All of this is going to be raised again by my comments on Maria Lucía Pallares-Burke’s interview with Natalie Zemon Davis, as well, it’s a theme that won’t go away.

For me, essentially, history can command my imagination, and I find that valuable because we live in a society where a considerable proportion of identity rests on choice, and so upon the imagination, (for example, at least one option will eventually become counterfactual).

The search for truth within history works in two ways, for me, when considered for this end: it encourages sincere and challenging consideration; and it structures and grounds the work, as poetry might be ground by its meter, in a form nevertheless quite distinct from the groundings of art and literature. Medieval history is far more potent, here, than more recent history, which can sometimes appear to be simply tardy journalism.

Thirdly, and perhaps independently, developing a historical perspective is, I think, a valuable tool towards transcendence of the self, and that makes history, (and geography) themselves art-forms, and a crucial tool for practical living. Even (or especially?) if you’re stuck “low” on Maslow’s pyramid, an escape from the self makes people stronger, more sure-footed, less easily cowed, more independent, and more altruistic and calm, and to achieve such a thing we need a “priesthood” to fuel the “laity”. It is no small thing.

I agree about the problems of the y-axis; it tends towards economic analysis because everything else would be hard to quantify. (Though I don’t know: evidence survival would be one thing, but then what would that mean and how to allow for the ‘dark matter’ of the unlocated and lost?) On the other hand I think there probably were global highs and lows, because I think climate lies behind everything to an extent; better weather means more crops means more surplus means more people and more leisure to produce works of culture means… and so on.

Michael, what you say rings very true to me when contemplating trips to Catalonia. Why did I choose to work on somewhere so far away, eh? Oh yes: because there’s some evidence there :-)

I have not been to Kalamazoo, though I should consider it, because over here work on Catalonia in English is basically just me. Which is one reason why I chose it of course but there are a good few US scholars with whom I should be in better touch than I am. Whether they usually bother with Kalamazoo I don’t know, though. Some day! when there is both time and money. I’m aware that there is never really time but trust me, there can be more than there is right now.

We are starting to talk in circles ourselves, as I was responding to your two-way direction comment. I suppose I would also see the idea of ‘cycles of history’ as being like a sin or cos curve, if I were to graph it (not that I think that is feasible to do). The problem with seeing history as a graph is that there is no way to define the y-axis. Do you put population, economy, size of the kingdom, foreign contacts, or even more subjective things like literature and arts? Or do a real historian thing and simply use the number of surviving historical manuscripts. ;-) After that is what makes the Dark Ages dark. All a matter of perception, this is the same period that medievals themselves placed Arthur’s Golden Age.

Another issue here is that I don’t think there has ever been a period when there was a global high or low. While Europe was in its dark age just after the fall of Rome, what was going on in China or the Americas? The Maya and Aztecs are peaking during the ‘middle ages’. How different would it look even just from Byzantium?

‘Why do history’ comes down to the same reason as ‘why do literature’, because people are interested (for what ever reason). Some will have good reasons, some will have bad reasons, some will have frivolous reasons, some will have recreational reasons, some will have stupid reasons and that is the way it has always been. If you can’t interest other people in the primary goal of the research, then maybe time, talent and/or treasure shouldn’t be spent on it in my humble opinion. I think its often just a point of view. It seems to me that scholars who don’t care what the general public think of their work are not going to be very good at talking about their research to anyone outside their tiny niche….happy to be walled up in their ivory tower.

Given the genetic mixing that has gone on within Britain, there is probably a good reason to think that more likely than not, most people whose families have been in Britain say 7 generations or more all have a little Pict in them. At seven generations, they have 128 direct ancestors doubling every generation you go back. How likely is that one of them will have descended from Pictish territory? A thousand years would have 40 generations at 25 years each, so 2 to the 40th power ancestors in the generation that lived 1000 years ago. (But genetic diversity is cut by intermarriage between the lines, so that is a complication, but still lots of ancestors…) So Jonathan your chances of having at least one Pictish ancestor might not be as small as you might think.

When I actually use the phrase `cycles in history’ myself I suppose that I don’t think of it as forwards then backwards, actually, but as a graph arcing up and down across the x-axis that is time. Which may go to show merely that I spent too much time with scientists in my formative years, but would also force me to withdraw the suggestion that your vision of the process was the back and forward of the piston rather than the round-and-round of the crank. My apologies.

Michael, thankyou for the kind words, and I hope you got your sleep. I think even in ye olde Europe we get our disassociation from the Middle Ages too, and I think that has something to do with the success of fantasy as a genre here and elsewhere; equally, I think that fantasy as a genre has probably powered a lot of people into studying the Middle Ages. I grant you that connection is easier to find, but given that I do pass through St Paul’s every now and then I can assure you that though Christopher Wren’s building is a marvellous thing, it doesn’t really clarify your understanding of Æthelberht’s policy or choice to stand there. It took me some time to work out that of course in his day you’d have had the river practically at the bottom of the churchyard, for example; it’s actually easier to get that in a book than to piece it together by mentally removing the dozens of city blocks that now stand between the Thames and old Paulesbyri. There are better places for it, like Hadrian’s Wall for example, where the connection is more palpable, and the best case of it I’ve ever had is standing at Sueno’s Stone in Pictland Scotland, where the Picts seem to have left a twenty-foot stone cartoon of them beating the Vikings standing at the roadside. Now, trust me, that is pretty alien to look at. This may only be because it’s alarmingly close to being a nine-by-four-by-one monolith, of course :-) And the modern glass-and-steel casing doesn’t really reduce that sense of otherness and separation. Now I’ve met people who do think they have a genuine connection to the Picts in their ancestry, but I think that personally I would take that with as much of a pinch of salt as someone from your area claiming mercian heritage. It’s been as many years between the Middle Ages and us and it has between them and you, after all, and the population in Britain has changed dramatically in that time as well. A lot of us have as much ability or justification in making that connection as you do. It’s just a bit easier to do so when we’re nearer to the remains.

First of all, time does travel in one direction, my friend. :-)

I suppose by two way, you mean forwards and backwards? I don’t tend to think of forwards or backwards at all, just as change. I don’t know about the sideways bit. Every age has its fuzzy edges. I tend to think there are very few sideways movements though. I don’t recall…was Christopher Columbus inspired by either Leif Ericsson or St Brendan the Voyager, or both? I thought it was Vinland maps that led Columbas to believe he wouldn’t fall off the edge of the world.

What has the Grail ever done for us? Hmm… as someone who occasionally writes about theology that is a loaded question. Given that the Grail is the cup used at the last supper, I would say that it relates to every celebration of the Eucharist. On a more secular note, it also brings in a lot of cash to the British economy particularly down around Glastonbury way.

I suppose I should add that I’m not a professional historian or a professional medieavlist… just a medievalist by interest.

Michelle, I think a cyclic view of history still implies a known direction of travel, even if it’s two-way. What when things go sideways and don’t lead anywhere? This is what I meant with the example of the Viking landings in America. No lasting consequences at all, but as you point out, endlessly interesting. Not for any reason to do with significance and effect on modern society though! Greenland does just as well for seafaring examples: the saga doesn’t say Leif built special new long-range longships does it? I may be wrong about that, but I thought he just bought someone else’s boat. The same with Dan Brown: what has the Holy Grail ever done for us? (Er: apart from allegedly containing the blood of Our Saviour and so on obviously. Actually, does that help us, or did it just reduce the Calvary cleaning bill? My theology lacks. Along, apparently, with my respect. Anyway.) Interest and significance, despite what those who insist education should be vocational, don’t map onto each other.

Sage, you correct and enhance my points, thankyou. This is of course roughly what you, I and others are trying to do with our blogs. I’m still quietly pleased by the close match between the contents of my aside on the Crusades and the search terms that lead people to it. However, I’d pick up your second point and say that it is the devil of peer review that we only talk to each other; until there is a definite recognition in employability terms of the attempt to reach beyond academia, rather than a slight contempt of it or indifference to it, our careers demand that we place the audience of peers before the audience of people.

Magistra, I think I like your points most of all because they specifically apply to the Middle Ages. I may well have to repeat them widely :-) However, your first paragraph causes me worry: it’s all very well impugning the US Constitutional Fathers, but you’re perilously close to damning Jane Austen! And she’s had more history published than either of us. So go careful :-)

Of course, there are all kinds of societies we could study to get this kind of realisation: we could do this via anthropology of current cultures, or via the history of another but very alien civilization, like Ancient China. But Europe, particularly Medieval Europe, is particularly useful because for the majority of us in the West, it is our cultural roots we are looking at. You can’t just say, ‘Oh, but that’s just the Chinese/African etc people’. You look at what our ancestors believed/did and what we do and believe now and you can start to see why we are where we are now and how we got from here to there.
(I think if this comparing of differences is done well it needn’t be teological/Whiggish: a good teacher can point out that it isn’t simply a matter of ‘progress’ all the time).

There are also some medieval ideas which are particularly good for thinking about change in these ways. For example, for a historian of gender like myself, it’s revealing to point out that in the Middle Ages, people ‘knew’ that women were more lustful than men, whereas now we ‘know’ the opposite. On a more local scale, there’s nothing like looking at the early Middle Ages to remind you that ‘England’ and ‘France’ aren’t ‘natural enemies’. Similarly, any discussion about ethnic identity or the formation of the nation state can be helped by using the early Middle Ages to show these concepts aren’t obvious. Yet on the other hand the Middle Ages has the roots of everything from the church’s control of marriage to parliament and the university, institutions and practices which still affect us today. It’s this combination of difference and similarities/roots that seems to me to making thinking about the Middle Ages so useful a mental tool. (This is aside from the fact that Vikings, knights, castles etc are simply more fun to study than the causes of the Crimean War).

To your comment #7: I think it’s important to make the distinction between using history and making usable history. Historians doing the former through their original scholarship is definitely dangerous. But not doing the latter is reprehensible. At the least, history should be useful to other historians who are trying to answer broader questions than the ones tackled in a particular, esoteric work.

I share much of your vision of the ways that history is valuable to society, but I don’t think that “pub rants” and Dan Brown documentaries should be an afterthought. When the public needs to know something from us, they should be able to go to our work, not have to track us down in person. A significant portion of our intellectual output should be aimed at making the esoteric knowledge we’ve created physically and intellectually available to whomever wants it. The lower the cost of accessing historical knowledge, the greater the demand for it.

To Jeff in comment #2: I’d say that American public understanding of history (full stop) stalled somewhere around 1955. That’s why I am always bringing up the issue of what historians are good for. A better understanding of history suffusing modern culture would have great benefits, particularly in terms of more meaningful political discourse. But historians have mainly been talking amongst themselves for decades now, to the detriment of public discourse.

Why study the Viking landings in North America/Canada? Because it is part of Canadian history and Norse heritage. Because its is part of the history of seafaring, because it is one of the examples of how peoples reached North America. There is a big debate going on among archaeologists now about Native Americans reaching North America by ways _other than_ across the land bridge in Alaska.

It is also part of historian’s job to correct the misuse of history. If you don’t work with public interest and heritage groups, you leave history vulnerable to people who are not shy about misusing it.

Reason number 1 bothers me. It implies that the only history that’s any good is history which can explain our society as it now is. Firstly this leaves some interesting stuff out in the cold: the Viking landings in America, for example, the one place where they made almost no cultural dent we can detect except maybe a headstone. Secondly, it encourages teleology: not just the explanation of the present by the past, but worse, and much more temptingly, the explanation of the past by analogy with the present, buried somewhere within which is the Whig idea of history as progress. I think that sets us looking for particular things instead of the true course of events, in which, as Alice Rio says, ‘the possibility of a discontinuous evolution is worth considering’. And thirdly it leaves us in a very sticky position when, like Professor Gabriele, we find that we need to emphasise that things are both different and similar; such motives pressure us to find the similarities that make our research `useful’, and elide the differences that mean our conclusions can’t be applied.

I mean, that’s the real issue: applied history. That’s back to social science again and I don’t think we can do that, or that we should. I used to say that to use history was to misuse it, and certainly I think there’s a lot more use to be got out of oversimplified bad history than there is out of the elegant, careful and precise work that we enjoy and try to produce ourselves.

I see that Professor Gabriele has already cited his post that I link to there in a post of his own about this one, which explains where the sudden deluge of traffic is coming from: a hat tip to you sir, thanks.

How many ways is the current situation in the Middle East/Afganistan/Pakistan like Europe after the fall of Rome? From colony/province to tribal units to kingdoms (merging, morphing and finally some stability) to mature representative government, same pattern. State formation. Interaction of church and state. It took Europe 1200 years to go from Imperial province to relatively stable representative governments, we are expecting the Middle East to go from the collapse of the Colonial Powers to representative government in less than 100 years. I’m not saying that it should take them anywhere near as long as it took Europe, but if we want them to speed up the process, then we better learn more about how our own process worked.

Reason number 2: heritage which brings in a good little chunk of the British economy.

Mind you, it’s been an astonishingly good few years for biographies of Charlemagne lately, hasn’t it?

Your musings about “usefulness” go to the reason I wrote the book in the first place. Although there’s so much terrific recent scholarship on the period, the public’s understanding of Charlemagne, at least in the States, stalled somewhere around 1955. I thought a work of “pop history” might remind readers who Charlemagne was and perhaps introduce them to some of the conclusions of recent scholars, if only through atmospheric asides documented in my endnotes.

True, the work of medievalists doesn’t feed the hungry or clothe the naked. But beyond the benefits of your work as teachers, tutors, translators, editors, and researchers within the profession itself, your scholarship also informs little books like mine, books read by people who regret dozing through history courses when they were younger and who will never read an issue of Speculum or English Historical Review. Saying that what I’ve done is “more useful” than what you do is kind, but it surely isn’t true. All the novels, movies, pop histories, reenactments, and documentaries couldn’t exist without the scholarly search for historical truth, even if some of those spinoffs don’t reflect the integrity of the sources that inspired them.

I’m a big fan of the sort of outreach you cite, but I wonder if your pessimism about the viability of medievalism in the marketplace isn’t a particularly British outlook. I’ve found that American audiences are curious to learn a little something about Charlemagne and his times–but maybe that’s because the medieval past isn’t omnipresent here?

In any event, don’t be too discouraged. Blogging is, after all, a sort of solution, a form of outreach in and of itself.