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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3560304" data-attributes="member: 4937">If I may say so, this is spoken like someone who has never taken an upper level academic history course.  Are you suggesting that the state of conventional wisdom about historical reality is not in continual flux?  Are you suggesting that Historians consider questions like, "What was the Reinnsance and when did it begin?" or "How Medieval was the middle ages anyway?" to be settled questions? One of the first things I was taught in an upper level history course was that all historians have biases.  Thus, historical reality never is what it is.  Historical reality is only what was written in books.  It is the reality of what was documented by individuals with agendas.  You can try your best to remove these biases, but you yourself will inevitably be a biased historian.   What will be considered the recieved wisdom of the day may and probably will be challenged by someone with a fresh and different perspective on the text.  That won't necessarily make them right, but it won't necessarily make them wrong either.When it comes to questions of Historicism, like 'When did the Reinnasance begin?', there are very very few long and universally held facts.  Universally held facts might be when a documented event actually happened, but why it happened and what the real motives of the individuals were and what it means are not questions of fact.  So unless, by 'long', you mean '50 years or so' and by 'universally' you mean 'by the Academics of the currently most fashionable school of thought', it is entirely wrong to suggest that the opinion on questions of opinion is static, unchanging, and unchallengable.</blockquote>

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