## Metadata - Author: [[Richard Cohen]] - Full Title: Making History - Category: #books ## Highlights *** > “History does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspiration.” - James Baldwin (Page 6) *** > The outside world of the 1920s, at least among the well-to-do, one of pleasure, featuring the new sound of jazz as a release from the years of carnage. Perhaps partly in reaction, David Knowle’s lifestyle became progressively more austere, his range of sympathies contracting. By 1930 he had given up reading fiction or listening to music, or playing tennis or squash, although he was physically able (even after his accident, he had a sinewy, athletic body and walked quickly, with vigor). Over the rest of his life he would see just six films, all from the silent era; plays not at all. The radio he listened to once a year, when carols were broadcast on Christmas Eve. Television he watched on two occasions, a cricket match and an interview with the breakaway Rhodesian leader Ian Smith. Letters, which he used to round off "Yours affectionately," he now ended "Yours to Him. > > 99 (Page 18) *** > In the West, as for the world generally, for thousands of years simply writing anything down was far from easy. The Greeks worshipped memory-literally. They had a goddess of remembering, Mnemosyne, said to have been the mother of the (usually) nine muses who inspired epic poetry, love poetry, hymns, dance, comedy, tragedy, music, astronomy-and, pertinently, history. The ordering and retention of knowledge was a vital instrument; thus learning to memorize was a way of strengthening a person's character. The Athenian statesman Themistocles supposedly learned by heart the names of twenty thousand of his fellow citizens; a contemporary of Socrates boasted of having memorized the entire Iliad and Odyssey, nearly forty thousand lines; and prisoners in Syracuse incarcerated following the Athenian expedition were allegedly rewarded with their freedom if they could sing any passage from a chorus of Euripides (one of the first writers known to have condemned slavery). Several are said to have done so, then made their way back to Athens to thank the playwright for saving their lives. (Page 48) *** > By Nero's day, Rome had 159 public holidays a year-three a weekeffectively one holiday for every day of work, itself only six hours long. No doubt for the vast majority of Roman citizens daily life was still a battle for survival and holidays were often working days, but for the privileged few there were leisure hours that gave plenty of time for writing. (Page 58) *** > The Black Death, beginning in 1347, wiped out about two hundred million people, almost 60 percent of the global population. (Page 130) *** > His (Bede’s) scholarship covered a wide range of subjects; for instance, he was the first to use the full A.D. system of dating, an immense improvement. When an event took place was not the problem the Battle of Kos in 261 B.C., for instance, had been a common dateline among historians ever since Polybius-but the method used was ungainly. Bede's method of tagging what had happened either from the time of Christ's birthi.e., A.D., "in the year of our Lord," or B.C., "before Christ" came into general use through the popularity of the Historia Ecclesiastica and his two works on chronology. The new system effectively synchronized timekeeping in the West, even if it took many years to become the norm. pr (Page 135) *** > For centuries, authors wrote history expressly to be read out loud in public. It might seem odd that reading silently was ever seen as a special gift, yet it is mentioned as early as 405 B.C., in Aristophanes's Frogs (52-53), and Plutarch records how, in the fourth century B.C., Alexander the Great silently read a letter from his mother while his troops, watching, stood amazed. In 63 B.C., Servilia, Cato the Younger's half-sister and Julius Caesar's mistress, wrote a sexually explicit letter to her lover that was handed to him during a Senate debate. Cato, suspecting that the letter referred to a political conspiracy, demanded that Caesar read it aloud. Caesar's lips were then seen moving, as he first read the missive to himself. Cato then read it out, to his considerable embarrassment-just what Caesar was hoping for. In the first account of someone reading silently without moving their lips, in St. Augustine's Confessions, written between A.D. 397 and 400, he sees his tutor, Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, reading in this way and speculates about the advantages and about reading's individualistic appeal, one that would become universal only during the Middle Ages. (Page 137) *** > . But nowhere does it find room to discuss one of the mostread writers of his time, the thirteenth-century monk of St. Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire, Matthew Paris. > > Writing with a goose quill on parchment in a crabbed, angular gothic script, Matthew (c. 1200-1259) completed several works, mostly historical, which he illustrated himself, to the extent that his pictures, “lively and demotic and sometimes macabre," are part of his appeal. > > John Burrow, whose words those are, also calls him "populist, scathing, cynical, violently partisan, prejudiced and funny," not dissimilar to Gregory of Tours. Burrow grants that Paris was more a chronicler than a historian, his Chronica Majora a vivid and highly personal view of the world, full of snorts of indignation and disgust. If Paris disapproved of someone there was no holding back, as over a lawsuit involving the St. Albans church: > > There was in this church among the brothers a certain person who was indeed cowled, though by no means a monk, but rather like Lucifer among the angels or Jude among the apostles, a worthless hypocrite among monks, himself not a monk but rather a living demon. > > We even get a name, one William Pigun. He does not come off well. > > In spite of his surname, Paris was English, although early on he may I have studied in the French capital. He may also have become a monk only after enjoying a career in the secular world, since he was clearly at ease with the gentry and even the royal court, suggesting that he came from a well-connected family. The first we know of him (from his own writings) is that he was admitted as a monk in 1217 and in 1236 succeeded Roger of Wendover, the abbey's official recorder, furnishing new material to include events of his own time. > > Apart from a couple of bookish missions to Norway, from 1217 till his death he kept to the abbey and to writing history, a pursuit for which St. Albans is celebrated, its chronicle eventually covering more than two hundred years; it was the effective center of historical writing in late medieval England. Paris completed several books besides Chronica Majora, among them Historia Anglorum (written about 1253), Deeds of the Abbots of the Monastery of St. Albans, and biographies of St. Alban, Edward the Confessor, and Thomas Becket. Chronica Majora remains an important measure for understanding the period, even if Paris's prejudices make him an unreliable guide. He denigrated the pope whenever he could, for example, and glorified Frederick II (1194-1250)—yet paradoxically, in Historia Anglorum, the holy Roman emperor is a "tyrant" who "committed disgraceful crimes. > > Much of his information Paris derived from people at court and from conversations with eyewitnesses. Among his sources was Henry III, who was well aware that Paris was recording events and wanted him to be well informed. In 1257, during a week's visit to St. Albans, he kept the chronicler beside him; the king "guided my pen," says Paris. Given this, it is curious that the Chronica provides so critical an account of Henry's reign, but possibly Paris never intended his work to be read in the form it has come down to us. Many passages have written next to them, in red, vacat, offendiculum, or impertinens, suggesting that they should be omitted. Unexpurgated copies were made in his lifetime, however, and his own outspoken manuscript copy has survived. While he tried to erase some more egregious indiscretions, bowdlerizing his own work was, to quote Burrow again, “like trying to de-vein Gorgonzola.” Had he been more successful in his edits, we wouldn't be reading him still. (Page 148) *** > Then came a major stroke of luck. Looking around for a new subject he delved into the local archives in Montpellier, his wife's hometown, where he had gone as a lycée teacher and later research fellow at the university. There he came across a reference to a fourteenth-century document, the detailed register of Jacques Fournier, bishop of Pamiers and a future pope (Benedict XII), who conducted a rigorous inquisition into possible Cathar heresies within his diocese, in particular in the village of Montaillou, set in a mountainous region of southern France. It was a research gold mine, but the ore still had to be brought to the surface. Le Roy Ladurie used the material as an anthropological study of how ordinary people lived and thought, detailing the criminal activities, sex lives, and family scandals of his villagers in a style as thrilling, said reviewers, as those of a soap opera. Published in 1975, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, was an international bestseller. The previously little-known village became a tourist destination, while Ladurie found himself feted as "arguably the bestknown historian alive" and the "rock star of the medievalists. (Page 348) *** > "The London Times is one of the greatest powers in the world. In fact, I don't know anything which has more power — except perhaps the Mississippi." -  Abraham Lincoln (Page 608) *** > In a long review article, The Economist commented that "some tales were blood-curdling-like that of a 16-year-old nurse who bit off the smashed arm of a wounded soldier to save his life, and days later volunteered to execute those who had fled the field. Other stories were heartbreaking, like that of a girl who first kissed her beloved man only when he was about to be buried… Even so, the censor demanded cuts, such as the a young partisan woman who drowned her story of crying baby to avoid alerting German soldiers." [talking of a book by Svetlana Alexievich] (Page 622) *** > … John Burrow, who, true to his name, closeted himself away in his Oxford study with thirty-seven chosen texts to produce his own magisterial tome. As he notes, “Almost all historians except the dullest have some characteristic weakness: some complicity, idealization, identification; some impulse to indignation, to right wrongs, to deliver a message. It is often the source of their most interesting writing."