A Rare 2-Cents Worth

When Studying History, Stay Neutral and Learn From It

If you can, stay a little dispassionate.  It took me a long time to learn to step back and be a bit more level with history.

The other day I posted about what is often called “Charlemagne’s Crown” on Facebook. Charlemagne himself never wore the crown in the form we know today. Its earliest elements belong to a later period, and it was altered and embellished over the centuries.

Regardless, someone left a simple expletive in the comments.

No explanation. No historical argument. Just a rude dismissal of Charlemagne.

I sighed and deleted it.

Oh, the joys of writing in public. Some days require a thicker skin than others.

But it also made me think about the way we approach history.

Please, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. You might be related to the baby!

Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Much of what we know about European history survives because royal and noble households kept records. Their archives contained charters, correspondence, estate accounts, genealogies, maps, legal agreements, household books and manuscripts.

They did not necessarily preserve these things for our benefit. Records were kept to establish ownership, prove ancestry, administer estates, settle disputes, collect taxes, document marriages, protect rights and maintain political influence.

Centuries later, however, those same documents allow us to reconstruct a world that might otherwise have disappeared.

Royalty and the nobility were never the only keepers of the past. Monasteries, churches, universities, guilds, merchants, towns and civic authorities also maintained extensive records. Similar patterns can be found across the world wherever governments, courts, temples, religious institutions, trading communities and families possessed the means to record and preserve information.

This is not an argument that one class of people mattered more than another.

It is simply a reality of historical survival of reference materials.

People with wealth, property or institutional power were more likely to have access to education, scribes, books, parchment, secure buildings and archives. Literacy was never entirely restricted to the wealthy, even during the Middle Ages, but access to education varied enormously.

As literacy and public education expanded, particularly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, more people gradually gained the ability to leave their own written record behind.

Yet history does not survive through documents alone.

Museums throughout the world preserve paintings, sculpture, jewelry, clothing, armor, furniture, tools and everyday objects. Some collections are so extensive that only a fraction can ever be displayed in public

galleries. Countless objects remain in storage, conservation departments and study collections, waiting to be researched or brought before the public.

The same is true of the world’s great libraries and archives. Their collections contain rare books, manuscripts, maps, letters and early printed works that may rarely be requested or displayed. Increasingly, digitization is opening these collections to people thousands of miles away.

Other treasures remain quietly protected in climate-controlled rooms, preserving thoughts, images and voices that have survived for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years.

And behind every object were human hands.

Goldsmiths fashioned crowns, necklaces and precious jewels. Painters created extraordinary works of art. Seamstresses, embroiderers and tailors produced elaborate clothing and ceremonial garments. Blacksmiths and armorers forged weapons and armor. Carpenters, architects, stonemasons and generations of laborers built houses, churches, bridges, town squares and city walls.

The names of the patrons were often recorded.

The names of the people who carried out the work were often forgotten.

Yet their story is still there.

It survives in a carved capital, a painted panel, a fitted stone, a fragment of embroidery, the shaping of a wooden beam or the curve of a carefully worked blade.

Their individual names may have disappeared, but their intelligence, imagination and skill remain visible all around us.

Even documents created by the powerful can unexpectedly preserve the lives of ordinary people.

Estate accounts record workers and wages. Wills reveal possessions and family relationships. Court records preserve the words of servants, widows, tradespeople and laborers. Parish registers recording baptisms, marriages and burials allow millions of people today to trace their ancestry through generations.

Sometimes a single handwritten line is enough to restore a forgotten person to the historical record.

Modern DNA testing has added another dimension to that search. When the paper trail disappears, genetic evidence can sometimes help identify family relationships, ancestral origins and patterns of human migration.

DNA cannot provide every name or tell an entire life story. But when combined with documentary research, archaeology and historical context, it gives us another way of exploring our shared human past.

Many people contact me today excited because they have discovered an ancestor who was royal, noble, a knight, a Templar, a merchant, a soldier or another well-documented historical figure.

There is something wonderful about that connection.

But the remarkable thing is not simply that someone has a famous ancestor. It is that records survived long enough for us to make the connection at all.

And every one of those documented families was surrounded by hundreds or thousands of other people whose names may never have been written down, but whose lives were just as real.

Today we are fortunate enough to record our own histories in ways earlier generations could scarcely have imagined. Photographs, letters, emails, social media, family trees, oral histories and digital archives allow ordinary individuals to leave behind records of their own lives.

History is becoming broader because more voices are able to survive.

When we look at earlier generations, it is easy to concentrate only upon the violence, injustice and inequality of their times.

Many of those criticisms are completely justified.

The past could be brutal, hierarchical and unforgiving.

But human beings have always been complicated.

We wage wars, yet we compose music.

We destroy, yet we build churches, temples, homes, gardens and libraries.

We can be selfish and violent, yet we also love, raise children, care for the sick, protect our communities and create extraordinary beauty.

History contains cruelty and compassion, greed and generosity, destruction and creativity, often existing side by side.

Recognizing what earlier societies created does not require us to excuse their wrongs.

Nor does criticizing their failures require us to discard everything they left behind.

Perhaps the more useful question is: what can we learn from them?

The wealthy preserved records partly because doing so served their own interests. But history was also preserved by librarians, clerks, monks, priests, teachers, artists, craftspeople, archivists and countless unnamed hands.

Someone commissioned the manuscript.

Someone copied it.

Someone stored it.

Someone rescued it from a fire.

Someone catalogued it.

Someone restored it.

Someone eventually placed it online where you and I could read it centuries later.

Had no one written, painted, built, recorded or preserved anything, enormous portions of human history would simply have disappeared.

What survives is incomplete. It is selective. It sometimes reflects the prejudices and priorities of the people who created it.

But it is also extraordinarily precious.

Our responsibility is not merely to praise or condemn those who came before us.

It is to study what they left behind with honesty, curiosity, logic, appreciation when it is deserved and discernment when it is required.

We cannot change the past.

But we can learn from it.

We can preserve what was beautiful, understand what went wrong and try to do better within our own families, friendships, workplaces and communities.

Take what is worth carrying forward.

Break the chains of inequality where we find them.

And leave something better for those who will one day ask the same questions about us.

Gretchen Cornwall

 

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