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57 Franciscan Studies 63 (2005) HISTORY! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? My work normally follows a certain trajectory. I ask a question about medieval Franciscan history and I answer it. I don’t spend much time agonizing about what I should be doing or why I should be doing it. What I’m going to say here is somewhat different. I want to ask why we do history at all. I suppose most of us would answer, first of all, that we do it because it’s fun. But over the years, from time to time, I’ve asked myself, “What’s it for?” Why should society pay me to look into an incident that occurred seven centuries ago? It’s a good question , and I wish I had a better answer than I do. But I do have some sort of answer. First of all, let me say I think the primary duty of historians, the thing they primarily owe to society, is to try as hard as they can to get it right. The goal of any historian should be to present the past as it actually occurred. There is an objective reality back there, and we should be looking for it. To say we should try to present the past as it actually occurred may seem delightfully retro; but it’s important to recognize that there’s a difference between being required to pursue a goal and being able to achieve it. We may be unable to achieve a completely accurate history, but that doesn’t excuse us from trying. It’s not all that hard to catalogue the reasons why we won’t ever achieve complete accuracy. In the first place, we don’t have all the information . Angelo Clareno was personally acquainted with three popes. He had influential connections within the papal curia, including a powerful cardinal who served as his protector. But this side of Angelo, Angelo the political operator, is almost entirely invisible to me because it isn’t the side of himself he talked about. In the second place, what information we have we read selectively. Angelo wrote a great deal. When I read him I take notes. The notes then become the work as far as I’m concerned. They’re what I turn to when I turn to that work. My sense of the work is shrunk to those DAVID BURR 58 dimensions. What we work with is always less than what is actually there. In the third place, we approach the sources from a given perspective , and with a specific agenda. What I see in Angelo’s letters is heavily dependent on what I’m looking for. I ask certain questions of the letters, and what I write down is the answer to those particular questions. In the fourth place, life is simply so complicated that we have little chance of understanding it except on a fairly superficial level. Human interaction was no less complex in the fourteenth century. Nor were human thought processes any simpler. Some of this cannot be corrected, but much of it can. I cannot compensate for the works Angelo never wrote, the things he didn’t bother telling us, but I can go back to what he did write and read it over, asking this time whether there’s anything there to make me wonder if I’ve been asking the wrong questions. I cannot shed my presuppositions and view Angelo from a position of complete objectivity , but I can compensate to some extent by trying to view Angelo through the eyes of those who differ with me, asking why they see things as they do. I cannot somehow comprehend psychological and social processes that are only partly comprehensible to the best social and physical scientists writing today, but I can attempt to become a bit more educated on these matters, and I can be honest about the limits of what can be said. I cannot expect to present the past precisely as it was, but I can try to get a little closer to it. But why should we care what really occurred? Why do we even need to do history? There are...

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