Editorial

Historians sometimes liken themselves to detectives, ever vigilant for clues, but in many ways the analogy is misleading. Or at least it is so, if we have in mind say Conan Doyle’s or, still more, Agatha Christie’s infallible sleuths for whom the crime is conveniently laid down in advance for them to solve. Historical cases are not ready made; nor do they lend themselves to definitive solution; they are unlikely to stare one in the eye from the start, and the cast list itself often mutates as we go along. Some ‘noirish’ private eye stories might provide a better approximation, where an opening ‘commission’ folds mysteriously into another, and the disconsolate investigator is drawn ever further into the murk.

This issue of HWJ probes that analogy by exploring the nature of evidence and the uses that we make of it. The term itself has many shades of meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary defines evidence as something ‘clearly present’ but also as something more unstable and potentially deceptive – ‘an appearance from which inferences can be drawn’. It’s the former quality of the term that we try to invoke when we speak of ‘hard evidence’: that which may render the matter at hand plain and unambiguous. Yet it’s the latter, less straightforward, sense that returns – and fascinates – in the pursuit of historical knowledge.

Carlo Ginzburg’s richly suggestive article, ‘Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method’ (History Workshop Journal 9, 1980), invited the reader to consider how the roots of historical method lay in earlier forms of conjectural knowledge. It cast its net provocatively wide – in search of underlying continuities across large swathes of time – but also pinpointed ‘uncanny’ affinities between seemingly disparate areas of thought and cultural practice that emerged abruptly in the late nineteenth century. Ginzburg showed how, almost contemporaneously, the detective, the psychoanalyst, the forensic scientist and the art connoisseur used tiny clues to lead them to discoveries that were anything but trivial. The discipline of psychoanalysis, he wrote, ‘is based on the hypothesis that apparently negligible details can reveal deep and significant phenomena’. That inclination, apparent also in medicine, detection, art criticism and indeed history-writing, is also consonant with the way we ‘feel our way’ and ‘play it by ear’ in everyday life. Ginzburg went on to make a distinction between ‘low intuition’ and ‘high’, but crucially insisted: ‘Nobody learns how to be a connoisseur or a diagnostician simply by applying the rules. With this kind of knowledge there are factors in play which cannot be measured: a whiff, a glance, an intuition.’ He traced that measureless form of acumen back to much older forms of inquiry – peasant, even neolithic methods of reading the sky and landscape – in which hunters and trackers had ‘learnt to sniff, to observe, to give meaning and context to the slightest trace’, thereby making ‘complex calculations, in an instant, in shadowy wood or treacherous clearing’.

Over time such methods would be overshadowed – but never fully eclipsed – by a new emphasis on knowledge rooted in the ‘laboratory’ model. Modern scientific inquiry came to be seen as based principally on experimentation, verifiable through immediate, repeatable observation. Here evidence connoted and generated a stable, testable body of information. That model had a very wide attraction across the human sciences and of course also in naturalistic literature and art. Hence also the self-conscious struggle of historians in and beyond the nineteenth century to define their enterprise as scientific, a struggle that Ginzburg suggests may be misconceived. Dealing in the particular far more than the general, ‘the historian’s knowledge, like the doctor’s, is indirect, based on signs and scraps of evidence, conjectural’. Ginzburg’s point was not that history-writing is art rather than science but that it is shaped by an alternative investigative tradition that can never shake off the knowledge of its artistry, its partiality, its imaginative investment, and its speculative dimension. And these days, to muddy the waters further, scientists are just as likely to stress the dimension of creative intuition and artistry – sacred or otherwise – that shapes their diverse investigative enterprises as to...