Some Notes on Remembrance

In an interview, Michael Rothberg pointed out that he had turned against a sentimental pop-culture view of the Holocaust quite early.

Ich verstand meine damalige Arbeit als Versuch, in diese Triangulation einzugreifen, indem ich einige Glaubensdogmen rund um den Holocaust infrage stellte, die ihn für eine rührselige Popkultur ausbeutbar machten und zugleich als Schutzwall gegen eine Kritik der israelischen Politik dienten – eine Politik, die ich zunehmend als unrechtmäßige Besatzung und Enteignung der Palästinenser sah.

Rothberg workes with a two-dimensional axis system (though he calls his work multi-directional) which creates four quadrants of forms of remembrance, which make it possible to empathize with different traumata without prioritizing them or reducing them to a general pattern in a lossy fashion.

A similar tack is the newspaper column Muslimisch-jüdisches Abendbrot by the political scientist Saba-Nur Cheema (publications) and Meron Mendel, who search for the commonalities in the differences (discussion report) as part of their marriage. These columns have now been bundled in a book.

A different tack is the term postmemory that Marianne Hirsch coined. For Hirsch, it is the biographical memory of her own childhood being less vivid than the Holocaust narratives of her parents in Romania that makes her conceptualize this idea.

To grow up with overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one’s consciousness, is to risk having one’s own life stories displaced, even evacuated, by our ancestors.

This quote is from the book The Generation of Post Memory from 2012,  which was not the first time that Hirsch pondered these matters. She already discussed this concept in Family Frames which is available in the Internet archive.

Some works of Jean Bodin

 Jean Bodin, who is this these days perhaps best known for his musings on Historiography, engaged in problems of religion and tolerance as well. His only posthumously published Conference of the Seven Wise Men on the Hidden Secrets of Sublime Things (Colloquium heptaplomeres de rerum sublimium arcanis abditis) clearly belongs into this category. It's seven speakers represent the views that Bodin was familiar with (summary by ChatGPT 3.5):

Coronaeus - Represents traditional Catholicism.

Fridericus - A Lutheran who defends Protestantism.

Curtius - A Calvinist, representing the Reformed tradition.

Torres - A Jew, offering a Jewish perspective.

Senamus - A skeptic, embodying the voice of doubt and questioning.

Salomon Barcassius - A Muslim, representing Islamic thought.

Octavius Fagnola - A Deist, who argues for a natural religion devoid of specific dogma.

Appraising Rosalind Franklin, Science Writing and Women's Contribution to Science

Very intrigued by a host of articles on Nature dealing with Rosalind Franklin.

The Nature EDITORIAL from 25 April 2023 was How Rosalind Franklin was let down by DNA’s dysfunctional team. The story of how the structure of DNA was found is one of team science from which one member was unforgivably excluded.

The editorial reminds of the anti-semitism, the sexism, and the unhappiness that Franklin experienced during her time at King's College in London, which truncated her work at the tail of her stay. Fortunately, she was happier at Birkbeck College. It also reminds readers that the fight over who would get DNA described first, contra Linus Pauling in the US, was a serious motivator.

Then, Matthew Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort in the same issue clarify What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure. Franklin was no victim in how the DNA double helix was solved. An overlooked letter and an unpublished news article, both written in 1953, reveal that she was an equal player.

The contribution tries to more fairly sketch the complex involvement of the King's College group's researchers and some of the allocation choices, making Franklin more than the supplier of a supposedly decisive X-ray picture.

This in turn lead me down the road of some previous Nature reporting, such as the injustice of science-historiographical reductionism from April 2020: Rosalind Franklin was so much more than the ‘wronged heroine’ of DNA. One hundred years after her birth, it’s time to reassess the legacy of a pioneering chemist and X-ray crystallographer.

The editorial rightfully points out how thinking of Franklin as the wronged party in the DNA discovery once again retracts her role as a woman scientist, under-lighting her many other science contexts and contributions.

The 2023 Editorial draws on Brenda Maddox's work, who wrote in Nature in 2003 about Rosalind Franklin, The double helix and the 'wronged heroine' who warned in the abstract already that

Franklin's premature death, combined with misogynist treatment by the male scientific establishment, cast her as a feminist icon. This myth overshadowed her intellectual strength and independence both as a scientist and as an individual.

 

Abductive Aspects of Interpretation

Under the assumption that a text has an architecture, that architecture is accessible only though abduction. The proof then becomes the pudding, because the role that the pieces play just so in the text validates the structure in the reconstruction. 

In the emplotment of historical texts, the facts play multiple roles in the discourse with the audience. They provide points of stability through agreement ("The Normans conquered England in 1066") or they teach novel facts and interpretations (whose novelty is of course dependent on the level of expertise of the readers). The whole point of offering yet another emplotment is to correct the existing ones, and that requires either new facts or new interpretations (and preferably both). 

Writers therefore have a model of the questions and the lack of information that the readers have and they write toward that model: to answer the questions and to supply the information that will make the readers agree with their architecture. 

Perhaps it is too much to say that each text creates a language for a special purpose (or a domain-specific language, to use that technical term), but probably each discipline and sub-discipline does. And that functions both as short-hand (writing takes time even with word processors) and as a model for thinking about the right types of problems.

We would like it to be the case that the architecture and its realisation using the facts and the interpretative fragments is mechanically verifiable. That makes it easier for the writer to adjust the whole without breaking the parts, to experiment with attitudes and stances, and to adjudicate if choices in one place amount to consistent stances in other parts. 

What is decidedly necessary is a way to rule out alternates and make clear why they are being rejected. This is part of dealing with the questions and the expectations of the audience. Didn't Odo of Bayeux commission the tapestry to suck up to his half-brother that he had insulted by siding with his enemies? Well, no, and here is why. That is the function of the precedent and the literature review.

This is also useful because it allows rerunning the narrative, if we think of it as a conceptual program, at a later point in time with altered insights. If the dating shifts, if the source becomes discredited, then we can see what that means for the remainder of the argument. Perhaps this is then no longer the stance of X, who may no longer be able to participate in the argument; but it may approximate the stance that X could have taken, as best as we know, given the new information. 

The drawback of all of this is of course that the abductive process repeats and re-occurs at the various levels of the interpretation, whether it be the text as a whole, the individual claims, the specific meaning of the words used, or the scripts employed to make progress on the problems. 

The problem is also that we primarily wish to rule out narratives, but the number of wrong narratives is of course too large to manage properly. So we need succinct ways of explaining plausible candidate narratives that we can then rule out equally succinctly, as a representational problem. 

Brittany had Arthur's Back

Read along with me in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain to understand what the idea behind the Chapter IX is (p.149). So why does Geoffrey of Monmouth even care about the Saxons? He is of Brittany stock, his ancestors came in with the Norman invasion, and is now settled around the castle of Monmouth in the Welsh border marches. When the actual invasion happened and Harold was killed at Hastings, the Welsh did not care; we can show that from the contemporary chronicles. The Welsh were much more interested ins sorting out internally their overlordship and focused on the contacts with Ireland.

My first claim is that, for Geoffrey (a name from Brittany, btw), the Saxons are the Anglo-Saxons that the Normans vanquished. Here he is basically inverting the narrative. It's not the Bretons and Normans who are the invaders, it is the Saxons who came to English Isles from Germany and conquered large swaths. While the second part is true (and showing that part in detail), the first part is not really the case. But that's the idea behind the detailed description of the Saxon battles. So first Colgrin gets defeated at the River Douglas (together with the Scots and the Picts, already old enemies by now of the Norman and Breton overlords) (p.150), and then gets bottled up in York. The rescue team under Baldulph with his six thousand men gets trounced by the duke of Cornwall and an army half the size. Duke Chelderic comes with six hundred ships to help the Saxons in York.

Now Arthur is short of men, so he calls for help. And from whence? Brittany! Arthur's nephew Hoel, son of the King of the Armorican Bretons, shows up with 15,000 men. I don't think for a moment that Geoffrey had any sources stating how many men anyone really had, but I think it is fair to assume that the numbers are interesting in their qualitative sense of comparisons. 15k is more than 6k; that's the punch line here. Arthur is getting big help from Brittany. That's the memo.

I also think it key that Hoel is the nephew of Arthur. Sure, kinship is the only place from which help can come, but the emphasis is on the nephew, not on his father Dubricius, Arthur's brother-in-law. With an eye toward the evil nephew, Mordred, later on, that sets up an interesting tension.

Over the next three chapters (3-6; p.151-154), Arthur and his men defeat the Saxons. They first trap them in the wood of Celion, whereupon the Saxons promise to leave for Germany, but turn around and come back, breaking their oaths. Hoel gets sick, which weakens the king's army for dramatic effect and making the upcoming victory even more of a sign that Arthur, as the oath-keeper, is trouncing infidels. In case anyone misses it, the prayer of the bishop of Lincoln and Arthur's speech spell it out (Chapter 4, p.151f). 

Arthur puts on his famous weapons, including the shield Priewen on which Mary is painted. This is a reference to an old Welsh legend that Arthur carried the Mother of God into battle, either on his shoulder or on his shield (a one letter permutation in Welsh.

It has been suggested that Arthur’s carrying the two religious burdens on his shoulders is an error for on his shield, through written confusion between ysgwyd (‘shield’) and ysgwydd (‘shoulder’), words often associated in early poetry (iscuit and iscuid in Old Welsh spelling). (Padel, p. 16)

The ensuring battle at Badon is one of the earliest battle attested for Arthur in the Welsh sources, as taking place on a mountain, and having Arthur kill 960 men (Padel, p.16f), but the particular way in which Geoffrey describes it smacks of Hastings, for my taste (p.153). For good measure, Goffrey halves the number of dead killed by "Caliburn" from "the Isle of Avallon", to 470 men. Those fleeing Saxons regroup under Chedric but are surrounded and Chedric killed at the Isle of Thanet (p.154).

With the Saxons out of the way, Geoffrey can now turn to iterating through the remaining typical enemies of the Norman and Britton occupiers of England. They are all squashed and conquered: the Scots and the Picts (p.155); Ireland, Iceland, Gothland and the Orkneys (p.158); Norway, Dacia (i.e. modern Romania and parts of Bulgaria!), Aquitaine and Gaul, including taking Paris from the (Byzantine Emperor) Leo (p.160). 

Concurrently, Arthur restores the pre-Saxon state of politics in England, including the Duke Lot as rule of the duchy of Londonesia. This man's ancestors hail from royal blood, and he married Arthur's sister "during the time of Aurelius Ambrosius", and fathered Walgan and Modred. Guinevere is called Guanhumara, also of Roman descent, and becomes Arthur's wife (p.157).

In this position, Arthur can summon the subdued lords to Camelot, which is called City of Legions in Goeffrey (p.161), for Arthur's coronation. The list of whose-who that answer his call (p.162) basically covers most of then-known Western Europe. Of the invited, Brittany's child Hoel manages to bag the largest description:

... Hoel, duke of the Armorican Britons, and his nobility, who came with such a train of mules, horses, and rich furniture, as it is difficult to describe. (p.163)

Even here the claim of lineage is spelled out by Geoffrey:

For the Britons still observed the ancient custom of Troy, by which  the men and women used to celebrate their festivals apart. (p.164)

The festivities are going well when the general of the Romans, Lucius Tiberius, challenges Arthur to submit to Roman rule (p.165) by paying the missing tribute due to Rome since Julius Caesar.  Arthur and his vassals retreat to counsel, and Arthur reminds them of his lineage's claims (p.166). As the reader suspects, Lucius has it all backwards. Arthur is kinsmen with both Emperor Constantine, son of Helena (p.167) and of Maximus, who

... both wore the crown of Britain, [and] gained the imperial throne of Rome. (p.167)

In fact, as Arthur slyly points out,

Do you not, therefore, think, that we ought to demand tribute of the Romans? (p.167)

Unsurprisingly, it is his kinsman Hoel that get's to go first.

As soon as he [i.e. Arthur, RCK] had done speaking to this effect, Hoel, king of the Armorican Britons, who had the precedence of the rest, made answer in these words." (p.167) 

Hoel is in agreement and reminds them of the Sibylline prophecies,

... which expressly declare, that hte Roman empire shall be obtained by three persons, natives of Britain. The oracle is fulfilled in two of them, since it is manifest ... that those two celebrated princes, Belinus and Constantine, governed the Roman empire; and now you are the third to whom this supreme dignity is promised. (p.168)

Hoel throws in ten thousand men, about 2/3 what he sent when Arthur was calling for help against the Saxons, but there you go. Only the King of Albania, also gets to give a speech (p.169), offering two thousand horse plus foot soldiers. The others are lumped together but their numbers are conveniently summed up: 183,200 horse and foot in number "not easily fall[ing] under" (p.170).

Lucius also musters his army from the east (which includes Spain, ruled by king Alifantinam?), and since Hoel is coming with Arthur (he promised his personal presence, p.168) and Walgan as well (p.175), Mordred and Guinevere (p.171). Before Arthur has time to defeat the Romans, he must best a Spanish giant who stole Helena, the niece of Hoel (p.172) and carried her off to the top of Mont St Michel---a Breton concern apparently that explains Helena's tomb (the lady does not survive the rescue), which Hoel built as a mausoleum (p.175). 

At this point Geoffrey of Monmouth begins the drawn-description of the battles of Arthur's host against the Roman army; this we shall save for another time.

Literature Cited

Padel, Oliver James. Arthur in Medieval Welsh Literature (Writers of Wales), University of Wales Press. 

The Rise of Arthurian Legends and the Plantagenet Empire

This is almost a guest-post, since it contains so much information provided by my frequent collaborator, Beparo.

When reading up on Wace's Roman de Rou, or A History of the Norman People, as some translate it, I was struck by the role that Wace had played in bringing the Round Table of King Arthur into existence, so to speak, by inserting it into his adaptive translation Roman de Brut, completed in 1155, of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Kings of Britain (Burgess & Van Houts, 2004, p.xxvi).

So in the middle of this negotiation of how to bridge these two land groups together (an attempt that does extend back to Saxon migrations and the Viking raiding of the 9th century, make no mistake), we have this influx of mythology. Perhaps the claims to the Roman mantle of power are again at disposition? The papacy is definitely involved in this shuffle, as the troubles that Wace go into for backing Becket against Henry II remind us (Burgess & Van Houts, 2004, p.xxxvii).

The Round Table may have Welsh roots, perhaps. The Winchester Round Table is perhaps the most interesting aspect in that question. As Beparo put it,

It was almost certainly Edward I who commissioned it, ca. 1260?;  so, maybe a century after Wace had been making the rounds.  But Henry VIII had it renovated, and the current paint job (with the Tudor Rose conspicuously in the middle of the table) dates to his era.  I seem to recall somewhere coming across speculation this was done in advance of Charles V's state visit in May of 1522;  the monarchs visited Winchester, where Charles would have seen it.  Given the Habsburg claim to Roman imperial succession, the implicit message probably wasn't lost. 

Those speculators however may have gotten

... Charles V confused with Francis I.  The state visit of 1522 was preceded by another in 1520, which was part of the run-up to the Field of the Cloth of Gold---yet another of these complicated trans-channel exercises where everybody was trying to trump everyone else's claim to be the sole inheritor of the Roman imperial purple.

As Beparo reminds us, the notion of inheriting the Roman imperial purple, and the imperial control implied, had found its traces in the Welsh sources in the figure of the late-Roman general Magnus Maximus, whose traces as Macsen Wledig are found in the Mabinogion. (Not all traces in Mabinogion are this historically grounded; the backdrop of The Dream of Rhonabwy for example is more complicated to discern.)

This is interesting because the compilation process of the Mabinogion belongs into the 12th and 13th century, when the French tradition of romance (the literary genre, not the vernacular translation of Wace's) was in full swing and flowing back onto the English Isles. For example, Wace's Roman de Brut was translated into English between 1200-1220 by Layamon, a Parish priest from Worchester (Burgess & Van Houts, 2004, p.xxvi). 

Of course, these back-and-forth connections between England and the modern day French shoreline reach back before the Conquest even. Wace himself is in some way linked to Duke Robert of Normandy, the father of William the Conqueror, who had attempted his own invasion of England and ended up with his fleet on Jersey instead, which connected Wace biologically to Turstin, the duke's chamberlain (Burgess & Van Houts, 2004, p.xxxv). 

William brought Breton soldiers with him to Hastings (Ralph de Gael from Rennes; Apdx 40 and Saint Saveur le Victome, Apdx 89 in: Burgess & Van Houts, 2004, pp.xlvii-lxii)), who settled in the Welsh border marches, controlling Monmouth castle after 1080. This aristocracy has been suggested by Frank Stanton and others as the nobility from which men like Geoffrey of Monmouth hailed (discussed in: Brynley F Roberts, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Cardiff, 1991). Perhaps even the name Arthur was more Breton than Welsh, after all.

on Silence and Simplification

In Andrew Freyn's contribution to The Silent Morning, entitled `What a victory it might have been`: C. E. Montague and the First World War, pp.131-148, Freyn works with the pastiche method of approaches of analysis that makes historians so careless about contradictory positions.

He cites five different opinions, ranging from historians to composers like John Cage of 4'33" fame, to negate the position that silence is an absence of sound. However, he grapples nowhere with the assurance that these positions are not self-contradictory and in the end undercuts his own analysis by pointing out that Cage is trying to get the audience to listen to the ambient sound of itself, which shows conclusively that the "silence" that Cage is after is just another form of sound (albeit not the one that the patrons paid for, and not a "natural" sound, but one that Western music performers like Beethoven cultivated in their listeners, who had happily chatted through Haydn [see Greenberg's lectures on Beethoven, by the Teaching Company] or 19th century French music performances [see Bernier's Pleasure & Privilege, esp commentary on attending the opera).

Freyn is more successful in integrating the use of silence as a commemorative device into the concomitant silencing of other forms of celebration as well as other stories. He cites two observers for the second aspect who deserve to be quoted in full.

Jay WInter comments that 'every decision to commemorate is a decision to simplify and clarify a message by leaving out substantial parts of the story surrounding it' [citing Fn 11]; .... similarly, James V. Wertsch comments that commemorative performances have a 'tendency to eschew ambiguity and to present the past from a single committed perspective' [citing Fn12] (p.133)

[[RCK: The references are to Winter's paper Thinking about Silence in Ben-Ze'ev et al, A Social History of Silence in the 20th Century, Cambridge University Press 2010, p.20 and to Wertsch's monograph, Voices of Collective Remembering, Cambridge University Press 2002,  p;42.]]

 And Freyn himself so aptly notes:

The officially sanctioned solemnity of Armistice commemorations [in Great Britain, RC] meant that alternative vibrant and boisterous celebrations were restricted, seen as unofficial and dissenting -- even if many of those who wanted to remember the war as a victory were those tho had worked hard to win it. (p.133)

Bibliography: Trudi TATE, Kate KENNEDY (eds), The Silent Morning: Culture and Memory after the Armistice, in series: Cultural History of Modern War,  Manchester (Manchester University Press) 2013.

Ideal Types continued

While it seems perfectly normal to have Restaurant as an ideal type, it seems less convincing to have a restaurant visit as an ideal type; yet this is what the script was.

So we first note that there is a difference between ideal types and scripts in the sense that ideal types are much more structural. Ideal types are concerned about the fact that restaurants have kitchens and waiting areas and menus and specials of the day and a parking lot and fire exits. For the scripts, the emphasis is on the event types that can take place in that setting. The focus is less on how to build a restaurant and more on how to behave within one.

The second aspect is that ideal types are themselves structurally developmental. Sometime in the modern era, probably increasingly so after WW2, restaurants acquired cold storage rooms to house the meats and other perishables between acquisition and preparation. The ideal type can accommodate that shift readily; there are temporal constraints on the presence of the cold room until pretty much all restaurants have them (and use them to great effect, e.g. Ratatouille).

It is not clear that scripts as encodings of expected behavior accommodate as quickly. Perhaps temporally recent changes that affect the behavior more are required to show script changes; for example, the elimination of smoking rooms or requests to silence cell phones during dinner.

Perhaps there is then a general tendency as to classify the ideal type as part and parcel of structural history (Strukturgeschichte), the background on which the events take place (some of which may very well be guided by scripts).

An Early Akkadian Historical Argument

I have often felt that the initiation rite that Gilgamesh does not pass in Tablet XI of the standard Akkadian version (right after the flood narrative of Utanapishtim) of the Epic is one of the earliest historical arguments that we have (ca 1200BC, from the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh). It is unclear to me whether the older Babylonian versions contained this section.

The context of the story is the challenge that the "Akkadian Noah" Utanapishtim gives to Gilgamesh to show that he is worthy of eternal life; he must not fall asleep for a week. Utanapishtim and his unnamed wife had earlier received, as an exception, immortality from Enlil, because they had overheard the secrets of the Gods; cf. L190ff.

(L198) [Utanapishtim said:] "Now then, who will convene the gods on your behalf,
that you may find the life that you are seeking!
Wait! You must not lie down for six days and seven nights."
soon as he [Gilgamesh] sat down (with his head) between his legs
sleep, like a fog, blew upon him. 

Gilgamesh falls asleep immediately, and Utanapishtim complains to his wife that Gilgamesh failed, but she asks for mercy, that he may wake up and return home. 

(L202) Utanapishtim said to his wife:
"Look there! The man, the youth who wanted (eternal) life!
Sleep, like a fog, blew over him."
His wife said to Utanapishtim the Faraway:
"Touch him, let the man awaken.
Let him return safely by the way he came.
Let him return to his land by the gate through which he left." 

Utanapishtim is concerned that Gilgamesh will deny falling asleep altogether, so he sets up a temporal trap, asking his wife to mark off the days on the wall and place fresh loaves of bread next to him.

(L208) Utanapishtim said to his wife:
"Mankind is deceptive, and will deceive you.
Come, bake loaves for him and keep setting them by his head
and draw on the wall each day that he lay down."
She baked his loaves and placed them by his head
and marked on the wall the day that he lay down.
The first loaf was dessicated,
the second stale, the third moist(?), the fourth turned white,
its ..., the fifth sprouted gray (mold), the sixth is still fresh. [...]"

One suspects that the earlier version had just marks on the wall, and the later version then fixed the fact that the marks show no temporal progression per se, but could be made together. This is independently interesting, if my suspicions are correct.

(L218) The seventh--suddenly he touched him and the man awoke.
Gilgamesh said to Utanapishtim:
"The very moment sleep was pouring over me
you touched me and alerted me!"

As Utanapishtim predicted, Gilgamesh tries to deny it by claiming that he ad been sleeping for just a moment (i.e. was not really asleep yet). But the evidence makes that story unsupportable.

(L222) Utanapishtim spoke to Gilgamesh, saying:
"Look over here, Gilgamesh, count your loaves!
You should be aware of what is marked on the wall!
Your first loaf is dessicated,
the second stale, the third moist, your fourth turned white,
its ...
the fifth sprouted gray (mold), the sixth is still fresh.
The seventh--at that instant you awoke!"
Gilgamesh said to Utanapishtim the Faraway:
"O woe! What shall I do, Utanapishtim, where shall I go!
...."

As far as the translation is concerned, the problem is the rotting away of the bread. E.A. Speiser had "soggy" instead of moist.


Colophon: Tablet XI translated by Maureen Gallery Kovacs, electronic version by Wolf Carnahan, line numbers according to ANECT, 3rd edition with Supplement, (pp.95-96).

Disagreements in Wikipedia

I have been tracking disagreements between articles in Wikipedia for a while now, and just found another nice one (though admittedly one of the articles is a stub). I found this while researching this post. The articles are about the Egyptian Pharao Dejdkare Isesi, specifically his daughters, and the man married to one of them, Senedjemib Mehi, who had finished the tomb that the previous post talked about.

While the stub-article on Senedjemib Mehi identifies his wife Khentkaus as either a daughter of Pharao Djedkare Ikesi or Unas, the successor of Djedkare Ikesi, the article on Djedkare Ikesi writes:

Less certain is the filiation of Kentkhaus III, wife of vizier Senedjemib Mehi, who bore the title of "king's daughter of his body".^[75][76] It is debated whether this title indicates a true filiation or if it is only honorary.^[76][77]

The fascinating part is that the quote draws upon Brovarski's 2001 work, The Senedjemib Complex, p.30 (= Fn 75),  but so does the stub-article on Mehi!

An Old Egyptian historical Argument

In the autobiographical part of his tomb inscription, Vizier Senedjemib Inti of the Fifth Dynasty of Egypt, who worked under Pharao Djedkare Isesi, writes:

When it came to pass [Register 4] his majest caused that I be annointed with fat [by the side of his majesty] [Register 5] [Neve]r [was done] the like by the side of the king for anyone. [Register 6] -- James H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Vol 1, #270, p.122.

Given the dating of the Fifth Dynasty, that would put the record between the late 25th and the mid 24th century BC; see here for some of the proposed dates of Djedkare Isesi's reign.

Reactions to Schank

In my previous post,  I reviewed Roger Schank's Tell me a Story, New York (Scribener) 1990 (= NWU Press, 1995) as to the problem of how to construct narratives, what constituent pieces are, and especially how to challenge or critique them. Though in the previous post, I mentioned three examples of analysis by Schank, I mostly focused on Tawana Brawley and on Iran Air Flight 655 getting shot down by the USS Vincennes, leaving Canadian Olympic gold-medalist runner Ben Johnson aside.

In musing over my dialogue with Schank, I wanted to offer some preliminary stabilization of my thoughts in terms of some theses to historiography---especially in the aftermath of the political display of revisionist Southern supremacy history in Charlottesville. Some of these are issues that Schank is concerned about and some of them I do not take him to care about.

1. Schank is right that story skeletons and their selection form an initial stance on the problem that even leads to the filtering of information or adaptation of memories. In fact, if Schank had the benefit of hindsight that we have, he could have pointed to the US Navy's explanation of scenario confirmation offered to the BBC in 2000 for the precise behavior that his story skeletons had predicted in terms of filtering incoming information.
2. Schank correctly distinguishes between story, skeleton and gist. The story is the actual production of the human talker, targeting the listener. The skeleton is the summary of the basic telos and gives explanation patterns at hand (more of that probably in Schank's prior book on Explanation Patterns). The gist is the cake mix, to use an analogy from cooking, that can be turned into a variety of cakes that all share a distinct family resemblance. Knowledge about what my current guests like and what I have quickly at hand inform the actual execution.
3. Schank's skeletons provide an easy ingress into his theory for content analysis. The arguments made and the supports advanced and the information elided (if we can reconstruct it) come from the telos of the skeletons that is truly most like a political stance.

1. Because Schank does not do much with the evidence/story or fact/narrative distinction (possibly because his biases against expert systems and automated theorem proving), he misses out on the ability to postulate that facts are stories for a subculture that no longer can or wishes to treat these stories narratively. They are as if baked, and questioning them can be interpreted as a violation of the norms of the subculture. Even low level sensor readings have these stories behind them, and this holds true even in particle physics (cf Knorr-Czetina), where the individual detectors in a setup such as the CERN super-collider are attributed 'personality' (in a anaphoric sense) because of their non-interchangeable behaviors. Unlike edible cookies however, facts can be unbaked back into stories if there are anomalies, provided the research data is available. Thus, bad footnotes or page references ghost through the literature until some brave grad-student hunts them down and slays them. For many historical documents, that is not possible, and here the community finds the line drawn for it. 
2. Schank has no locus for the social role of power in the success of narratives, because he does not distinguish the UN Security Council adequately from a US district court or the admiralty of the US Navy. Schank tries to rope this in while looking at the story expectations, but that is really a small aspect of the problem only. His use of made-up stories or divorcee self-reports is equally ill-suited to discover this, as in the first case everyone knows the story is not real (thus there are no real validity requirement or possibility) while in the second case our culture considers it flat-out rude to question people's divorce narratives. 
3. Schank is handicapped by his focus on the genre newspaper articles and transcript of psychological experiment. He looks a bit at screenplays as well, but never clarifies how the fictional status of these works interacts with the realistic status of the newspaper article or the emotional stance of the transcribed individual.

What about all these Stories? Rereading Schank

In the aftermath of the civil disturbances of Charlottesville, Michael Eric Dyson wrote in the August 12th, 2017 edition of the New York Times:

Such an ungainly assembly of white supremacists rides herd on political memory. Their resentment of the removal of public symbols of the Confederate past — the genesis of this weekend’s rally — is fueled by revisionist history. They fancy themselves the victims of the so-called politically correct assault on American democracy, a false narrative that helped propel Mr. Trump to victory. Each feeds on the same demented lies about race and justice that corrupt true democracy and erode real liberty.

Dyson then distinguishes between political memories, between revisionist history and other history (proper? academic? he has no name for it, but cites Du Bois), between true and false narratives.

Tools of Story Telling

It is in this context relevant to look at the infrastructure that Roger Schank has identified for story telling (bracketing Schank's occupation with intelligence, however). Because of his particular slant to story analysis, Schank provides a repertoire of narratological tools and distinctions that differ from those in the literary toolkit. (This cuts both ways, Morson argues in the Foreword, missing for example the notion of Genre in Schank's musings, p.xxff.)

Stories are received and generated structures that people label in an attempt to index them, so that they can retrieve them and match them for comparison purposes. People are assisted in story manipulation by story skeletons, which give a basic direction to a narrative, and by the hierarchy of scripts, plans, goals and themes that Schank had identified in his classical work with Robert Abelson (1977). Because stories can be retold in a variety of ways and for various purposes, Schank posits that they are remembered in a different format, the gist, of which the individual retelling is a production. Stories vary by culture and subculture---Schank specifically discusses the French restaurant on the one hand and the teenager Rock fan on the other.

In much of the exposition of the book, and especially in the discussion of the story production and generation, Schank brackets the question of truth. Schank writes as if the intentionality of the stories would make the question of whether the stories are true or not irrelevant or even impossible to answer.

Diplomatic Incidents

Schank uses a diplomatic conflict, the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US Navy warship, the Vincennes, on July 3, 1988, to illustrate the way that the same event is used to make hay for the divergent political positions.

If we construct our own version of truth by reliance upon skeleton stories, two people can know exactly the same facts but construct a story that relays those facts in very different ways. (p.152)

Or even more patronizingly:

The real problem in using skeletons whis way is that the storytellers usually believe what they themselves are saying. Authors construct their own reality by finding the events that fit the skeleton convenient for them to believe. They enter a storytelling situation wanting to tell a certain kind of story and only then worrying about whether || the facts fit onto the bones of the skeleton that they have previously chosen. (p.154f)

Schank then goes on to label the skeletal stories that backed the reactions of the various government as the US using the understandable tragedy (p.152f), Great Britain the justifiability of self-defense (p.153),  Libya insolence and state terrorism (p.154),  and Bahrain justifiable bad effects of war on the aggressor and moral courage (p.155).

So, we can summarize as a first impression that, while Schank will admit that some facts do not fit onto the bones of a skeleton, he is willing to talk about people's own realities and how the skeleton stories are what make up people's notions of truth.

... no matter what happens next, all the viewers of the play [that plays out in the international diplomatic incident, RCK] will retell the story according to the skeletons they have already selected; i.e. they will probably not be moved to reinterpret any new event in terms of some skeleton that they do not already have in mind. (p.158)

So even though the stories dominate to the point of where they shape the memory of the events and the way that future facts will attach to past narrations, there is still something that Schank can call coherence.

One of the oddities of story-based understanding is that people have difficulty making decisions if they know they will have trouble constructing a coherent story to explain their decision. (p.159)

So justificatory stories do have coherence requirements, otherwise they will not properly support the decisions through explanations. Schank goes on to demonstrate this with divorce stories (pp.160ff), which however need not concern us here.

Stories that were Challenged

While there is much plausibility to the fact that political agents have apriori decided how participants will respond to events in the arena that is international diplomacy---theorizing, as Sherlock Holmes would warn us, in advance of the facts (p.159), matters become more complicated when Schank looks at stories that were strongly challenged by agents able to do something about disagreement.

Schank discusses this problem in two examples, in the claimed rape of Tawana Brawley by white supremacists (pp.208ff) and the disqualification of Canadian runner Ben Johnson (pp.210ff) for allegations of doping. However, the larger context is the problem of the cultural and subcultural specificity of stories, and how to acquire that skill (pp.189-218). As a result, the analysis of these stories that were challenged (and ultimately rejected) by authoritative agents come across as situations of choosing bad raw materials for story telling on part of Brawley and Johnson.

Tawana Brawley

... Tawana Brawley ran away for four days, and she needed to tell a story. For her own reasons, she decided not to tell the true story of where she had been, but to invent one instead. (p.209)

It is easy to agree with Schank here, though one has to emphasize that he distinguishes between "true story" and "invend(ed) one" explicitly.

Schank then continues:

When we invent a story in order to mislead people, we try to figure out the story that they want to hear, and we tell it. Children frequently tell a he made me do it story or an it wasn't me that did it story when they are caught having done something wrong. And this kind of story is what Tawana Brawley told too. (p.209)

Again, we are on the same page as Shank here. But then Schank takes a departure that is interesting for the problem of reliability.

Her [Tawana Brawley's, RCK] problem was selecting a believable story. She failed to assess how many listeners would hear her story and failed to understand that what each of them wanted to hear was quite different. (p.209)

Even with the discussion of enculturation into story cultures and subcultures and the difficulties for teenagers to acquire these skills going before (p.208), the turn here is unexpected. The problem according to Schank at this point is not that too many listeners would eventually exhaust Tawana's range of fictional supports, but that they story expectations would eventually exceed her capabilities in some other way.

Schank argues that Brawley picked two basic skeletons, both shockingly realistic in 1980s America ( and as Dyson might remind us, even in 2017), namely young girl is kidnapped and raped as well as young black is victim of racial attack (p.209). Crucially for Schank's argument, the first one comes from the general American culture, and the second one from Brawley's subculture (p.209).

While either of these standard stories is bad enough, the combination of them produced something we can only assume Tawana had not counted on---the match of two types of stories || sought by the news media and black activists. (pp.209f)

Schank then discusses these two groups in turn:

The media looks for horrifying stories involving assaults on especially innocent people. Consequently, Tawana's story matched a skeleton story that news people are always looking to report. (p.210)

Her [i.e. Tawana Brawley's, RCK] story also matched a skeleton story that black activists are always on the lookout for: innocent blacks as easy victims of white officials. She had added that her rapists were state police officers and other officials of her area. The factor, of course, had it been true, should well have caused alarm on the part of the activists. (p.210)

Schank is entirely plausible in identifying the activation patterns for various groups' involvement, and the in arguing that Brawley did not understand how her chosen skeletons meshed with these activation skeletons. But even here, Schank is willing to admit that there are true stories of innocent blacks as victims---"had it been true" (p.210)---that activists should be alarmed by.

Tawana's mistake, apart from fabricating events in the first place, was to invent stories without understanding the standard nature of the stories that others look for. (p.210)

There are a polite and a critical reading to this sentence. The admission, and as an aside only, that "fabricating events in the first place" was a mistake either is Schank's backdoor to admit that the events matter (this is the polite reading) or an indication of his lack of appreciation for how much events matter (the critical reading), i.e. that Brawley's failure to grasp "the standard nature of stories" (p.210) pale to the point of irrelevance in comparison with the need to fabricate facts that could hold up to the scrutiny of multiple organizations.

It is thus with much less agreement than previously, or with a feeling of the emphasis lying on the wrong part, that we head into the description of the role of the standard nature of stories.

Thus, when doctors are handed a rape case or a case of unconsciousness from beating and deprivation, they have certain tests they perform to aid the victim. They also use skeleton stories to understand such cases, and they seek to fit the details of any new story into the familiar story. (p.210)

This  is just an adapted restating of Schank's general epistemology that understanding in humans is story-based.

Similarly, the police know a story about rape, and in the case of Tawana Brawley, they tried to fit the details of her story into theirs. (p.210)

As a result of casting the problem in this way, Schank posits that the police became suspicious because of the mismatch between Tawana's story and their expected story.

For both the doctors and the police, Tawan's story did not agree with the standard stories about rape, and this disparity caused them to question the truth of Tawana's claims. (p.210)

Notice that the whole problem of truth---now however applied to claims, not to facts or events or stories---is admitted and raised by Schank. Yet his conclusion is cast in terms of story skeletons and of subcultures:

Not surprisingly, since she is young and rather unsophisticated, Tawana Brawley failed to understand how to make up a story that matched the ones that the people who were listening to her expected to hear. She did not know the stories of the other subcultures. (p.210)

And almost wistfully, Schank concludes:

Traveling across cultures, it seems, requires the help of a translator. (p.210)

Perhaps a stronger stance that Schank could have taken was to recur on his prior notion of scripts. Tawana failed, because she did not really understand the rape script and the deprivation script, and was therefore unable to tell stories that matched well enough with the script that the doctors and the police officers had for these incidents.

Furthermore, as the New York Times article that Schank quotes (pp.208f) suggests, while the doctors and the police officers took their departure from their questioning the validity of the story, they did not condemn her on that account but used it to find actual evidence that contradicted Tawana's narrative. Notice the use of the word "evidence" in the cited article:

The conclusion that Miss Brawley fabricated her story is supported by ... evidence that she ran away and spent much of the next four days at her former apartment, evidence that she concocted the condition in which she was found, and evidence that she tried to mislead the police, doctors and others about what had happened to her.  --New York Times, September 27, 1988, cited in: Schank 1990, (p.209)

In fact, the article, a two-page spread as Schank admits (p.208), was called "Evidence points to Deceit by Brawley".

Even granted all the usual caveats of the mutual interaction between evidence and narrative, it seems hard to support the stance that for Miss Brawley, the story skeletons did her in. At best they tipped the police off to problems. And the failure in the collection of confirming evidence, which would have been required equally for a court of law, would have done her in just as much as the success in finding fabricated evidence.

Canadian Runner Ben Johnson

Schank of course believes that he has proven that Brawley became entrapped by being unfamiliar with the story expectations. Thus he can use the case of Ben Johnson, a Canadian runner disqualified from the Olympics for doping, as "another case of story misunderstanding" (p.210). 

The story is interesting in this context because the press assumed that everyone who used steroids also knows how to avoid getting caught. (p.211)

Schank's quotes from the NY Times actually do not bear this statement out. It is Dr Voy, the chief medical officer of the US Olympic Committee is the one that is quoted as commenting on the masking know-how in the athletes community.

Schank then goes on to enumerate the stories that Dr Voy, the physician and official, has---to wit: the miscalculate the dose, the screwy system, and the reckless gamble story, the panic to insure victory story and the masking the drug story (p.211)---as well as the stories that Johnson was familiar with---to wit: spiked my drink with drugs and bad lab test (p.211).

The first thing to notice is that Voy's and Johnson's narrative intentions are at odds. None of Dr Voy's stories would have gotten Johnson a pass for testing positive. Indeed, the article gives no examples of stories that Dr Voy would have considered legitimate for a positive testing candidate to continue on as a medal bearer. So Johnson could not have used any of these stories. In fact, all we learn is that the stories Johnson alleged were not part of Dr Voy's repertoire of acceptable excuses; that set may have been empty. If there was no story for Johnson to choose, then Schank's comment, that "in essence, the only thinking we have here is the selection of stories" (p.211), is puzzling in the extreme.

Summary

Though Schank at times sounds as if he is flirting with both sides of the relativism divide, this effect is produced partially by sloppy wording and partially by not distinguishing the following points correctly:

1. Even if skeletal stories are hard to disprove because of their intentionality, which functions as a political stance does, their are notions of quality of match that can lead to not selecting them.
2. Stories include factual information and can be challenged much more readily along that dimension. Admittedly, facts may themselves be the outcome of stories (a topic that Schank unfortunately bypasses), and facts have some of the same subcultural aspects that Schank identified for the stories (e.g. water-logged dinosaurs supporting a Biblical flood narrative) as to acceptability and validity.
3. Though it may not be possible to show that some stories are true, it is sufficient to be able to show that some stories are false for historiography to have the ability to stem the flood of politically-charged revisionist history. Tawana Brawley's story for sure and possibly Ben Johnson's story as well (Schank's source material is too terse) are stories that are false, due to the evidence found, not the skeletons chosen.

It is possible that Schank's side-stepping of the question of truth is due to his general goal of moving AI work from theorem proving and expert systems (p.xlii) toward story generation / understanding / summarization and explanation.

If we take a step back and look at the larger sources of information available for the examples that Schank uses, such as the Admiral Fogarty report from August 1988 or the investigative research journalism by the New York Times reporters Robert McFadden et al, Outrage: The Story Behind the Tawana Brawley Hoax, from August 1990,  we get the suspicion that Schank is used in the small forms, such as the newspaper article, not the hundred-plus pages slugfest of details that Fogarty or McFadden and their collaborators provided with.

Postscriptum

In an amusing twist, the McFadden's book Outrage, published contemporaneously with Schank's book in 1990, possibly even contradicts the sequence of events claimed by Schank. 

Later, Dr [Alice, RCK] Pena [the emergency room physician, cf. p20, RCK] had her put her feet into stirrups for an examination of the vaginal, rectal and pelvic areas. The examination revealed no cuts, dried blood, bruises, swelling, deep redness, or other indications of injury. There were no signs of trauma to the mouth …. Indeed, the girl’s [Tawana Brawley’s, RCK] teeth were surprisingly clean and her mouth did not even have a bad odor. Dr Pena decided to forego the use of a rape-detection kit, at least for a while. There weren’t enough signs to warrant it …. (p.21)

At this point, with Tawana still giving signs of semi-consciousness (p.17), and had hardly launched into a story of the type that Schank is looking for. Already the initial interaction with the paramedics and the emergency room physician was gathering evidence against the narrative that Tawana was planning or had been told to use.

Bibliographic Record

Roger C. Schank, Tell Me A Story: Narrative and Intelligence,  Evanston, IL (Northwestern University Press), 1995 (= reprint of the 1990 edition published in New York (Scribner), 1990; with a foreword of Gary Saul Morson, from 1995). [Google Book Selections]

Mildenberger über Heilsgeschichte

Mildenberger emphasizes that the term itself is of 19th century origin (Erlanger Theologican J. Ch. K. v. Hofmann), even if pietistic Biblizism in the style of J.A. Bengel and F.Ch. Oetinger as well as the Federationtheology of the 16th century prefigure the notion (sp.1584).

Mildenberger notes that the premise to such thinking is accepting all of history as one reality, which only begins to take place in the 2nd half of the 18th century (sp.1584). Here, Heilsgeschichte effectively replaces metaphysics for dogmatics (sp.1584) and has to find a profile in comparison to world history.

Already in Hofmann's work the curious move, that Salvation History has existence independent of any knowing subject surfaces here (p.1585). Key criticisms of this position are Bultmann [presumably Geschichte und Eschatologie?, 1955?] and O. Cullmann's Heil als Geschichte, 1965.

Salvation history finds use in conservative positions that insist on the verbal inspiration of the Biblical writings, coupled with a modern notion of history, which is then intended to counter the historical critical reconstructions of the Biblical narratives.

Hier ist die mehr oder weniger streng gefaßte Vorstellung der Verbalinspiration mit einem modernen Verständnis geschichtlicher Tatsächlichkeit verknüpft. (sp.1585)

 However, Mildenberger indicates the problems that this approach has.

Heilsgeschichte als Systematisierung des biblischen Erzählens von Gottes Handeln erweist sich ## darin als problematisch, daß sie die biblischen Erzählungen in einen diesen fremden Zusammenhang einer einzigen Geschichte bringen will. Dabei kommt ein dem biblischen Reden fremder Begriff von Tatsächlichkeit und zeitlicher Kontinuität ins Spiel, der die biblischen Erzählungen auf einen hinter diesen liegenden Tatsachenzusammenhang hin befragt. ... dieser konstruierte Tatsachenzusammenhang (soll dann, RCK) als Heilsgeschichte die objektive Grundlage des Glaubens sein.  Die moderne Geschichtskonstruktion tritt an die Stelle des biblischen Redens, wo auch die einzelnen Inhalte der biblischen Erzählung entnommen sind. (sp.1586)

No approach of Salvation History can escape the assumption that history can be interpreted at all as such a unified process (sp.1586).

Die Bestimmung der Gesamtwirklichkeit als Heilsgeschichte setzt voraus, daß Geschichte überhaupt als sinnvoller zielgerichteter Gesamtzusammenhang erfasßt werden kann. Das ist aber ein keineswegs selbstverständliches Wirklichkeitsverständnis. (sp.1586)

Mildenberger proposes to drop the use of the term altogether (sp.1586).

Bibliographie

Friedrich Mildenberger, Art. Heilsgeschichte, RGG4, Band 3, sp.1584-1586.

• O. Cullmann, Heil als Geschichte, 1965.
• R. Bultmann, Geschichte und Eschatologie, 1955?
• Karl Löwith, Meaning in History, 1949 (= Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen, 1953).
• R. Koselleck, Art Geschichte, V-VII, GGB2, 647-717.

Portelli on the Difference of Oral History

Alessandro Portelli insists that as oral sources, the recorded tape is the actual document (p.33), which can therefore not be destroyed.

The transcription, as a written document the preferred form, is a removed object due to its various forms of interpretation, such as the punctuation which ties to replicate pauses in speech. (p.34)

The tone and volume range and the rhythm of popular speech carry implicit meaning and social connotations which are not reproducible in writing --- unless, and then in inadequate and hardly accessible form, as musical notation. (p.34)

It has no story for some speech properties, such as the velocity of speech, an ambiguous but meaningful property (p.34).

... slowing down may mean greater emphasis as well as greater difficulty, and acceleration may show a wish to glide over certain points, as well as a greater familiarity or ease. (p.34)

Because these properties are "sites" of important narrative functions, their loss reduces the emotional valence of the narrative. (p.35)

This is even more true when folk informants are involved: they may be poor in vocabulary but are often richer in range of tone, volume and intonation than middle-class speakers who have learned to imitate in speech the monotone of writing. (p.35)

Because oral history produces a narrative, the tools for analysis of narratives are relevant. (p.35) Such formal and stylistic analyses are not optional:

The greater or lesser presence of formalized materials (proverbs, songs, formulas, and stereotypes) may measure the degree in which a collective viewpoint exists within an individual's narrative. (p.35)

This equally applies to standardized language and dialect and their uses (p.35).

Oral history is concerned with meaning more than with facts (p.36); thus the factually `false` may still be psychologically `true` (p.37). Thus, in terms of the Russian formalists, it contributes less to the fabula than to the plot [we would say emplotment now, RCK] (p.36).

Oral sources tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did. (p.36)

Portelli stresses that many written sources are fundamentally transcripts of uncontrolled oral sources, which can thereby never be analyzed for bias (p.37).

 ... memory is not a passive depository of facts, but an active process of creation of meanings. (p.37)

Because of this meaning, there are systematic distortions, which are almost as informative as the facts to be recalled. As standards of acceptability of behavior change, editing and even hiding takes place, which is crucial information (p.38).

The difference between how the subject used to think and how the subject thinks now is a key contribution in understanding the change that has occurred (p.38). Those who cannot separate this shift out use an epic mode of presentation, because they claim a timeless relevance of the past for the present. The ability to escape this timewarp is a key skill the interviewer can contribute.

If the interview is conducted skillfully and its purposes are clear to the narrators, it is not impossible for them to make a distinction between present and past self, and to objectify the past self as other than the present one. In these cases --- Malcolm X is again typical --- irony is the major narrative mode: two different ethical (or political, or religious) and narrative standards interfere and overlap, and their tension shapes the telling of the story. (p.38) [emphasis in original, RCK]

[[RCK: Notice that this is the technical use of irony, not the standard common-sense on.]]

Portelli stresses that oral sources remain artificial, variable and partial. (p,38) This has to do with the fact that the interview situations is engineered; the oral replies given are not repeatable; and the knowledge of the informer can never be exhausted (pp.39-40).

The relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee cannot be overrated, because the interviewer is what makes the potential of an oral source into an actuality and causes "transmission" to take place (p.39). As a consequence, an oral source that is transcribed without the questions of the interviewer eliminates half of the interaction and obfuscates the variability, insinuating that the interviewee would have responded equally every time (p.39).

Researchers often introduce specific distortions: informants tell them what they believe they want to be told and thus reveal who they think the research is. (p.39)

Rigidly over-structuring the interview will only turn the interviewee into an echo of the views of the interviewer, merely confirming the frame of reference of the historian (p.39). Portelli calls that phenomenon "ventriloquizing" (p.40).

Variability needs to be addressed by re-questioning, but the fact that this cannot quiesce produces the partial nature of the oral source (pp.39f).

The oral source is the combined product of the historian and the interviewee, not the unfiltered voice of the silenced masses.

... the control of the historical discourse remains firmly in the hand of the historian. (p.40)

Even accepting that the working class speaks through oral history, it is clear that the class does not speak in the abstract, but speaks to the historian, with the historian and, inasmuch as the material is published, through the historian. (p.40)

[[RCK: To which I would add that the class does not speak either, but members of the class, but the intent is clear of course.]]

Finally, as a literary researcher, Portelli rightfully points out that, other than in the case of other sources, historians are an embedded narrator of the story, in the style of the modern novel, not the 19th century omniscient narrator using the third person voice (p.41). Portelli analogizes the situation to Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, who has to ask other 'informants' in order to complement what he has heard and seen.

In the writing of history, as in literature, the act of focusing on the function of the narrator causes this function to be fragmented. (p.41)

On explicitly entering the story, historians must allow the sources to enter the tale with their autonomous discourse. (p.41)

Oral history has no unified subject; it is told from a multitude of points of view, .... oral history can never be told without taking sides, since the 'sides' exist inside the telling. And ... historians and 'sources' are hardly ever on the same 'side'. (p.41)  

Bibliographic Record

Alessandro Portelli, What Makes Oral History Different, in: Robert Perks, Alistair Thomson (ed), The Oral History Reader, 2nd Edition, London (Routledge) 2006, pp.32-41.

Curiouser and Curiouser

When a friend of mine interviewed a pagan who wanted to know more about easter eggs, easter bunnies and easter foxes, this lead me to Georg Franck von Franckenau, a medical doctor and personal attendant to Christian V of Denmark, who wrote some 20+ Medical dissertations in the style of Latin Satires, published posthumously by his son in 1722, where Satire #19 is the first discussion of the easter egg and the easter bunny, with Latin and German quotes (p.396 in the book, p.413 in the PDF). The work of Franckenau, especially his analysis of the sexual and the erotic in these dissertations, is discussed in this paper, which places Franckenau squarely into the Baroque tradition of curiosity literature (p.88 Fn 14). The author makes a good case for the relationship between the extreme and marvelous and the Baconian inductive method on the other, which required these outliers to adjust the conceptual framework (p.96 Fn 55).

Among books that discuss the curiosity literature is Christoph Daxelmüller (1979), Barockdissertationen und Polyhistorismus. Die Curiositas der Ethnica und Magica im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Würzburg, 117–186, which is available at the Vienna FB for European Ethnography.

Momigliano on Ecclesiastical Historiography

Momigliano begins his sketch by pointing to the difficulties that 18th century Italian historiographers faced with respect to the Church hierarchy, in a century-spanning way.

An event of the fifth century [i.e. Emperor Vallentinianus III giving the pallium to the bishop of Ravenna, as part of raising Ravenna to an archbishopric, RCK] as told by a local ecclesiastical historian of the ninth century [i.e. Agnellus of Ravenna, author of a Liber Pontificalis, RCK] still had practical implications for the eighteenth century---and not only in Ravenna, but everywhere in Christendom. (p.136)

This precedent-directed connection is glossed by Momigliano as follows:

The very continuity of the institution of the Church through the centuries makes it inevitable that anything which happened in the Church's past should be relevant to its present. (p.136)

[[RCK: That argument of course only holds because of the conservative nature, as a structure that cannot reform, only re-explicate or rephrase. Institutions such as companies that re-innovate themselves every couple of years do not have these problems at all; the fact that IBM used to make meat scales has zero impact on their current foundational physics research.]]

Clearly Momigliano is right, that even across the denominational ditches,

A Church that consciously breaks with its original principles and its original institutions is inconceivable. (p.136)

The Church knows a return to the principles, not a break with them. (p.136)

 Momigliano argues that this both simplifies and complicates the task of the ecclesiastical historian.

[The Church historian, RCK] ... has to write the history of an institution which began in a precise moment, had an original structure, and developed with clear changes. It is for him to judge where the change implies a betrayal of the original purposes of the institution. On the other hand the historian of the Church is inevitably faced with the difficulty of having continuously to relate the events of the individual local churches to the corpus mysticum of the Ecclesia universalis. (p.136)

Momigliano believes that secular historians can focus on retelling the past, without the chance of much challenging of their results (pp.136f).

The historian of the Church knows that at any point he will be challenged. (p.137)

Church historians prepare for these challenges by rigor in the documentation of their retellings of the past. (p.137)

[[RCK: The argument that historians have few challenges to their retellings, presumably outside of their discipline, is only true if they work on a topic whose connection to the present is unclear. In general, Momigliano seems to work with an inverted arrow of time; the question is the applicability to the present times, and it is the principles' impact on the present time that are at issue, not the relationship of these principles to the past. A biography of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or the other founding fathers is no less challenged in the present day US, because their principles project forward, because the history of politics in the US is interpreted as an unfolding of the original Declaration of Independence and the original Constitution plus Amendments. A biography of Sam Houston, outside of Texas, or of Davy Crockett, has no such projections.]]

We have defined what seem to us some of the essential elements of ecclesiastical historiography: the continuous interrelation of dogma and facts; the transcendental significance attributed to the period of the origin; the emphasis on factual evidence; the ever present problem of relating events of local churches to the mystical body of the Universal Church. (p.138)

Momigliano points out that this is but an enumeration of the features of the first Church history of Eusebius of Caesarea, who is effectively without predecessor in his creation of his ecclesiastical history.

Momigliano explains the analogy between Eusebius' endeavor and the "secular" historiography of the pagan contemporaries.

... the succession of the bishops in || the apostolic see represented the continuity of the legitimate heirs of Christ; whereas the preservation of the purity of the original teaching of the Apostles gave internal unity to the Church. Apostolic succession and doctrinal orthodoxy were the pillars of the new Christian nation [i.e. the Church, RCK]; its enemies the persecutors and the heretics. Thus ecclesiastical history replaced the battles of ordinary political history by the trials inherent in resistance to persecution and heresy. (pp.139f)

Though Eusebius was inspired by the Acts of the Apostles for the spreading, the Old Testament and Flavius Josephus for the Holy Nation, and the Books of Maccabees for the struggle against persecution, his conception was novel (p.140).

Momigliano believes that Eusebius was inspired by Diogenes Laertius and his history of the philosophical schools, where the term diadoche denotes the notion of "succession", and the distinction of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, as well as thorough antiquarian documentation (p.140). Momigliano points to similar documentation in Flavius Josephus and Maccabees, and to the rabbinic tradition of succession as similar parallels (pp.140f).

Momigliano sees the very difficulty of Eusebius in his departure from a point where the Roman state and the Christian nation are two separate entities, a model that would no longer hold when what was Caesar's and what was Christ's would become indistinguishable (p.141).

There was a very real duality in Eusebius' notion of ecclesiastical history which was bound to become apparent as soon as the Christians were safely in command of the Roman state. (p.141)

Thus, the problem was spelled out for all followers of Eusebius:

... how to deal with this divine institution's very earthly relations with other institutions in terms of power, violence, and even territorial claims. (p.141)

A Church in power can hardly separate itself from the State in which it exercises its power. (p.141)

... wherever Church and State tend to coalesce, it is difficult to separate heresy from political rebellion, dogmatic differences from court factions. (p.141)

In fact, none of the other ecclesiastical historians of Late Antiquity mentioned to get past this problem, using the succession of the emperors rather to structure their work chronologically, instead of the succession of bishops or metropolitans (p.141).

Momigliano cites some of the immediate successors of Eusebius and shows how they deal with the amalgamation, both positively and negatively. Sozomenus---student of Socrates, another immediate successor of Eusebius---openly invites his emperor, Theodosius II "to revise and censor what he has written" (p.143). Theodoretus, a provincial involved in the Nestorian dispute, "warns the emperors that if they fail in their duty to orthodoxy they may be punished by God on the battlefield" (p.143).

As a corrective view, Philostorgius is useful, as he embodies the same principles in an non-orthodox way, as he was "an Arian of the Eunomian variety" (p.144).

... his Ecclesiastical History started with the origins of the Arian controversy .... He adopted clear apocalyptic tones and liked to believe that the disaster of Adrianopolis in 378 was not unconnected with the persecution of the Arians. He saw the importance of the sack of Rome in 410 ... [which goes almost ignored by the orthodox Church historians, RCK]. (p.144)

Momigliano sees the ecclesiastical history after the Latin condensation, the Historia Tripartita of Cassiodorus and Epiphanius (p.144), as as complicated by the fact that the illusion of a Universal christianity could not longer be maintained, and that all state history had become local too. The restoration of the Eusebian program did not really happen, inspite of the excellent work of Otto von Freising, Adam von Bremen, Beda Venerabilis and Hugo of Fleury, (p.146), Flodoardus of Rheims, Ordericus Vitalis of Normandy (p.148), until the Centuriae of Magdeburg in 1559 (p.146): Luther had studied the Rufinian translation; Caspar Hedio reissued parts of the text in his Chronica of 1530, which drew upon Eusebius and the Tripartita; and Flacius and the centuriators "knew their Eusebius by heart" (p.149).

[[RCK: The Centuria by Matthias Flacius and Johannes Wiegand of Magdeburg, among other achievements, exposed the Pseudo-Isidorian Canones that had become part of the Decretium of Gratian, through source critical methods, in an attempt to show the Catholic Church as the departure and the Lutheran Reformation as the Restoration of the true church. They were therefore, just as Momigliano would have predicted, busily appealing to the mystical body of the ecclesia universalis and using documentary evidence to make their case.]]

What both Protestants and Catholics wanted to prove was that they had the authority of the first centuries of the Church on their side. Consequently, the ecclesiastical history that the religious controversies of the sixteenth century demanded was a history of the Universal Church---not a history of special [i.e. particular, RCK] churches. (p.150)

Not only had the "standards of precise documentation" evolved since the time of Eusebius, but the latter "had no suspicion that the very course of events of the first Christian centuries could be disputed and that there might be more than one interpretation of basic events" (p.150).

This focus on the original Church dropped the Christian nation by the wayside.

They [i.e. Flacius, Baronio---the Catholic historian of the Counter-Reformation, cf. Vol 3 in German translation from the Baroque---and their followers, RCK] were concerned not so much with the Christians as with Christian institutions and doctrines. (p.150)

Throughout the seventeenth and the eighteenth century, this focus on the Universal Church,  whether from the Protestant or the Catholic side, is not lost.

Even the revolutionary Gottfried Arnold, who sees the real church outside every existing denomination, does not yet doubt that the true ecclesia exists somewhere. (p.151)

Momigliano nominates several candidates for having shaking the consensus of "the existence of the invisible, Universal Church" (p.152). Momigliano points to Johann Lorenz von Mosheim's Institutionum historiae ecclesiasticae of 1755; Ferdinand Christian Baur, a student of Hegel; or Max Weber's religious sociology, which "put the Christian Church on a level with any other religious society---or perhaps with any other human society" (p.152). Momigliano's favorite is Pietro Giannone, who wrote a sketch in prison in the 1740s that could not be published until 1859, the Istoria del Pontificato de Gregorio Magno (p.152). [[RCK: Giannone had earlier written a History of the Kingdom of Naples in two volumes, which was how he aligned the political with the religious.]]

Momigliano reminds his audience that the first historian to write a history of the origins of Christianity, who was not a theologian, in Germany was Eduard Meyer in 1921 (p.152).

Momigliano draws the two irresolvable different positions, which he considers beyond mediation.

Those who accept the notion of the Church as a divine institution which is different from other institutions have to face the difficulty that Church history reveals only too obviously a continuous mixture of political and religious aspects: hence the distinction frequently made by Church historians of the last two centuries [i.e. 19th and 20th, presumably, RCK] between internal and external history of the Church, where internal means (more or less) religious and external means (more or less) political. (p.152)

By contrast, the historians of the Church as a worldly institution have to reckon with the difficulty of describing without the help of a belief what has existed through the help of a belief. (p.152)

Bibliographic Record

Arnaldo Momigliano, Ecclesiastical History, in: Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, (= Sather Classical Lectures Vol 54), University of California Press (Berkeley-Los Angeles-Oxford) 1990, pp.132-156.

What historiography does

Historiography as a science makes narratives impossible. This is its primary and main functions. Most of the narratives are too simplistic to be satisfactory; but some are too complicated as well.

Historiography achieved this aim in two ways: in the process of accumulating data, it provides minimal inclusion requirements for all proposed narratives. The path may wind in a number of ways but ihas to traverse these loci. Having to include these in their belly makes simplistic stories pop like an over inflated balloon or complex stories hang themselves in their own skein.

Furthermore, in re-emplotting new stories, it breaks facile binary disjunctions. The nice thing about binary disjunctions is the hard either-or which can prove the one by the proof of the negation if the other. Re-emplotments add terms to the disjuncts, other ways the stories might have gone, requiring proof by cases to settle the matter.

The fundamental problem of historiography is that historical knowledge is non-monotonic. Any new factoid could change everything. The best bet for the science then is to have a small number of maximally distinct narratives. 

The process of factoid generation and re-emplotment serves to maintain the set as small yet distinct.

The naval War of 1812 by Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919

I was pointed to The naval War of 1812 : Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919  as a potential source for my transportation research with the use of Morris, Charles R. (2012-10-23). The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution. PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition.

Morris writes:

Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote a small masterpiece on the naval war, was no fan of [US commanding officer] Chauncey, but he mocked [British commanding officer, RCK] Yeo’s battle report for failing to admit that his fleet “ran away.” (Kindle Locations 459-460)

Mormon Postmodernism

One of the oddest creatures is the Mormon post-modernist, the staunch defender of the most large scale narrative in Western history attacking the sceptics with the tools of anti-large scale narrative and epistemic investigations.

Alan Goff may be the most famous one: After writing his thesis at BYU on this issue, he continued to publish articles on this issue, up until the present. A favorite target of his is Dan Vogel and his interpretations of the way the Book of Mormon came about.

• 2005 review of Dan Vogel's Making of a Prophet
• 2014 article on The Inevitability of Epistemology in Historiography (which attacks Dan Vogel again, for many pages, and needs trimming)