At the Dawn of Modernity: Biology, Culture, and Material Life in Europe after the Year 1000

Afterwords

After-words If you want a generalization I would have to say that the historian has got to be listening all the time. He should not set up a book or a research project with a totally clear sense of exactly what he is going to be able to do. The material has got to speak through him.1 It is a journey that requires unlimited curiosity, and endless search for detail that may at first seem trivial, and an appreciation of the strangeness of objects oddly assorted, picked up as it were off a vast rubbish heap, rather like a historian’s visit to a still unfashionable , and totally unselfconscious marché aux puces before bric-àbrac became modish.2 1. Historians usually read the past by working through to its documented remains . At the Dawn of Modernity is not a work of primary research that took place in the archival flea markets. Yet, it is important to keep in mind the obvious fact that, as Greg Dening has noted, “These relics of experience —always interpretations of the experience, never the experience itself —are all that there is of the Past. Historians never confront the Past, 411 1. “Interview with E. P. Thompson,” Radical History Review 3 (1976): 15. No matter how much we might want to “listen,” however, there are many times when we hear no more than the sounds of silence.Adequate documentation is often lacking ; only empathy can fill this gap. 2. Richard Cobb, Death in Paris (Oxford, 1978), 37. only the inscriptions that the Past has left. History is always interpretation of interpretation, always a reading of a given text.”3 In my case, the writings of other historians have been employed as if each was a residue of the past and not just a secondhand account of it. Making sense of the chaotic dynamic of past contingencies demands a vision that inevitably outstrips anyone’s ability to consult historical sources. I have tried, therefore, to comply with Marc Bloch’s advice and to “follow the smell of burning flesh” as one reference led me on to others. As the historians’ products have piled up in the barnyard of history, they seem to create a veritable biomass of local studies.The mass ferments, but it is rarely the professional historian who seeks to recycle this composted material and to draw upon the stored energy of these products to increase oxidization and thereby enhance the fertility of our historical understanding. Each historian’s case study is written in the belief that it is a unique rendering . In contrast, historical sociologists seek to connect individual entities into an organized whole. When historians attempt to do this, their efforts are usually labeled haute vulgarization. There are few kudos—and many stinging darts—for the historian who wants to generalize. In a general sort of way, I have followed the investigative methods of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who unraveled the Watergate coverup . They took information to be substantiated when it was confirmed by two separate sources. Similarly, I took an article or book to be important when it was referenced by two independent authorities. Sometimes this drew me to a new library within the Toronto system, sometimes this led me to a new section of the main library, sometimes this led me to a new journal whose back issues were ransacked for promising materials, and sometimes this led back to the main catalog to see if the author had published anything else. It was part serendipity, part experience, part intuition, and part persistence. In this way I found myself breaking into new intellectual networks within which the most important works were frequently cited.4 A lot of this secondary material exists; I have recycled it in my account . At the Dawn of Modernity is very much my own idiosyncratic attempt at historical sociology, or maybe sociological history. 412 / After-words 3. Greg Dening, The Death of William Gooch: A History’s Anthropology (Honolulu, 1995), 54. 4. Many of these publications were not always accessible for me in Toronto; I could not have gone very far along this path without the cheerful assistance—and detached bemusement—of Isabelle Gibb, who responded to my mad requests by connecting me with the Inter-Library Loan system. For the historical bricoleur, the bulging library shelves are tools—an archival marché aux puces—which it is “good to think with.”5...