In a sense, all historical writing is revisionist. In their writing, most historians attempt to show that some aspect of history has been slighted, ignored, or undiscovered, and they have come up with a remedy. Sometimes, though, revisionist history is very powerful.
In his 1992 book The Stripping of the Altars, Eamon Duffy offered a revisionist view of the Protestant Reformation in England. His goal was to “contribute a shovelful of history to the burial of the venerable historiographical consensus” about the English Reformation.[1]
That consensus (which echoes the “whig version” of history challenged by Herbert Butterfield) pictured an open-minded, modern religion (Protestantism) replacing a superstitious, populist “folk” religion (Catholicism). Historians, says Duffy, were under the sway of A. G. Dickens, the “doyen of English Reformation studies,” who disdained what Duffy calls “late [Catholic] medieval piety.” Duffy’s 654-page volume (which I am reading for a class this fall) was designed to restore respect for Catholic England, and apparently it did.
Over my lifetime I have loved reading history—especially big-themed books about the rise of the Western world and the causes of the Industrial Revolution. No, I did not expect to duplicate that kind of subject matter when I started an academic course of history.
I expected instead some chunky medium-sized themes in European history. I thought I would learn things like why the Hapsburgs fell, what caused World War I, why did the German states take so long to form a nation, why did France have so many credit problems, and why was the Hanseatic League successful?
My expectations were off-base. Had I been starting an undergraduate history major, such (yes, some unanswerable) questions might have been subjects of discussion. But graduate school is different. The emphasis is more on writing (especially a thesis) than on acquiring facts. Indeed, if I dare say so, the success path for graduate students and other researchers is to find something that no one has noticed before, research it, and then prove it shouldn’t be obscure at all! Continue reading “I Learn What Graduate Courses Are About”
Historical writing evolves. So there are some things that a budding historian should not say, do, or be. I’ll start with words that have gone out of fashion.
“Dark Ages” was a pejorative term historians used (until recently) to describe Europe beginning around 500. Influenced by the Enlightenment, these nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians thought that after Rome “fell” (another term going out of style), Europe had plunged into a benighted age of deteriorating trade, economic stagnation, and ignorance. Europe didn’t get fully back on track until the rediscovery of the ancient civilizations—the Renaissance. The first 500 hundred years were the worst, thus the Dark Ages.
That prejudice is gone. The Middle Ages as a whole are seen as a period of commercial and agricultural vitality. The “fall of Rome” has given way to “late antiquity,” and the “Dark Ages” are now the Early Middle Ages (followed, at least among Anglophone writers) by the High and Late Middle Ages. (By the way, notice that I said “Anglophone,” not “English-speaking.” Trying to sound like an academic.)
