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Common Knowledge 9.2 (2003) 352-353



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Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 207 pp.

Evidence abounds of an unparalleled creativity and productivity in the writing of history. Yet contemporary historians struggle to defend the very possibility of historical knowledge. However professionally accomplished, historians are forever "in pursuit of," "in search of," and this uncertainty is the discipline's strength. If the best historians, beginning with Thucydides, have been skeptical of metaphysical absolutes, they have also been reluctant to immerse themselves in antiquarianism. The present book draws strength from this tension, as well as from that between its authors. The volume took shape in the late 1960s in medievalist Walter Prevenier's graduate seminars on historical methods at the University of Ghent. And unquestionably, the core of the book remains its two central chapters on the technical analysis of sources and the criteria of evidentiary satisfaction. A Columbia University historian of early modern Europe, Martha [End Page 352] Howell has now adapted and expanded the original Dutch text for an American audience and, in the process, has reminded us that Ranke remains relevant in a world of interdisciplinarity, electronic media, and intense debate about the nature of truth and fact.

 



—Charles Sullivan

Charles Sullivan, associate professor of history at the University of Dallas, is currently writing about the imaginative literature and political economy of eighteenth-century Scotland.

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