Three things are disturbing about the "People in the Middle Ages..."
nature piece quoted and commented on by Otfried:
1. Why do scholars in other fields think they can draw conclusions
about the medieval field without doing some research in the scholarship
of medievalists? Why doesn't he know that he doesn't know what he is
talking about? The lack of primary sources, other than the artwork
itself, is also extremely disturbing.
2. Why would a scholar in ANY field fall into this kind of
historical fallacy, essentially making a reductionist argument? For
that matter, his sense of art and aesthetics is equally bad and I am
sure art scholars would cringe as well.
3. Why can't he see the bias in his approach to the subject? He
seems to lack the kind of self-awareness needed in scholarship and
teaching--that always looks for the other side, another point of view,
or another explanation, if only to argue against it.
I have run into this before in the academy, unfortunately,
particularly in regard to medieval religious studies--a prevailing
negativism toward Christianity and/or the Middle Ages, judgmentally
expecting to find things "wrong" and not trying to understand the period
or people (even if one disagrees with what one finds). William
Manchester's sorry excuse for a book, "A World Lit Only By Fire" is a
case in point--he didn't really try to understand medieval people on
their own terms, but only used them as a foil to his argument about
progress in western civilization.
The analogy that comes to mind is an attic full of stuff: this
person would go in and sort the items according to what looked like junk
to him, tossing out as irrelevant everything he didn't like or think was
worthwhile. A good scholar would look at each piece of "junk" in the
attic and wonder "what was it used for? why was this important? what
did it mean to the people who kept it?" The absence of this kind of
curiosity on the part of someone engaged in scholarship is appalling.
Sorry to rant--this is one of my pet peeves.
Karen
--
Dr. Karen Jolly
Associate Professor, History
University of Hawai`i at Manoa
[log in to unmask]
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~kjolly
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