Agatha Christie on historical perspective

Coincident to my recent posts about the “right side” of history and how our understanding of what happened in the past changes and, ideally, grows more thorough and accurate as time passes, here’s Agatha Christie in the short story “The Coming of Mr Quin,” which I’m reading in the collection Midwinter Murder: Fireside Tales from the Queen of Mystery.

Briefly, a New Year’s Eve party at a comfortable home is interrupted just after midnight by the arrival of a Mr Harley Quin, whose car has broken down. Quin says that he knew the house’s former owner, one Derek Capel, who unexpectedly killed himself a decade prior. Notice how Quin invites the partygoers to revisit what they know about the incident:

‘A very inexplicable business,’ said Mr Quin, slowly and deliberately, and he paused with the air of an actor who has just spoken an important cue.

‘You may well say inexplicable,’ burst in Conway. ‘The thing's a black mystery—always will be.’

‘I wonder,’ said Mr Quin, non-committally. ‘Yes, Sir Richard, you were saying?’

‘Astounding—that's what it was. Here's a man in the prime of life, gay, light-hearted, without a care in the world. Five or six old pals staying with him. Top of his spirits at dinner, full of plans for the future. And from the dinner table he goes straight upstairs to his room, takes a revolver from a drawer and shoots himself. Why? Nobody ever knew. Nobody ever will know.’

‘Isn’t that rather a sweeping statement, Sir Richard?’ asked Mr Quin, smiling.

Conway stared at him.

‘What d’you mean? I don't understand.’

‘A problem is not necessarily unsolvable because it has remained unsolved.’

‘Oh! Come, man, if nothing came out at the time, it's not likely to come out now—ten years afterwards?’

Mr Quin shook his head gently.

“The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation. It is a question of getting the true perspective, of seeing things in proportion.”

— Mr Quin

‘I disagree with you. The evidence of history is against you. The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation. It is a question of getting the true perspective, of seeing things in proportion. If you like to call it so, it is, like everything else, a question of relativity.’

Alex Portal leant forward, his face twitching painfully.

‘You are right, Mr Quin,’ he cried, ‘you are right. Time does not dispose of a question—it only presents it anew in a different guise.’

Evesham was smiling tolerantly.

‘Then you mean to say, Mr Quin, that if we were to hold, let us say, a Court of Inquiry tonight, into the circumstances of Derek Capel’s death, we are as likely to arrive at the truth as we should have been at the time?’

‘More likely, Mr Evesham. The personal equation has largely dropped out, and you will remember facts as facts without seeking to put your own interpretation upon them.’

Evesham frowned doubtfully.

‘One must have a starting point, of course,’ said Mr Quin in his quiet level voice. ‘A starting point is usually a theory. One of you must have a theory, I am sure. How about you, Sir Richard?’

Simple and tailored to the mystery genre, but not a bad explanation of how the greater perspective afforded by historical distance can lead to a more accurate understanding of important events. There are, certainly, parts of my own life I understand much better now than when I was an eyewitness living through them.

I’ve been trying to read more of Agatha Christie the last year or so after having made it to my late thirties with Murder on the Orient Express as my sole experience of her storytelling. My wife, on the other hand, has read a lot of Christie, and has done so over many years. But even she was unfamiliar with Christie’s Mr Quin, who is the subject of several short stories collected as The Mysterious Mr Quin. I’m enjoying him in this story so far—especially with this kind of sharp historical aside—and plan to check that out.

History has no sides

History, a mosaic by Frederick Dielman in the Library of COngress

I started this post some weeks ago, but sickness—mine and others—intervened. Fortuitously so, since it seems appropriate to finish and post this as a New Year’s Eve reflection, a reminder as 2023 gives way, irretrievably, to 2024.

Writing in Law & Liberty a few weeks ago, Theodore Dalrymple takes the recent conflict between Venezuela and Guyana, a large area of which Venezuela is now claiming as its own territory, as an opportunity to consider an idea invoked by Guyana’s rightly aggrieved foreign minister: “the right side of history.”

This is now a common term for an idea that was already fairly widespread, a sort of popularized Whig or Progressive view of history’s supposed outworkings that, as Dalrymple notes, “implies a teleology in history, a pre-established end to which history is necessarily moving.” History has a goal, an ultimate good toward which societies and governments are moving, a goal that offers an easy moral calculus: if a thing helps the world toward that goal, it is good, and if it hinders or frustrates movement toward that goal, it is bad. This is how history comes to have “sides.”

As worldviews go, this is relatively simple, easily adaptable—whiggishness, as I’ve noted, tends to be its conservative form, and Progressivism or doctrinaire Marxism to be its liberal form—and offers a clarity to thorny questions that may have no easy answer. This is why people who believe in “the right side of history” are so sure both of themselves and of the perversity and evil of anyone who disagrees with them.

But “the right side of history” has one problem: it doesn’t exist. Dalrymple:

“[H]istory has no sides and evaluates nothing. We often hear of the ‘verdict of history,’ but it is humans, not history, that bring in verdicts.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

But history has no sides and evaluates nothing. We often hear of the “verdict of history,” but it is humans, not history, that bring in verdicts, and the verdicts that they bring in often change with time. The plus becomes a minus and then a plus again. As Chou En-Lai famously said in 1972 when asked about the effect of the French Revolution, “It is too early to tell.” It is not merely that moral evaluations change; so do evaluations of what actually happened and the causes of what actually happened. We do not expect a final agreement over the cause or causes of the First World War. That does not mean that no rational discussion of the subject is possible—but finality on it is impossible.

“It is true,” he continues, “that there are trends in history, but they do not reach inexorable logical conclusions.” This is the false promise of Hegel or, further back, the Enlightenment. Outcomes are not moral judgements, and victories of one side over another are not proof of rightness. Dalrymple:

History is not some deus ex machina, or what the philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, called the ghost in the machine; it is not a supra-human force, a kind of supervisory demi-urge acting upon humans as international law is supposed to act upon nations. . . . Are we now to say that authoritarianism is on the right side of history, as recently liberal democracy was only thirty years ago, because so much of the world is ruled by it?

To equate victory with goodness or to view success as superiority—the inescapable but usually unstated Darwinian element in “the right side of history”—is, as CS Lewis put it, to mistake “the goddess History” for “the strumpet Fortune.”

Dalrymple concludes with an important question, one he is unusually reticent in answering:

“History might excuse our worst actions, justifying grossly unethical behaviour.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

Does it matter if we ascribe right and wrong sides to history? I think it could—I cannot be more categorical than that. On the one hand, it might make us complacent, liable to sit back and wait for History to do our work for us. Perhaps more importantly, History might excuse our worst actions, justifying grossly unethical behaviour as if we were acting as only automaton midwives of a foreordained denouement. But if history is a seamless robe, no denouement is final.

I’m going to be more categorical and say that it certainly matters whether we believe history has sides, and for the latter of the two reasons Dalrymple lays out. History—with a right and wrong side and a capital H—offers a rationalization, a handy excuse. Armed with an ideology and a theory of history’s endpoint and the post-Enlightenment cocksureness that society is malleable enough to submit to scientific control in pursuit of perfection, group after group of idealists has tried to shove, whip, or drag the world forward into the light. And when the world proves intractable, resistant to “the right side of history,” it is easy to treat opponents as enemies, blame them for failure, and eradicate them.

This is true even, and perhaps especially, of groups that start off making pacifist noises and decrying the violence and oppression of the status quo. The Jacobins and the Bolsheviks are only the most obvious examples, though our world in this, the year of our Lord 2023, is full of groups that have granted themselves permission to disrupt and destroy because they are on “the right side of history.” What do your puny laws, customs, and scruples matter in the face of History?

That’s the extreme danger, but a real one as the last few centuries have shown. Yet the first danger Dalrymple describes is even more insidious because it is so common as to become invisible—the smug complacency of the elect.

What kind of grim New Year’s Eve message is this? It’s a denunciation of a false idea, sure, but also a plea to view the change from 2023 to 2024 as no more than that—the change of a date. Year follows year. Time gets away from us. Everything changes without progress, things neither constantly improving nor constantly worsening and with no movement toward a perfect endpoint of anyone’s choosing.

Unless, of course, something from outside history intervenes. History, like war, like gravity, like death, is a bare amoral fact in a fallen world. If it is to have meaning and moral import at all it must come from somewhere other than itself. For those of us who believe in God, this is his providence. He has an endpoint and a goal and a path to get there but, tellingly, though he has revealed his ends he has kept his means, the way there, hidden. Based on what I’ve considered above, this is for our own good. The temptation not only to divine his hand in our preferred outcomes but to seize control of history and improve the world is powerful. We haven’t reached the end of it yet.

Until then, if history has sides at all, they are only the two sides of Janus’s face—looking behind and ahead, observing but never reaching either past or future. The more clearly we see this, the more deliberately we can dispel the luminous intellectual fog of thinking about the movement of History with a capital H, the more we can focus on the things nearest and most present with us. Celebrate the New Year, pray for your children, and get to work on the little patch that belongs to you, uprooting evil in the fields you know. That’s my goal, at least.

Thanks as always for reading. Happy New Year, and best wishes to you for 2024!

More if you’re interested

Dalrymple’s entire essay is worth your while. Read it at Law & Liberty here. The sadistic violence of the ostensibly pacifist French Revolutionaries is fresh on my mind because of David A Bell’s excellent book The First Total War, which I plan to write more about in my reading year-in-review. For CS Lewis on the false idea of “the judgement of history,” see here. And for one of my favorite GK Chesterton lines on progress, see here. For a view of history and progress and the pursuit of human perfectibility that closely aligns with my own, see Edgar Allan Poe here. Let me also end the year with another recommendation of Herbert Butterfield’s classic study The Whig Interpretation of History, the fundamental text in rebuking ideas of progress.

That's not how any of this works

Director Ridley Scott talks with Dan Snow about Scott’s forthcoming film Napoleon

Yesterday History Hit released a 16-minute talk with Ridley Scott covering some aspects of his epic drama Napoleon, which comes out in three weeks. The interview is mostly interesting even if host Dan Snow doesn’t dig very deep, but Scott got strangely testy when Snow—over a clip of cannonballs smashing up the ice of a frozen pond beneath the feet of retreating Russian infantry at Austerlitz—raised the question of historical accuracy:

Snow: What about historical accuracy? When a historian says, “Uh, sorry, Sir Ridley, it didn’t quite happen like that,” you say, “Listen, I’ve done enough with you.” You have to have artistic license, right?

Scott: You know, I would say, “How would you know? Were you there?”

Snow: [laughs]

Scott: They go, “Oh, no, right.” I say, “Exactly.” So I said, You know, Napoleon [?] had four-hundred books written about him. So it means, maybe the first was the most accurate. The next one is already doing a version of the writer. By the time you get to 399, guess what—a lot of speculation.

Oof. That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

Historians don’t know things because they were there, they know things because they study. It’s work. They’ve read and researched and compared notes and argued and walked the ground. Scott’s rejoinder is surprisingly childish for such a sharp and accomplished man.

Further, his breezy explanation of how history works as a discipline and a profession is simply bizarre. The implication of what he says about how books cover a subject over time is that historical facts are established at the beginning, and the rest is just eggheads batting ever more intricate theoretical interpretations back and forth.

The truth is that, as I’ve had cause to reflect here recently, the first accounts of an event are fragmentary or partial even if they’re accurate. It takes diligent study, the perspective of time, the synthesis of all available sources, and a good bit of luck to piece together a big-picture account of what actually happened. And with big, heavily-documented subjects—like, say, a French emperor—new material is being discovered all the time. There is no substitute for a primary source or eyewitness account, but if you want accuracy qua accuracy, you will absolutely want a secondary source, a book written later.

I’m all for allowing responsible artistic license—I’m always interested to hear filmmakers explain how and why they choose to change what they change—but Scott doesn’t stop at artistic license. His arrogant dismissiveness toward truth in historical storytelling is breathtaking. Maybe he picked up more from Napoleon than he’s aware.

To be fair, Scott was speaking off-the-cuff, and is 85 years old. I’m not even absolutely certain he said “Napoleon” when he cited the figure of 400 books because he was mumbling. (The real figure, if he was talking about Napoleon, is tens of thousands, more than 300,000 by one old estimate.) But given his track record with using history for his own purposes—I stand by my thoughts on Kingdom of Heaven from the early days of this blog—and the forcefulness with which he said this, I have to assume he means it. I can’t say I’m surprised.

At any rate, I’m cautiously optimistic about Napoleon, but I’m not hoping for much more than interesting performances and exciting spectacle.

The fog of war is no excuse

Speaking of John Keegan, here’s a passage from the chapter on Waterloo from The Face of Battle that I’d like to enlarge upon. Regarding the way the Battle of Waterloo is traditionally described as unfolding—in five “phases” of engagement—Keegan writes:

It is probably otiose to point out that the ‘five phases’ of the battle were not perceived at the time by any of the combatants, not even, despite their points of vantage and powers of direct intervention in events, by Wellington and Napoleon. The ‘five phases’ are, of course, a narrative convenience.

A narrative convenience, he might have added, laboriously gathered and constructed after the fact and over many years. He goes on to describe “how very partial indeed was the view of most of” the participants, beginning with distraction and proceeding to visibility:

There were other causes, besides the preoccupation of duty, which deprived men of a coherent or extended view of what was going on around them. Many regiments spent much of their time lying down, usually on the reverse slope of the position, which itself obscured sight of the action elsewhere. . . . A few feet of elevation, therefore, made the difference between a bird’s-eye and a worm’s-eye view . . . But even on the crest of a position, physical obstacles could limit the soldier’s horizon very sharply. In many places, at least at the beginning of the battle, the crops of wheat and rye stood tall enough for the enemy to approach to within close musket shot undetected. . . . [T]he men in the rear or interior of dense columnar formations, of the type adopted by the Guard in their advance, would have glimpsed little of the battle but hats, necks and backs, and those at a distance of a few inches, even when their comrades at the front were exchanging fire with the enemy. And almost everyone, however well-positioned otherwise for a view, would for shorter or longer periods have been lapped or enveloped by dense clouds of gunpowder smoke.

And those are just problems affecting vision. The other senses have equally severe limitations and are just as susceptible to illusion. Look up acoustic shadow sometime. Keegan: “To have asked a survivor . . . what he remembered of the battle, therefore, would probably not have been to learn very much.”

Now compound these limitations and frequent misperceptions and misunderstands by passing them through reporters. But at least reporters are impartial, right?

Visit the New York Times complete online digital archive—or the archive of any old newspaper—and look up a the earliest possible reporting on a conflict you know a lot about. You’ll be amazed at how much is simply wrong. And that’s not even allowing for spin, for bias, for lies, for manifold other motivated errors.

What we know about battles and wars and other conflicts we know because of that laborious process I mentioned above, of gathering, compiling, organizing, and collating sources and information, and then study and study and more study, not to mention walking the ground. There are things happening now that we will never—none of us in our own lifetimes—have the perspective, much less the information, to understand completely. Even then, there will still be unanswered questions, or questions answered after years, even centuries of uncertainty.

“Assume that everything you hear or read about a current conflict is wrong, incomplete, made up, or the precise opposite of the truth.”

So my rule of thumb: Assume that everything you hear or read about a current conflict is wrong, incomplete, made up, or the precise opposite of the truth. And wait. And don’t get emotionally invested in what’s happening, especially if your sense of moral worth depends upon viewing yourself as on The Right Side and raging against a barbarous enemy.

War is tragic, and people will suffer. That’s guaranteed. But there is no reason to compound those facts with ignorant and impotent rage.

If you slow down, you won’t beclown yourself the way certain institutions have in the previous week. Many of these have now, suddenly, discovered the concept of “fog of war,” which has been dusted off to provide a sage reminder to readers instead of a mea culpa. Look here and here for samples, and here for well-earned mockery.

Per Alan Jacobs, who wrote excellently and succinctly on this topic over the weekend:

The more unstable a situation is, the more rapidly it changes, the less valuable minute-by-minute reporting is. I don’t know what happened to the hospital in Gaza, but if I wait until the next issue of the Economist shows up I will be better informed about it than people who have been rage-refreshing their browser windows for the past several days, and I will have suffered considerably less emotional stress. . . .

“We have a responsibility to be informed!” people shout. Well, maybe . . . But let me waive the point, and say: If you’re reading the news several times a day, you’re not being informed, you’re being stimulated.

To the New York Times’s credit, it has offered an editorial apology, but, as Jeff Winger once put it, “Be sorry about this stuff before you do it, and then don’t do it!”

I’ll end with a reflection from CS Lewis, in a passage from his World War II radio talks eventually incorporated into Mere Christianity, a passage that was going the rounds late last week:

Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything . . . as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.

Let the reader understand.

We already have something approaching Screwtape’s universe of pure noise. Can we still turn back from a universe of pure hatred?

Robert Downey Jr on historical accuracy

In a recent video breakdown of his career for Vanity Fair, Robert Downey Jr, reflects on his experience preparing for and filming the 1992 biopic Chaplin, which was directed by Sir Richard Attenborough:

“[I]t’s hard to tell a story any more interestingly than the way it actually occurred.”

— Robert Downey Jr

When you’re twenty-five and you’re given the keys to the kingdom you’re probably going to come out of center, maybe out of fear, maybe out of confidence. And for me, I, at that point—not to boast, but I was as much of a Chaplin expert as anyone involved in the project, and I was making corrections to the things that were factually and historically inaccurate. To which Attenborough said, “But, poppet, we’re making a film. It’s not a documentary.” I did learn at that point, though, that it’s hard to tell a story any more interestingly than the way it actually occurred.

That closing observation is exactly right. I think a lot of people assume that those of us who complain about historical inaccuracy in film adaptations of true stories are just humorless scolds or nitpickers. Certainly those exist, but for a true lover of history or of a specific historical period inaccuracy rankles because whatever Hollywood comes up with can never be nearly as good or surprising as the real thing. Credit to Downey for recognizing that and acting upon it.

Filmmaking as a medium has limitations, of course. Information, in film, is best communicated visually. Adaptation is necessary and inevitable. But those limitations shouldn’t be an excuse for inventing things where the reality is much more interesting. The more so where “inventing things” means molding history to the shape of cliches.

A few years ago on this blog I complained about the film Tolkien in precisely these terms. You can read that review here. You can watch Downey’s Vanity Fair breakdown here. The whole thing is fun and informative but it’s worth watching just for his perfect Richard Attenborough impression.

Swuster sunu

Peter Dennis’s depiction of the Battle of Maldon for Osprey’s Combat: Viking Warrior vs Anglo-Saxon Warrior

One of the noteworthy aspects of The Battle of Maldon is the large number of named individuals, presented as real people, included in what we have left of the poem. Byrhtnoth, the Ealdorman of Essex, is the central figure in the poem’s action and themes, but there are many others like Æthelric and Offa, members of Byrhtnoth’s retinue; or Dunnere, “a simple ceorl” or non-noble freeman; or the brothers Oswold and Ealdwold. Many, like the latter, are given just enough biographical information to identify them to an audience presumably familiar with the event and the men who, overwhelmingly, died in it.

And the poet is careful to distinguish men with shared names, noting the presence of both a Wulfmær and a “Wulfmær the young” and, most damningly, Godric Æthelgar’s son who died fighting as opposed to “that Godric that forsook the field.” Others offer pure tantalization: Æschferð, Ecglaf’s son, from Northumbria, who “showed no faint heart,” is a “hostage” (gysel) of Byrthnoth’s household. Who is he? Why is he a hostage? What’s the Northumbria connection? And is it a coincidence that his name is so similar to Unferð Ecglaf’s son? We’ll probably never know—the poem is concerned only with recording his bravery.

In his notes on Maldon, Tolkien writes this of the first Wulfmær, Byrhtnoth’s nephew specifically by his sister (his swuster sunu): “The relationship was one of special import in Germanic lines and the especially close tie existing between uncle and sister’s son is motive in several legends (notably Finnsburg).”

Tolkien then makes a broader point about the relationship of stories like this to actual historical events and their treatment by modern critics and historians:

“Things do not become legendary unless they are common and poignant human experiences first.”

There is however no reason to suspect that Wulfmær was not actually swuster sunu of Byrhtnoth, and this is a good caution to that kind of criticism which would dismiss as falsification actual events and situations that happen to be [the] same as familiar motives of legends. Things do not become legendary unless they are common and poignant human experiences first. The traditional affection of the relationship (whether or not it be a last survival of matriarchy or not!) may however have been the cause of the poet’s special mention.

I have complained before about the tendency of a certain kind of historian to doubt or dismiss any story that has even the rudiments of a literary shape. According to these, this represents the intrusion of fiction into reality, or perhaps some shadowy figure reshaping raw material to suit a literary design. At worst, it represents deliberate falsehood with a political purpose—that is, propaganda.

Tolkien here correctly inverts that suspicion. The kind of historian or critic he describes has gotten the relationship of legend to reality backwards, and, more specifically in the case in question, they have ignored many other possible explanations for the inclusion of details like Wulfmær’s kinship with Byrhtnoth—not least that it might actually be true.

Later in his notes, Tolkien writes this of Byrhtwold, the old retainer (eald geneat) who gives the famous final speech of the poem, in which he declares his intention to die avenging Byrhtnoth: “We have here another instance of old traditional situation and actual occurrence coinciding. We need not doubt that Byrhtwold was an eald geneat, and that he actually spoke memorable words not unlike the remarkable ones here enshrined. Yet it was traditional for the eald geneat to be relentless and dauntless and ‘speak winged words.’”

Historians and critics would do better to accept that the literary and the actual “coincid[e]” a lot more often than they suspect.

I’ve previously written about a related problem, the tendency of suspicious historians, having seen through everything that strikes them as literary falsehood, to make history boring, here. (Cf CS Lewis on “seeing through” things.) For my thoughts on describing ancient and medieval works as “propaganda,” see here.

On exoticism and annoyance

A curious passage in an otherwise measured and informative book that I read this spring. Referring to early 16th-century rumors of Maya cannibalism, the authors write:

There is, in fact, no evidence that the Postclassic Maya were cannibals devoted to slaughtering captives in religious rituals, despite the popular (and sometimes scholarly) obsession with “human sacrifice”—vividly reflected in images stretching from early modern European woodcuts accompanying accounts of discovery and conquest to modern equivalents such as Mel Gibson’s 2006 movie Apocalypto. There is no doubt that the Maya ritually executed war captives, people judged as criminals, and people, animals, plants, and objects chosen as religious offerings. But such executions have been practiced in almost all human cultures. Nor were such rituals in Maya society necessarily religious, despite the Western tendency to exoticize and exaggerate Maya executions as always religious and always human sacrifice. Maya culture was no less violent than any other, but nor was it any more so.

There’s a strange movement here from disputing evidence of cannibalism to ranting against popular curiosity about human sacrifice. Despite clearly disapproving of such curiosity and putting “human sacrifice” in scare quotes, the authors follow this rant with a pretty definitive concession that the Maya “ritually executed” people* “as religious offerings.” (If only there were a term for ritual execution of captives as religious offerings!) The capper is the paragraph’s concluding reflection, two weak and patently false appeals to moral equivalency.

I’ve mulled this paragraph over for a while now and what strikes me most about it—beyond handwaving and minimizing a particularly brutal form of ritual murder—is the sense of scholarly annoyance throughout. As if the authors, after getting questions about human sacrifice for the five hundredth time, respond, “No! Well, yes, actually. But not really. But yes. But everybody else has done it, too. And why are you so obsessed with this, weirdo?”

I’m actually pretty sympathetic to this kind of irritation. Anyone who has ever specialized in anything must either get comfortable facing the same set of popular misunderstandings over and over again or get irritated and snippy. Both feelings are understandable. The latter comes naturally. The former you have to work at. In the best case scenario, the scholar (and/or teacher, though I recognize the two don’t always overlap) can address common misperceptions of his field frankly and as an invitation to learning more. You have heard it said . . . but I tell you . . .

Having introduced the much-maligned and -misunderstood Middle Ages to students in this way for years, I can tell you that this approach works. But you have to subsume whatever irritation you feel at putting the same myths to rest again and again and let your passion for the subject take over.

What the above paragraph tries to do instead is dismiss curiosity (via the telling word “exoticize”) and dodge (by playing word games). A smart or skeptical student wouldn’t be fooled. And the genuinely curious will go somewhere else with their questions, probably to untrustworthy internet sources.**

But the accusation of exoticism is perhaps the worst element in all of this. I’ve seen this rhetorical charge most often in a certain kind of polemical academic discourse and, occasionally, in a vaguer version that has trickled down into the mainstream among the kind of people who rage against “cultural appropriation.” It seems, to me, to be way to spin curiosity as a bad thing. Notice something unusual, interesting, or even horrifying about another culture? Don’t you dare ask about it. You’re not allowed to be interested in this thing in this way.

Which is too bad, not only because of the uncharitable assumptions built into an accusation like this or the perceptible annoyance in writing like the paragraph above, but because of the way it worsens the insularity of academics. Charging the curious with exoticism, condemning questions to which you have to concede the central facts, and redefining terms—these are bridge-burning instincts when what I think we need most right now is greater curiosity.

*And plants, leaving one wondering how one “executes” a plant.

**Jackson Crawford, the Old Norse linguist I’ve referred to many times here, has a lot to say about this phenomenon on his YouTube channel.

History must be written forward

From the introduction to the late Steven Ozment’s A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People, in which Ozment briefly recapitulates several conflicting approaches to the study of German history. Against one widespread approach that sees all of German history as preparation for the arrival of Hitler and explains everything with that destination in mind, historian Thomas Nipperdey

believed that reliable history must be written forward chronologically, from past to present, not from present to past, as so much postwar historiography was inclined to do. It is one thing to know the end of a story and to be moved by it to learn the whole story, and quite another to tell that story from its known outcome. “In the beginning was Napoleon,” Nipperdey deadpanned in the first line of a multivolume history of Germany. . . . If 1933 is taken as the first page of modern German history, it will most likely be the last word on it.

One could think of this German historiographical situation as a shadow form of Anglo-American “Whig history,” which views all of history as a providential march toward the democratic institutions, liberal laws, free markets, and individualism of Britain and the United States.

But as Herbert Butterfield pointed out almost a century ago in his critique of Whig history, the basic mistake to such an approach is to search for and synthesize only those historical elements that contribute to that linear, progressive narrative. It’s too tidy. The real picture is much, much more diffuse and contingent. Ozment, again summarizing Nipperdey:

The larger lesson of these critiques of post-World War II historiography is twofold. Reading history from present to past is reading into it rather than learning from it. And equally distorting is the belief that history can be read as black and white. It is, as Nipperdey described, “homogenous, ambivalent [and] filled with contradictions that can never be resolved. Reality is not a system in which everything is uniformly arranged [but is] moved along by conflicts other than those a ‘continuity perspective’ selects—conflicts that do not fall neatly into progressive/anti-progressive or democratic/undemocratic categories.” 

Or, as I constantly take pains to remind my students, “History is complicated.” Good stuff from a valuable introduction. I look forward to the rest of the book, especially since Ozment embraces “the Tacitus challenge” to provide a view of Germans and Germany that reaches back two millennia to their encounters with Rome.

I’ve written about Whig history here many times before, in the context of presentism here, on useable pasts and what historians are actually good for here, and most recently here.

Room to swing a cat

This week Law & Liberty published an ambivalently positive review of The Reactionary Mind, by Michael Warren Davis, a book I enjoyed when it first came out. The reviewer, James M Patterson, takes Davis to task for romanticizing the Middle Ages, in the course of which Patterson writes this:

[Davis’s] criticisms of journalism and technology are good, though a little naïve. For example, he says, “It was the peasants, in their simplicity, piety, and common sense who saw through all the made theories” of their day. These same peasants also massacred cats because of their association with evil and witchcraft.

Okay, but what this blog presupposes is… maybe they didn’t?

This is a story I’ve been meaning to dig into for years now. It doesn’t pass the smell test for me, especially because it is always brought up to denigrate medieval people or illustrate their credulity and primitive violence. Like the term “Dark Ages,” if a story, factoid, or anecdote is always brought up to achieve the same effect, and if that effect is always to cut the subject down, double and triple check it, starting with primary sources. So consider this post a set of notes toward a deep dive sometime in the future.

Patterson, above, is making an offhand allusion. Again, the flippancy should arouse suspicion. If it’s this easy to demonstrate the stupidity and superstition of the medieval peasant why is there any difference of opinion? But the broad outline of the story in its various forms usually falls back on these points:

• In the Middle Ages, cats were closely associated with the Devil and devil worship

• The association was so strong that in June 1233 Pope Gregory IX (r. 1227-41) issued a bull titled Vox in Rama condemning cats as servants of the devil

• As a result, medieval people across Europe massacred cats

• The lack of cats caused growth in the rat populations of Europe, leading to the Black Death

That last point is usually the Paul Harvey twist to story, really driving home the consequences of such brute stupidity and violence toward cats. That’s what you dummies get! seems to be the implied moral. Cat people twitch their whiskers and purr.

If you want the most elaborate and self-congratulatory version of this that I’ve run across, see this World History Encyclopedia article on “Cats in the Middle Ages.” The author is not an historian but a “freelance writer and former part-time Professor of Philosophy” and lards his treatment of the subject with a lot of stuff about the position of respect and honor accorded cats in the ancient world (supported by a Victorian classicist painting of Egyptian cat worship), the way medieval “religious bigots” attempted to undermine that position, and—on the other side of Middle Ages chronologically—how the Protestant Reformation “broke the power-hold of the Church over people's lives and allowed for greater freedom of thought.” Citation needed.

That article is a pile of bad research (seriously, look through the bibliography at the bottom), whiggish clichés, and Dark Ages mythology, but it is just about the Platonic ideal of the medieval cat massacre story.

Now, a fair-minded person, one not content to accept any old slander of medieval people that comes his way, should be able to see problems with this story or at least points that are open to question. A few that have occurred to me every time I’ve heard some version of this:

• Were cats really that closely associated with the Devil? Why?

• A papal bull condemning cats? Why would a pope bother with an official pronouncement on something like this?

• How did the pope’s condemnation result in popular massacres of cats? Are there not several steps missing between an official letter from the pope and peasants programmatically butchering animals?

• Vox in Rama was written in 1233. The Black Death, so-called, arrived in Europe from Central Asia in the late 1340s. Was there really a lack of cats in Europe for that long? Are these events related at all?

Accepting a story that leaves itself open to questions like these is predicated on uncritically believing that medieval people were stupid. (It also relies on a Tom & Jerry-level understanding of zoology.) But our hypothetical fair-minded person, having asked the questions above, might be tempted to ask one more:

• Did this even happen?

The answer seems to be No, not really. At least not in the way laid out above and as popularly regurgitated over and over and over.

A few good places to start picking apart this story:

• Here’s a Medium article that accepts rather more of the myth of medieval cat hatred than I prefer but does a good job of demolishing the proposed connection between purported cat massacres with the arrival of the plague.

• Here’s a broad look at cats in medieval society. Though regurgitating the Gregory IX papal bull/Black Death myth as a side note, the article does a good job showing the recognizable role cats played as pets and ratters in medieval communities, from common farming families to abbeys and royal households.

• Here’s a Medievalists.net gallery of medieval depictions of cats ranging from 8th-century manuscript illuminations and marginalia to 16th-century paintings. Note that most of them are either purely naturalistic or playful in that genuinely sweet medieval manner, showing cats doing human things.

• Also from Medievalists.net, here’s a short review of a scholarly journal article on cats’ bad reputations in medieval Europe. Note the chronological range of sources it draws from and the distance it has to reach for examples of medieval “hatred.”

• Here’s a Quora answer to a question about Vox in Rama provided by someone who has actually read and understood medieval literature, understands what a papal bull is and how it worked, gives attention to the bull’s context, and quotes it at length.

• Finally, here’s a 2020 article from Museum Hack on the specific question of Vox in Rama.

The last two items above are the strongest, so if you look at any of these, look at those two. A few of the things Tim O’Neill on Quora and Alex Johnson at Museum Hack do well in rebutting the story of the cat massacres:

• Both present the actual passages of Vox in Rama that deal with cats. If you’re expecting a rabid churchman’s spittle-flecked denunciations, prepare to be underwhelmed, as cats are only incidental and are featured alongside toads and zombie-like specters as part of a rite of initiation. The “animals” in the rite are also clearly shape-shifters—demons taking on physical form—rather than actual toads and cats. This points to the bull’s broader context.

• Both explain well what a papal bull is, its specific function as official papal correspondence, and its reach and effects. Vox in Rama was written and delivered to the Holy Roman Emperor, the Archbishop of Mainz, inquisitor Konrad von Marburg and others for a specific purpose and was not a universally applicable diktat. Misunderstandings of this kind point to the limits of the modern imagination, shaped as it is by centralized government and totalitarianism, and to the bull’s original broader context.

• Both note that Vox in Rama does not at any point call for the killing of cats and that, even if it did, the plague arrived far later than the bull, so a connection between the two is nonexistent, and that even with cats around the plague would still be able to spread among humans because it was fleas rather than rats that spread it. And, as Johnson notes specifically, fleas don’t mind living on cats. In fact, a flea living on cat might have a better chance of biting a human.

• Finally but most importantly, the context. Both point out that Vox in Rama was written to warn about and combat a supposed satanic cult then operating in central Germany and that the bull is narrowly focused on this.

Knowing this and reading the actual text of the bull should be enough to scuttle the myth of the pope-ordered cat massacres. Why, then, does it persist? O’Neill sums it up well:

Despite there being no evidence to support any of these claims, they are repeated uncritically because they have found their way into a couple of badly researched books and because they appeal to people's prejudices about the Middle Ages.

Emphasis mine.

Again, consider these notes toward a deeper dive. (I’m especially intrigued by parallels between the satanic rites described in Vox in Rama and those cooked up by Philip the Fair as an excuse to liquidate the Templars a decade earlier.) I’m most grateful to O’Neill and Johnson for quoting the actual text of Vox in Rama, as its lack of availability foiled my attempts to look into the primary sources behind this story some years ago. I aim to look deeper still and write all this up in a more presentable form someday, though the misinterpretation and misrepresentation of the source at the root of the story seems to settle the question pretty conclusively.

If I am to end this post with any peroration or call to action, let me simply repeat this: If you run across any story repeated context-free purely as a cudgel to denigrate a past period and its people, look into it. Deeply. Whatever you do, don’t accept it because it confirms your prior impressions or prejudices, and definitely don’t breezily repeat it to dismiss someone else’s arguments. Real history is done on purpose.

On ancient and medieval “propaganda”

It is commonplace among certain kinds of historians to refer to some ancient and medieval sources, especially anything produced at the behest or under the patronage of a king or nobleman, as “propaganda.” Among those that come to mind from my reading in the last couple years are Asser’s Life of King Alfred, the anonymous Life of King Edward (the Confessor), and Augustus’s Res Gestae Divi Augusti. And this is without taking into account the purely literary works that critics occasionally label propaganda, like the Aeneid.

Calling these sources “propaganda” seems to me wrongheaded and misleading for several reasons, foremost among them the anachronistic connotations embedded in the word itself.

While the word has innocent origins (and a quite interesting and revealing evolution) and it can, technically, still mean only “official information,” its technical sense, as with “Dark Ages,” has been almost entirely swamped by negative connotations. Labeling something “propaganda” immediately freights it with insinuation as to its origins and the ulterior motives of its creators. To me, the word propaganda suggests:

1—the direct involvement or oversight of a state or ruling power,
2—a carefully crafted and controlled programmatic message,
3—ideological motivation and rationalization for either distorting the truth or outright lying,

and, in terms of material conditions,

4—a means of mass production or at least mass dissemination, and
5—a corresponding mass readership.

I think this is a pretty fair assessment of where propaganda comes from, what it’s for, and what it needs to do its work, and yet by these standards most ancient and medieval texts offhandedly labeled “propaganda” by modern historians would fall far short.

Just the culture of widespread literacy required by 4 and 5 would eliminate almost all sources before Gutenberg and from most of the following two or three centuries, and 1 and 2 are seldom as obvious from a face-value reading of such sources as some historians would like you to believe.

To take the examples I gave at the beginning of this post:

• In Asser’s Life of King Alfred, Asser himself asserts authorship, openly acknowledges his personal connection to his subject, and explains why he wanted to write about him. What is not clear is that Alfred was directing Asser (1) or dictating how he was to be presented (2). And what certainly is clear, given how books were produced during the 9th century, was that Asser could not publish or widely disseminate his version of Alfred’s life (4) and that only a small number of people like Asser—clergy, religious, and a small number of educated laymen like Alfred himself—would ever read it, nixing (5).

• Ditto the Life of King Edward, with the added uncertainties of who precisely commissioned the book and who wrote it, so that it is even more speculative to argue for (1) and (2). Further, the Life survives in one manuscript, which is empirical proof that even if whoever commissioned the book aimed at (4) and (5), they did not achieve it.

• Of the unscientific sample I referred to at the top, the one that comes closest to fitting the definition of propaganda suggested by the term is Augustus’s Res Gestae or The Deeds of Augustus. Here you have the emperor himself dictating the text (1), much of which is political in nature (2), and widely reproduced as a monumental inscription (4). But even here it is not clear how many people could read the Res Gestae even when it was available inscribed in a public place.

So much for the anachronistic implications of the term. But there is a deeper level of error to which calling an ancient or medieval source “propaganda” leads.

What is missing from all of the sources I worked through above but fundamental to all modern propaganda is (3), an ideological framework that either allows or requires lying. This is not to say that these sources are 100% truthful, but flattery, omitting awkward or controversial topics, or simply not knowing things and not recording them are not the same thing as ideologically motivated suppression or fabrication of facts.

Assuming ancient and medieval sources to have the same pragmatic relationship to the truth as modern propagandists (or, increasingly, historians) is a clear case of projection. Their ways were not our ways. As Orwell wrote on this topic in a passage I posted last year:

Up to a fairly recent date, the major events recorded in the history books probably happened. . . . A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don’t like it. . . . Some of the facts . . . were regarded as neutral and in substance accepted by everybody. No such thing would be possible now.

Further—and this is especially the case for sources like the Life of King Alfred and Life of King Edward—the dearth of alternative or parallel sources for many of the events they describe means that even the forms of non-propaganda bias listed above can only be inferred. Guessed at. Speculated.

Which I think gets at what’s really going on with accusations that such sources are “propaganda.” Calling a source propaganda grants the historian permission to read between the lines and construct alternate histories purely negatively, with a kind of kindergarten “opposite day” hermeneutic that ends up as a license to fabricate. And the problem is only more pronounced in those periods when we have precisely the lack of sources that requires us to rely on those commissioned by kings or abbots or emperors.

By all means, approach sources produced through some connection to or the patronage of a king or ruler or other authority with caution, and always, always look for bias. (It’ll be there, though that doesn’t mean anyone is lying.) But avoid dragging in words with such strongly modern associations and implications, and certainly don’t use that as an excuse to concoct the “real” story behind the sources we actually have. That way lies bad history.

If only we had a word for that kind of untruthful, selective, ideologically motivated storytelling.