thinking to moderns, is a huge assumption, imho.

Stephen,

It's obvious to me that the underlying assumption of this "historical" school of thought is that the primary sources were putting on a hoax, and that they should be delegitimized as sources because their choice of words is "represented" as being deceptive, tricky or coded. The notion that primary sources don't or can't provide "pure facts/reality" is to say the decision has been made that any of the facts that they do present will not be presented as facts, but will be denigrated as emotional fictions. Moreover, rather than trying to reconstruct the emotional state that lay behind their choice of some words in describing the facts, their emotional state has been a priori judged as false or fictionalized or contrived, and therefore, without any value whatsoever other than to prove that the writers were false. This "schools" effort is at destruction, not history.

Jim

And a further objection to this "alienation" of ourselves from our forebears, just occurred to me: by convincing the rising generation that a study of our history is pointless and "alien", we have killed off all possible benefit that such a study can provide. The children of the present and immediate future, if largely convinced that we cannot possibly know why earlier people did what they did, means that there are no lessons of the past to provide warnings for the present. The death of the aphorism, "Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it", is thus assured.

By so eliminating any popular recourse to history, to learn from it and thus guide us in the present, we have relinquished unprecedented power to manipulate the present into the hands of those unscrupulous persons who seek power and wealth and prestige: a "class" of people in our midst every bit as real and active as in all earlier epochs of our species' existence….

"Whilst in insurance it's the compliance team who are pulling the words apart with a fine tooth comb, in academia it's called 'peer review'"

The terms and conditions of an insurance policy are delineated in terms of independent law, whereas academic "peer review" is delineated in terms of adherence to a mandated mode of dependent thought. Apples and oranges.

Stephen,

I really think more can be gained by analyzing the facts that the chroniclers present or reconstructing their emotional realm to understand their choice of subjective words, rather than collectively bashing their emotive state as false… If you have a number of independent chroniclers and they are all using similar kinds of language to describe how people felt at a given time as part of their historical description, then that verifies their emotional authenticity. It's farcical to assume otherwise.

Here's an example of a historian who tries, successfully IMO, to reconstruct the emotional state of people from the past:

Joanne Freeman, Affairs Honor.

Here are some historians I think are very objective:

Gaddis Smith, American Diplomacy during the Second World War, 1941-1945

George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975.

I do agree to the extent that I've always felt the drier the language the more objective, which is why I enjoy monographs and textbooks in particular. Of course, not exactly emotionally gripping stuff for most people at least :)

Jim

Objective thought is independent of religious persuasion in historical writing or anything for that matter. That's what the ancient Greeks and Romans proved and that's what Kant reiterated anew. Yes, there are times when people have and do mix both subjective and objective thought in their writing, but it is the responsibility of the historian—most the especially the modern historian-- to distinguish between the two. I don't think the Chroniclers were writing history under the influence of Thucydides, but that shouldn't be a reason to dismiss their attempt at documenting historical events and facts, nor to castigate the subjective, emotional context in which they lived.

Anyway, that's my two cents.

Hi Jim,

"Whilst in insurance it's the compliance team who are pulling the words apart with a fine tooth comb, in academia it's called 'peer review'"

The terms and conditions of an insurance policy are delineated in terms of independent law, whereas academic "peer review" is delineated in terms of adherence to a mandated mode of dependent thought. Apples and oranges.

You may be in the same line of business, but in my experience of running an insurance company for several years, T&Cs are drafted by underwriters, the language checked by proof readers and the implications considered by lawyers based on current case law. It is a review process based on both opinion and experience. Having been through both processes, the comparison seems safe to me.

On the hoax issue, absolutely not and I do not state that their representation of various emotions states is false, but they may well have had an individual perspectives in the same way a modern reporter for a newspaper, TV station or blog has their own take on an event. Maybe my use of 'representation' is something you are still reading as something more than the way they described what happened?

When explaining this in the past I've compared primary sources to people involved in a major soccer match. Someone on the pitch playing for team A may have a different view to what happened in the game to someone supporting team B watching from the stands, to someone at home watching on TV, listening on the radio whilst driving home from work, to the person who missed the game but hears an account of it from one or more of the above. So of all those, who knows the facts about the game the best? Who is the most reliable source? No one is saying any of them in their description of the game is seeking to put on a hoax, just that they might all ‘represent' the game in a different light. If we can begin to understand which team they support, how they were involved, their view of a certain goal, foul etc., then we can appreciate their account better. Nothing destructive or castigative there I hope.

Dear JV,

I can't but help wonder if you read that part of my piece that dealt with emotions before posting. Judging by your closing remarks I suspect not, which hinders the discussion somewhat, but here goes.

Why must we begin by ‘taking human nature as essentially unaltered during our species' sojourn on this planet'? Indeed what do you mean by ‘human nature' when a study of the history of emotions suggests that even the display of basic emotions is not consistent, but cultural driven? So at no stage do I argue that we cannot approach an understanding of our forebears. That's the whole point of the critical method – to help us understand. Moving to a new job may require us to learn a new way of operating, technical terms, company structures, norms and processes. So how much more do we need to strive to understand a society hundreds of years in the past? Is not the past as much a different culture to our own as another nation's society in the present? It is not impossible to understand, but we all ‘know' that it follows it's own unwritten rules and we must discover those rules to understand it, i.e. crack the code. There's nothing esoterical about it, it just involves an open mind and a methodology – which is generally based on common sense rather than some black art that excludes the ‘uneducated'. Whilst Eleanor's grief may well be timeless, the way she expresses that may not be. For example, would you argue that a mother in every present day culture would deal with such as loss in exactly the same way? Might there not be many norms that influence how somebody will react? Some might seem constant to every culture, but why assume so? Why not keep an open mind and investigate it?

To follow-on, I do not think that their emotional state was false, but we must examine the social and narrative norms involved. For example, medieval texts seemingly have knights bursting into tears left right and Chelsea, did they really cry all the time because of a heightened emotional state, social norms or was this a narrative structure employed by writers?

In summary, all this is not a threat to understanding historical accounts or an attempt to dismiss them, quite the contrary. Sounds like you guys have been exposed to some fairly extreme approaches to this in the past. I approach historical sources in basically the same way as I used to approach intelligence whilst in the military, i.e. the better you knew the person who wrote the report and understood their viewpoint (and perhaps their sources), the more useful the information within it was to adjust current and plan future ops.

Kind regards,

Stephen,

The Crusades weren't a soccor match and the Chroniclers weren't just assorted people who happened to be at one.

Jim