One book, one December meme response
Dec. 21st, 2025 02:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Happy Gravy Day to those who celebrate! It's been a bit of a disjointed few days. I'm working right up to (and including) 24th December, so there's the usual mad scramble to deal with the inevitable mad scramble of students and researchers wanting to 'wrap things up before Christmas,' I'm trying to get all the food shopping and Christmas preparation done around that, and to top it all off, both Matthias and I have been sick. He's mostly better now, and I'm on the way to recovery, but the timing was less than ideal.
author_by_night suggested that I talk about the discrepancy between conventional understanding of history (based to a large extent on the experiences of the upper echelons of society), and the realities of ordinary people's lives for the December talking meme, and although I don't really feel qualified to provide a definitive answer to this, I'll do my best.
I'm not a historian by background — before I became a librarian, I received a PhD in medieval Irish literature. Obviously history figures into that, but in all my three degrees my focus was much more on the literary side of things, and I've been out of academia (other than research support for medical research) for more than ten years.
I would broadly say — with the usual caveats about making sweeping statements about 'history' (as opposed to talking about specific historical times and places) — that this discrepancy is correct. For most of human history, we are building our historical understanding on: a) the written record produced by a minuscule literate elite and b) the fraction of that written record that has actually survived down the years. For example, if I recall correctly, the entirety of the Old English literary corpus exists in just six manuscripts (some of which, including the manuscript that contains Beowulf, only narrowly escaped being destroyed in a fire). Although we can supplement our historical understanding with archaeology and material culture, there are absences there as well, and it would be wrong to make comprehensive generalisations based on a tiny handful of written records. Just as it would be inaccurate for historians of the future to assume that the lives of the British royal family are representative of the lives of the average British person, or the lives of tech oligarchs like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk are representative of the average US American experience, it would be wrong to generalise in similar ways about people of the past. To be fair, I don't think there are many credible historians who would perpetuate such misconceptions.
I think the reason why these misconceptions based on elite experiences are so prevalent in popular culture is that most popular history or historically-inspired fiction does tend to focus on the experiences of the political and cultural elite — writers and showrunners and filmmakers tend to assume that the lives of royals, the nobility, political leaders etc are more glamorous and interesting, and create books/films/TV shows etc accordingly. I don't think the problem is a dearth of credible academic historical research into less elite, less examined lives and experiences — it's more the lack of visibility these perspectives get in popular culture.
I've picked up The Dark Is Rising for my annual winter solstice reread, but haven't finished it yet, and have otherwise only finished one other book this week: The Art of a Lie (Laura Shepherd-Robinson), another great novel by one of my favourite writers of historical fiction. This was a page-turning, enjoyable read with all the features I've come to enjoy about Shepherd-Robinson's books: a scammer in eighteenth-century London embarks on a new con job on a wealthy widow, and finds he's picked a more savvy and complicated mark than his usual targets. The book switches perspectives, each time revealing more unreliabilities in its pair of narrators, pulling the rug out from each other and from the reader with every shift in point of view. As always, the author's extensive research and rich evocation of this period in history is on full display — I was delighted to learn more about eighteenth-century confectionery- and ice-cream-making, law-enforcement in London before it had a dedicated police force, and all the various opportunities for scamming and corruption (most of which are essentially unchanged to this day — there was a common 'Spanish prisoner' scam which is identical to today's 'Nigerian prince' scam).
And that's about it for this week. I hope everyone else is having a restful time.
author_by_night suggested that I talk about the discrepancy between conventional understanding of history (based to a large extent on the experiences of the upper echelons of society), and the realities of ordinary people's lives for the December talking meme, and although I don't really feel qualified to provide a definitive answer to this, I'll do my best.I'm not a historian by background — before I became a librarian, I received a PhD in medieval Irish literature. Obviously history figures into that, but in all my three degrees my focus was much more on the literary side of things, and I've been out of academia (other than research support for medical research) for more than ten years.
I would broadly say — with the usual caveats about making sweeping statements about 'history' (as opposed to talking about specific historical times and places) — that this discrepancy is correct. For most of human history, we are building our historical understanding on: a) the written record produced by a minuscule literate elite and b) the fraction of that written record that has actually survived down the years. For example, if I recall correctly, the entirety of the Old English literary corpus exists in just six manuscripts (some of which, including the manuscript that contains Beowulf, only narrowly escaped being destroyed in a fire). Although we can supplement our historical understanding with archaeology and material culture, there are absences there as well, and it would be wrong to make comprehensive generalisations based on a tiny handful of written records. Just as it would be inaccurate for historians of the future to assume that the lives of the British royal family are representative of the lives of the average British person, or the lives of tech oligarchs like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk are representative of the average US American experience, it would be wrong to generalise in similar ways about people of the past. To be fair, I don't think there are many credible historians who would perpetuate such misconceptions.
I think the reason why these misconceptions based on elite experiences are so prevalent in popular culture is that most popular history or historically-inspired fiction does tend to focus on the experiences of the political and cultural elite — writers and showrunners and filmmakers tend to assume that the lives of royals, the nobility, political leaders etc are more glamorous and interesting, and create books/films/TV shows etc accordingly. I don't think the problem is a dearth of credible academic historical research into less elite, less examined lives and experiences — it's more the lack of visibility these perspectives get in popular culture.
I've picked up The Dark Is Rising for my annual winter solstice reread, but haven't finished it yet, and have otherwise only finished one other book this week: The Art of a Lie (Laura Shepherd-Robinson), another great novel by one of my favourite writers of historical fiction. This was a page-turning, enjoyable read with all the features I've come to enjoy about Shepherd-Robinson's books: a scammer in eighteenth-century London embarks on a new con job on a wealthy widow, and finds he's picked a more savvy and complicated mark than his usual targets. The book switches perspectives, each time revealing more unreliabilities in its pair of narrators, pulling the rug out from each other and from the reader with every shift in point of view. As always, the author's extensive research and rich evocation of this period in history is on full display — I was delighted to learn more about eighteenth-century confectionery- and ice-cream-making, law-enforcement in London before it had a dedicated police force, and all the various opportunities for scamming and corruption (most of which are essentially unchanged to this day — there was a common 'Spanish prisoner' scam which is identical to today's 'Nigerian prince' scam).
And that's about it for this week. I hope everyone else is having a restful time.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-21 02:18 pm (UTC)I loved The Art of a Lie too. Shepherd-Robinson is on auto-buy for me.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-21 02:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-21 02:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-21 02:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-21 02:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-21 02:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-21 04:33 pm (UTC)b) the fraction of that written record that has actually survived down the years.
That's a very good point. A lot has probably been lost.
I don't think the problem is a dearth of credible academic historical research into less elite, less examined lives and experiences — it's more the lack of visibility these perspectives get in popular culture.
And that probably extends even to popular history, versus deep historical studies. It's easier to find a tour of a castle than it is a museum dedicated to medieval villages, even though I'm sure those do exist. (They're just not in the travel brochures.) It's not so much the lack of scholarship as it is that perhaps our immediate go-tos (historical fiction, period dramas, museums) do focus on the elite, since that's what's shown and advertised. People who want to delve in can, but they have to want to, and many don't. Hence, the misconceptions are spread.
I also think for the aforementioned reasons, even people who consider themselves well-versed may not be as knowledgeable about certain subjects as they think they are. I got good grades in history in school, but in doing genealogy research, I've come to realize how many misconceptions I held. I absolutely had history teachers tell me most people didn't live past the age of thirty, which is patently false. (They're mixing up life expectancy with death rates.)
no subject
Date: 2025-12-21 05:00 pm (UTC)I also think for the aforementioned reasons, even people who consider themselves well-versed may not be as knowledgeable about certain subjects as they think they are.
I agree. That's why there are so many amateur history enthusiasts with lots of knowledge of the lives of political/cultural elites, but almost zero understanding of how ordinary people lived in those same time periods, and they mistake their narrow expertise as being a comprehensive understanding.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-21 08:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-22 01:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-22 03:49 am (UTC)=^..^=~
no subject
Date: 2025-12-22 01:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-22 10:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-22 04:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-22 01:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-23 07:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 02:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 04:20 am (UTC)I hope you're feeling better now :)
no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 02:43 pm (UTC)And yes, 'Anglo-Saxon' is a loaded term (to make matters even more complicated, there are big differences in understanding of the term, both academically and colloquially, across different English-speaking countries; the split is particularly severe across both sides of the Atlantic).