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Reviewed by:
  • A Culture of Fact: England, 1550-1720
  • Stefaan Van Ryssen
A Culture of Fact: England, 1550-1720 by Barbara J. Shapiro. Cornell Univ. Press, Ithaca, NY, U.S.A., 2000. 284 pp. Trade. ISBN: 0-8014-8849-4.

Over the past decades, critical observers and suspicious citizens have learned to mistrust reports about the facts of military campaigns, corporate (ir)responsibility, royal mishaps and scientific success. The media, we have gradually come to understand, are as easily creating certain "facts" as they are hiding certain others from public view. Misters Bush and Blair "know for a fact" that the former Iraqi regime was producing and hiding weapons of mass destruction, and it is a well-known "fact" that man never walked on the moon. Yes, Elvis lives. As a matter of fact, I have met him at a recovery center in the South of France where Princess Di has gone into hiding, too.

Facts are no longer facts, it appears, but how did they ever become facts in the first place? What does this overworked four-letter word—derived from the Latin "factum," or "man-made thing"—really stand for? When was it used and what were the events or pieces of information that received this seemingly untouchable label? Who elevated mere descriptions, stories, anecdotes and gossip to the semisanct position of the undoubtable, solid and foolproof status of factual evidence?

Barbara Shapiro, a professor of history in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, retraces the early history of the concept of "fact" in the United Kingdom in the 16th and 17th centuries. It started in the courts, when juries and judges were urged by early modern thinkers to ground their verdicts on facts as witnessed by reliable and trustworthy observers. Sir Thomas More and Sir Francis Bacon—himself a professional lawyer—among many other lesser known philosophers, contributed to the advancement of the "fact" in the legal arena, although it may come as a surprise that they thought gentlemen to be more reliable than commoners and men more trustworthy than women.

In a matter of decades the concept gradually spread from law to historiography, chorography and travel reporting. By the end of the 16th century, reporters of "marvels," "wonders" and other "news" in the periodical press had adopted the practice of quoting witnesses and their antecedents to support the factual status of their stories. With the founding and the development of the Royal Society, "facts" became part and parcel of scientific discourse. Finally, at the beginning of the 18th century, the use of the word had become so common in English culture that it appeared even in religious texts.

Barbara Shapiro has taken the work of Shapin and Shaffer (see Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life [1985], a landmark work on the development of early scientific thought and on the societal nature of science and knowledge) to heart and clearly demonstrates how the fact originated in law, not in science, and how this epistemological concept moved from one realm to the other, reshaping the structure of knowledge in its wake. She does so in eight thematically arranged chapters rather than one chronologically ordered narrative, giving enough side information for the reader to get the complete picture. Shapiro draws from a truly formidable range of references, appropriately organized in the footnotes to keep the prose clear and readable, and she strikes a balance between "factual" description and epistemological interpretation. This makes the book a good read for both historians and amateurs—in the modern sense—of intellectual and cultural history.

Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent, Jan Delvinlaan, 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium. E-mail: <stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be>
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