Lessons for Studying History: Withhold Judgment

In my fifth Daughter of Time post, I address the tendency of humans to assign values--as in judgment--to the past.

We judge the past, in large part, because the human condition remains the human condition; we can read and enjoy and even relate to Shakespeare since like us, people back then were members of a complex world. We can understand them, to a degree, because we also inhabit a world filled with philosophy and religion, entertainment and news, families, nature, medicine, survival, love, war, hate, politics, holidays . . .

Deciding that a particular time period was good or bad is...okay, frankly, it is rather normal. I'd rather live now with roads and cars and antibiotics and the right to vote than during the medieval era.

Still, value applications to the past have a limited shelf-life, especially when their primary purpose is to place the past in a compartment labeled "good terms that I apply to periods that I approve of and glamorize" or "bad terms that I apply to periods that I despise and blame for stuff."

Either approach is remarkably unhelpful when it comes to true understanding.

In Medieval Bodies, author Jack Hartnell makes a similar argument to C.S. Lewis. In several books, C.S. Lewis argues that the medieval world was not a completely different entity from the world of the Renaissance. The popular idea is that one day, the world was all plagues and bossy popes and bad ideas. And then, voila! everyone woke up one morning to better art and Protestantism, and the beginnings of science.

In contrast, Lewis points out that ideas that flourish in one era began in an earlier one. Like Rodney Stark, he asserts that the medieval world was not "worse" simply because we know less about it than other eras.

Jack Hartnell writes the following:

We cannot patronize this seemingly distant moment in time simply to make ourselves feel better. Rather, in order to truly grasp any aspect of the medieval world we need to engage with it on its own terms...A move into something resembling the renaissance did not happen overnight. The kind of changing ideas, actions or artworks that signaled to some that a paradigm shift was under way in Italy...might have only come into fashion a full century later in London...Historical change is, after all, a human thing. It does not sweep uniformly across regions in an instant. (my emphasis)

Hartnell goes on to make the point that cultural "givens" like religion would have been part of the fabric of thought--not separated out as some kind of "look how medieval we are!" behavior. He compares the acceptance of religion in the past to our modern acceptance of science:

We do not go around slapping each other on the back and congratulating ourselves on the existence of gravity, constantly expressing gratitude and awe that Newtonian physics stops us from floating off the earth's surface into space. Rather, it [scientific discovery] is a baseline for how we see and understand this world, its past, present and future.

His point is not that all medievals had all the same ideas about religion, any more than we all do about science; rather, religion was a common reference point. His book addresses how medievals saw the human body through a differing mindset than our own. Without defending the lack of antibiotics--that's not his point--he makes the case that the medievals brought as much care and thought and precision to the problem of the physical existence as we do--in their own way.

The problem with attaching valued judgments to historical periods is not just that it wipes out real understanding (or the desire to understand). The problem is that it also turns the people of the past into villains or heroes in our narratives. How much better to see those people of the past as fully human! As engaged as we are. As passionate as we are. As varying as we are. As much products of their current situations and views as we are (and as we are not--things do change). As curious as humans have ever been.

In the end, it is all about the individuals of any historical era because it is the individuals that make up the human experience. As I wrote:

Certain eras certainly had certain points of view, not to mention certain attitudes, ideologies, and problems, many of which I'm glad have faded away. Certain eras are, to be fair, better than others. But deciding, for example, All women before 1920 were meek and mild and bossed around by their husbands shows a complete lack of understanding of the human condition. Women had far fewer rights in the past (in some places, none at all), but there were bossy wives and meek wives and loving wives and hateful wives and tough wives and commonsensical wives and flighty wives just as there were domineering husbands and mild husbands and amused husbands and destructive husbands and protective husbands and indifferent husbands and dimwitted husbands. In some ways, "historical" romance novels are more accurate than many academic essays!

People of the past deserve more than our applause or ridicule. They deserve to be embraced as fully human: part of their world and entirely themselves at the same time.