"A profusion of entangled events"

I've taken to this quote from Foucault.  It sums up pretty much how I think about my swim through history - tangled up and confused as the past often seems to be.  Here's the longer version:

 

"The world such as we are acquainted with it is not this ultimately simple configuration where events are reduced to accentuate their essential traits, their final meaning, or their initial and final value.  On the contrary, it is a profusion of entangled events.... the true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events, without a landmark or a point of reference. 

Historians take unusual pains to erase the elements in their work which reveal their grounding in a particular time and place, their preferences in a controversy - the unavoidable obstacles of their passion."

Foucault, 1994. 

The quotations come from Foucault’s essay,  Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.  The first certainly sums up the trouble visiting the 19th century seems to be causing me.  The second remains an interesting counterbalance to the silence in the literature on historical method.  Certainly the major nineteenth century historiography itself increasingly seems wedded to the point at which it was created between the 1970s and 80s.  More recent work takes another tack, looking at a different range of actors from another point of view.  Foucault's point was not that historians could escape the dilemma of always writing from now, but rather that they should be upfront about their interests in re-working the past - whilst also allowing the past to speak back to us in its own terms.  I guess that is the research dilemma I'm wrestling with.

Of Battledores, Hornbooks and Spelling Books

This week I’ve been browsing around the net looking for examples of battledores and hornbooks.  The net is a really good resource for doing this. They’re some of the earliest resources made for teaching children how to read.  The hornbooks came first.  They typically just have the alphabet, some simple vowel/consonant combinations and then the Lord’s prayer.  The Battledores were an eighteenth century innovation.  Made out of cardboard some were highly coloured, and the alphabets were typically illustrated too, one woodblock picture for a word illustrating each letter. This site gives a good range of examples

http://mulibraries.missouri.edu/specialcollections/exhibits/childrenliterature/Horn.htm

Looking around the net for images, it turns out this is a blogging hotspot.  I like the way the net gets used like this to map and share enthusiasms.  I can’t quite think what the antecedent might be.  There is no obvious equivalent, that would facilitate this kind of display of the objects and the commentary.  Except of course a book, which would have been much more expensive to produce and would once have put this kind of exercise out of most people’s hands.  I can remember from my A Level course on Tudor and Elizabethan history, when we did a paper on Elizabethan architecture, that style books containing ideas for design motifs were widely circulated, and influenced what and how people chose to decorate their buildings.  Did they also represent a different kind of demarcation line between professional and amateur knowledge?  Maybe that is part of what is in flux:  changes in technologies provide different possibilities for knowledge exchange, diffusion and appropriation.  

On blogging and telling tales

There seem to be three rules to blogging
1.  Keep it short
2.  Write often
3.  Have something to say

So far I seem to be breaking the rules.  Well here's my second offer, sparked off by reading an extract from Jeanette Winterson's autobiography in the Guardian Weekend Review, which set me off thinking about history.

In commenting on her first fictionalised account of her early life, Winterson said "adoption drops you into the story after it has started.  It's like reading a book with the first few pages missing.  It's like arriving after curtain up.  The feeling that something is missing never leaves you - and it can't, and it shouldn't because something is missing.  It's why I am a writer - I don't say "decided" to be, or "became".  It was not an act of will or even a conscious choice.  To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs Winterson's story I had to be able to tell my own." 

There is a general truth here about the stories we tell about ourselves, and the difficulty we have in disentangling them from others that run alongside or threaten to displace our own.  This seems equally true of history.  Reading back into the nineteenth century primary sources,  I find myself stumbling over a multitude of others' stories, whose shapes I cannot fully understand, nor fully trace.  Where to look to discover the start or find the end?   Pulling at one thread, others unravel alongside.

I am not sure if this is a product of coming to the discipline from other traditions, or whether it is a recognised problem within history.  Certainly dealing with the secondary sources intensifies the problem.  Data is there, clues are scattered, but they are already tied into a particular sequence and narrative frame.  How to reframe the evidence without arguing back.  Does history deal with this as a methodological problem and if so how?  I can't find these points directly addressed within the discipline, though the potential truth of the many different kinds of stories created are openly acknowleged.   I'm intrigued to know if historians would recognise the dilemma or have a response to my questions.