This Chinese scroll from the Ming Dynasty shows the Prophet Mani. Mani’s teachings survived in China and central Asia after their followers were persecuted out of the Persian empire and the Roman empire and the House of Islam. Photo from Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Icon_of_Mani_2.jpg
Victor Davis Hanson can be a scholar when he wants to be, although since 2004 that has just been a hobby while he focused on punditry. Many people who have read his books and articles on antiquity are confused at the positions he takes, where Spartans can be admirable defenders of Freedom in the pass at Thermopylae, but despicable slave-holders at Leuctra (and there were helots at Thermopylae, and Hanson was not one of the radicals who teach that the Sparta we think we know emerged after the death of Leonidas). I know a bit about ancient Persian religion so this was always easy for me to understand. This week I have written up the way I explain it when it comes up in conversation ever since a much younger self was reading one of his trade books at the Greater Victoria Public Library Central Branch.
Crowds entering the Royal Theatre in Victoria, BC (est. 1913: not seen, the Dread Pirate Roberta)
there is a kind of revision of history, widely practiced today, that arises not from the opportunities but from the needs- or the passions- of our time. Basically, all research means putting questions, and historical research means putting questions to the past, preferably without torture, and trying to find answers there. The questions we put are necessarily those suggested to us by our own times and preoccupations, and these differ from generation to generation and from group to group. It is inevitable and legitimate that this should be so. What is neither legitimate nor inevitable is that not only the questions we put to the past but also the answers we find there should be determined by our present concerns and needs. This can lead, particularly under authoritarian regimes, but also in free societies under pressures of various kinds, to the falsification of the past, in order to serve some present purposes.
Bernard Lewis, “In Defense of History,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 143, no. 4 (December 1999) pp. 585-586 (573-587)
One of the builders of Stonehenge as imagined for the Royal BC Museum Stonehenge exhibit in 2024
This post was scheduled late partly because I was late in writing up all the books and partially because I wanted to finish some which I left half-finished in 2024! The usual caveats about writing one of these when I read like a scholar and not like a fan of romance novels apply. John Ting calls the way academics read reading like a mongrel (picking out useful morsels and then moving on, not working all the way through). My reading was disrupted when my Tolino eReader failed in late summer. And one novel which I wanted to read did not arrive until the new year!
Most grand narratives are neither wrong nor right. They violently simplify reality, or say things which are so vague that nobody can agree what would make them true or false (not quite the same as cold reading but related). They leave out alternative points of view, such as whether the Korean War was driven by international Communism or just one phase in an internal Korean conflict between nationalists and communists. But you can still check some of the facts that are used to support the big statements. Is anything in this book by economist Brad Delong flat out wrong?
One of the paths outside the University of Victoria’s McPherson Library
It has been more than ten years since I blogged about how I research history and archaeology and philology. The world has changed since. Some events in November and December gave me a story to share with my gentle readers again.
For my project on linen armour I am reading all the dictionaries of the Romance and Germanic languages in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE (there was scale armour backed with six layers of linen in the twelfth century BCE, but that is a different story). In November I got around to Joan Coromines‘ dictionaries of Castilian (dominant Spanish) and Catalan (other than Portugese, the Romance language which was best able to resist being assimilated into Castilian, possibly because it was similar to Occitan and people traveled back and forth along the coast between cities which used the King of France’s coins and cities which used the King of Spain’s coins). Coromines (he/him) was a philologist who spent his time in exile from Franco writing dictionaries, like Marc Bloch spent his time on the run from the Gestapo writing an Apologie pour l’histoire. Many historical dictionaries have been converted to databases and hooked up to websites, but his dictionaries have not. Somewhere in one of his works I found a reference to an inventory from 1307 in what I thought was the Revue des Linguistique Romane. And thus began an adventure!
J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books: New York, 2022)
What can I say about Slouching Towards Utopia by blogger and economist Brad DeLong? This book is a grand narrative of the era of modern economic growth, 1870-2010. In this period incomes in many North Atlantic economies grew several percent a year for decades, and for the first time there was enough for everyone in some countries to be fed and housed and clothed and doctored. But even if all of our material needs were met and we had better entertainment than a King of Kings, we did not feel like we lived in Utopia. It is framed around a debate between Friedrich Hayek and Karl Polyani, the first arguing that people should just accept the strangeness of markets in return for wealth, and the second replying that people in fact feel that they have rights to some control over their shape and population of their community, the ability to earn a living from skills that they suffered to acquire, and who is rewarded and who punished. Deny people control over these things and they will react violently and outside the market, regardless of what theorists say that should do. But how on earth can I respond to it?
Knowing things is hard, even about the past. Over the years I have compiled pithy names for some of the reasons why this is. This week I decided to share them in the style of Andrew Gelman’s Handy Statistical Lexicon or Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. Right now many entries are blank or just link to other people’s websites and articles. If I ever turn these into a book, I will expand them. Until then I can add entries one at a time as they become necessary.
If you are aware of all Internet traditions, you remember that the end of the year is the time when Bookandsword Blog posts about the state of the author and the state of the blog. There is a lot to talk about!
One of the stacks at Munro’s Books, Victoria BC, in May 2016
In my home office I am packed between what feels like half the output of Eisenbrauns and Dover Books, dust-jacketed hardcover books on Aelian the Tactician, self-published softcovers with the study notes of renaissance tailors, and the black brick-shaped bulk of Pierre Briant’s From Cyrus to Alexander. My hard drive and bookmarks folder are crammed with thousands more PDFs and links. Databases of medieval wills, Attic Red Figure pottery, and small finds are a click of my browser away. But even then, I believe that the choice to print a book makes sense today.
Two weird and wonderful conferences have come through my inbox in the past few weeks. I thought some of my gentle readers might be interested. There is a face-to-face conference on the f word in France, and an online conference on the medieval world in computer games in Vienna. Linguists are where historians are going (nobody but other linguists knows what they do) but they have fun! These involve Jesse Sheidlower of the Oxford English Dictionary and Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, and James Baillie the British specialist in medieval Georgia.
