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<blockquote data-quote="aspqrz" data-source="post: 7251109" data-attributes="member: 19485"><p><strong><span style="font-size: 12px">You just can't trust 'em</span></strong></p><p></p><p>Those of you have have studied History at any level will probably be aware of Primary and Secondary Sources ... though, based on almost 4 decades of teaching the concept(s) as part of the NSW Junior and Senior History Curriculum, not everyone will have fully grasped the whole concept.</p><p></p><p>Primary Sources are, simply, those created (directly or indirectly) by people who lived at the time.</p><p></p><p>Secondary Sources are everything else.</p><p></p><p>The potential problem is that too many people assume that Primary Sources are somehow inherently better than Secondary Sources and are inherently infallible... which is where things tend to become ... problematic.</p><p></p><p>And I'm not just talking High School or University students either ... some authors of some texts (all too many, it seems sometimes) are guilty of this. Well, perhaps that's being a little harsh ... they are, perhaps, too trusting of the sources they use ... and that's often one of the reasons, one of the main reasons in fact, for the various 'everyone knows' issues I've been highlighting.</p><p></p><p>So, what are some of the more important shortcomings ...</p><p></p><p>A general dearth of (Written) Sources - prior to the development of printing by Gutenberg most people were illiterate and every record, letter, book or legal document had to be written out longhand. This constrains our picture of medieval life considerably ... there's a lot we simply can probably never know because there are no surviving records to tell us.</p><p></p><p>This is compounded by the fact that, even in England, most records for the period are written in an almost illegible (to modern sensibilities) hand with no punctuation and either in a corrupt form of Latin or in Norman-French (which isn't all that close even to medieval French) ... a lot of the relatively small (compared to later periods) number of surviving documents haven't been studied, or not sufficiently, because they haven't been translated or because those with the skills to decipher them are a small subset of active Historians.</p><p></p><p>Bias. This is so blindingly obvious you'd think it was blindingly obvious. Yet it isn't always - sure, people get things like sexism, classism and the like, but they miss the most pervasive.</p><p></p><p>The simple fact that so few people could read and write! </p><p></p><p>Records were done for the elite either by themselves or by those whose livelihoods depended on the elite giving them a job. To use a modern slang term ... how much of it is actually fake news?</p><p></p><p>You can, generally, discount pretty much any comments, even in passing, about the 'peasants' and their lifestyle ... they're all leaners, after all, at least to the literate Elite.</p><p></p><p>There's more to this whole aspect of medieval (or any) history, of course, and there's a discussion of its impact on how the uncritical, or not sufficiently critical, use of those wonderful primary sources can be so potentially misleading ...</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="aspqrz, post: 7251109, member: 19485"] [B][SIZE=3]You just can't trust 'em[/SIZE][/B] Those of you have have studied History at any level will probably be aware of Primary and Secondary Sources ... though, based on almost 4 decades of teaching the concept(s) as part of the NSW Junior and Senior History Curriculum, not everyone will have fully grasped the whole concept. Primary Sources are, simply, those created (directly or indirectly) by people who lived at the time. Secondary Sources are everything else. The potential problem is that too many people assume that Primary Sources are somehow inherently better than Secondary Sources and are inherently infallible... which is where things tend to become ... problematic. And I'm not just talking High School or University students either ... some authors of some texts (all too many, it seems sometimes) are guilty of this. Well, perhaps that's being a little harsh ... they are, perhaps, too trusting of the sources they use ... and that's often one of the reasons, one of the main reasons in fact, for the various 'everyone knows' issues I've been highlighting. So, what are some of the more important shortcomings ... A general dearth of (Written) Sources - prior to the development of printing by Gutenberg most people were illiterate and every record, letter, book or legal document had to be written out longhand. This constrains our picture of medieval life considerably ... there's a lot we simply can probably never know because there are no surviving records to tell us. This is compounded by the fact that, even in England, most records for the period are written in an almost illegible (to modern sensibilities) hand with no punctuation and either in a corrupt form of Latin or in Norman-French (which isn't all that close even to medieval French) ... a lot of the relatively small (compared to later periods) number of surviving documents haven't been studied, or not sufficiently, because they haven't been translated or because those with the skills to decipher them are a small subset of active Historians. Bias. This is so blindingly obvious you'd think it was blindingly obvious. Yet it isn't always - sure, people get things like sexism, classism and the like, but they miss the most pervasive. The simple fact that so few people could read and write! Records were done for the elite either by themselves or by those whose livelihoods depended on the elite giving them a job. To use a modern slang term ... how much of it is actually fake news? You can, generally, discount pretty much any comments, even in passing, about the 'peasants' and their lifestyle ... they're all leaners, after all, at least to the literate Elite. There's more to this whole aspect of medieval (or any) history, of course, and there's a discussion of its impact on how the uncritical, or not sufficiently critical, use of those wonderful primary sources can be so potentially misleading ... [/QUOTE]
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