An ancient Mediterranean historian needs to read both Latin and Greek, to be able to parse a site report, to understand archaeological methods, decipher inscriptions (and possibly ancient handwriting), and so on. By contrast, a historian of, say, 19th century Europe may not need Greek or Latin, but will certainly need French and be able to read 19th century cursive writing, along with knowing how to navigate European documentary archives and records. A historian whose work touches on law may need legal training for the laws and legal terminology of their period, to – for instance – avoid accidentally inventing hundreds of executions by failing to realize that the phrase “Death Recorded” in 19th century British legal records, when in fact that notation almost always meant the person was not executed. Because historians engage with historical documents, records and artifacts ‘in the raw,’ there’s often special training required to know what one is looking at and understand it fully, beyond the more general historian’s training. At the same time, you’re also learning where your sources are in their raw form, which might be important archives, key reference works, edited texts, important manuscripts and so on. All of that ends up as field-specific specialist training.
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Source criticism is just the process of trying to evaluate a source of historical evidence for reliability. If this seems such a basic thing that no training is required for it, consider how many people continue to treat Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus as a perfectly reliable source on the Spartans despite the obvious ways that it is clearly unreliable, including but not limited to the fact that the author says it is unreliable in the very first paragraph.
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So the historian is not asking “is this biased or not” but how is this biased and how does that impact its credibility and usefulness. Even a source filled with absolute falsehoods can be revealing. But at the same time, your goal is getting to what actually happened, or what people actually thought or experienced, so judging pure reliability (is it likely the things my sources say happened, actually happened – especially if they disagree) is important here.
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Because we treat all sources as suspect, historians are rarely operating with full certainty, so the approach, the “argument to best explanation” is generally to find the most ‘parsimonious’ (uses the fewest assumptions, especially inherently improbable assumptions) explanation which best fits the most observed evidence (as compared to other, rival explanations).
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[N]o single framework or question captures the full complexity of the past. So learning a bunch of them serves to both illuminate the things we didn’t know that we didn’t know, but it also serves to illustrate the pitfalls and potholes in the historical path, by watching how ‘pure’ versions of these theories fail in to one or another of them. For instance, leaders are often important historical focal points, making decisions with big impacts, but if you assume that historical change is always and everywhere the product of super-capable leaders (‘Great Man Theory,’ advanced by Thomas Carlyle), you are going to completely miss the impact of all sorts of other things and be entirely unable to explain some historical events that just lack a single, central figure motivating them at all. On the flipside, an ‘all structural factors, no agency’ framework (such as an extreme version of Marxist historical materialism) is going to fall into the trap of ignoring the very real agency of people making decisions (be they big important leaders or just regular folk). Historians learn a lot of different frameworks because each one exposes the gaps in the others: there is no perfect framework.
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(Almost) no historian is out there [i]s a doctrinaire devotee of a single school of historical theory – often not even the historians who pioneered a school.
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The term ‘primary source’ often gets reduced in introductory classes to something like ‘eyewitness accounts,’ but in a research context, a ‘primary source’ is really a source for an event for which there are no closer available sources. For a modern event, this is almost always a contemporary, often eyewitness source, but for the Middle Ages or Antiquity, the nearest source is often still quite distant from the events. You could thus, for instance, call the sources for the life of Alexander the Great primary sources in the sense that there are no closer sources available to us (anymore), while at the same time they are technically also secondary sources, reporting the testimony of other closer sources (now lost).
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In any case, historians seek to engage with this evidence ‘in the raw,’ which is to say with the minimum number of possible filters. In almost every field, for instance, it is an essential, non-negotiable element of historical training to be able to read one’s main body of source evidence in the original language, If that means mastering archaic syntax and vocabulary or entire dead languages, then that is the ‘price of admission.’
From the article:
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