On the Advantage and Disadvantage of Sentimental History for Life

‘What was it really like?’¹ To the common sense of today’s lay reader, this question seems to be the foundation of all historical work, the very core of our curiosity about the past. Ironically, however, in the long history of historical writing, the idea that the goal of history is to provide a window on to the ways of life of another time is a relative late-comer and, even then, it has seldom taken precedence over other, seemingly more serious reasons for examining the past. Recently, however, the layman’s question has found its way to the front, animating the most ambitious historians of the past four decades. What was it really like (such historians have been asking) to be a sixteenth-century French peasant woman? what was it really like to live in a thirteenth-century community of Cathar heretics? to be a follower of a peasant cult that continued to practise pre-Christian fertility rituals? to work as a midwife in eighteenth-century New England?

From the earliest days, historians have written in the service of memory. ‘These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus’, the Father of History begins, ‘which he publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory.’ What has changed, almost beyond recognition, is what we want to remember. Herodotus’s view that history concerns itself only with ‘great and wonderful actions’ belongs to an age of heroes, remote in every way from the populism of modern democracies; in the present climate of historical studies it even seems hard to argue (and not because of gender alone) that history still takes its direction from the imperative to record ‘what men have done’. History now, we would have to inform Herodotus, though it remains an art of memory, often has very little interest in doing at all.

History has traditionally been thought of as combining the desire to record events with the need to explain them. In recent decades, however, this way of engaging the past has lost some ground to narratives of another sort – ones that often seem content to bypass much of the business of events and explanations while exercising the closest scrutiny in retracing the textures of ordinary life and inward feeling. Studies of this kind are less concerned with causes and consequences than with the intimate anthropology of other times. At bottom the goal – responding to a strongly democratic instinct that has produced, from generation to generation, an ever-widening horizon of modern historiography – is the same that Michelet identified in his own work: the desire to reach beyond ‘analysis’ or ‘narration’ and enact a kind of ‘resurrection’. And like the author of Le Peuple, many contemporary historians have dedicated themselves to the task of recuperating the commonplace experience of ordinary people in the past – their thoughts, fears, memories, and even their physical sensations or innermost feelings.

The empathetically recreated past has faced historians with enormous challenges. Not only has it meant reconstructing stories of people whose lives had been largely invisible to history, but it has also meant representing realms of physical or mental experience that have traditionally been regarded as lying beyond the reach of historical change – the growth and decay of the body, the life of the senses, childhood, sexuality, madness, death. Both of these tasks, it is clear, entail an exploration of something substantially new, and yet ironically both also bring the academic historian closer to arenas in which popular audiences and popular media have an important presence, bringing ‘high’ and ‘low’ histories into a closer proximity than at any other time in recent scholarship – sometimes with uncomfortable results. At a time when the resurrection of physical and emotional experience has become so prized, where does the past exercise its greatest impact? For some it may it may be a visit to New York’s Tenement Museum, a list of family names preserved at Ellis Island, or a heap...