SUMMARY MARTHA HOWELL &
WALTER PREVENIER, FROM RELIABLE
SOURCES: AN INTRODUCTION TO
HISTORICAL METHODS (ITHACA, NEW
YORK 2001)
2016 – 2017, Semester II
HISTORY
BACHELOR YEAR II
Lisa Jurrjens
,Summary Howell & Prevenier, From reliable sources (2001)
Content
Chapter 1 The Source: The Basis of Our Knowledge about the Past ........................................ 3
A. What is a source? ............................................................................................................... 3
B. Source Typologies, Their Evolution and Complementarity .............................................. 4
C. The Impact of Communication and Information Technology on the Production of
Sources.................................................................................................................................... 5
D. Storing and Delivering Information................................................................................... 6
Chapter 2 Technical Analysis of Sources .................................................................................. 9
A. Clio’s Laboratory ............................................................................................................... 9
[1] Palaeography ................................................................................................................. 9
[2] Diplomatics ................................................................................................................... 9
[3] Archaeology .................................................................................................................. 9
[4] Statistics ...................................................................................................................... 10
[5] Additional Technical Tools ......................................................................................... 11
B. Source Criticism: The Great Tradition ............................................................................ 12
[1] The “Genealogy” of the Document ............................................................................. 12
[2] Genesis of a Document ............................................................................................... 12
[3] The “Originality” of the Document ............................................................................. 13
[4] Interpretation of the Document ................................................................................... 13
[5] Authorial Authority ..................................................................................................... 13
[6] Competence of the Observer ....................................................................................... 13
[7] The Trustworthiness of the Observer .......................................................................... 14
Chapter 3 Historical Interpretation: The Traditional Basics .................................................... 15
A. Comparison of Sources .................................................................................................... 15
B. Establishing Evidentiary Satisfaction .............................................................................. 16
C. The “Facts” That Matter .................................................................................................. 17
Chapter 4 New Interpretive Approaches .................................................................................. 18
A. Interdisciplinarity ............................................................................................................. 18
[1] The Social Sciences ..................................................................................................... 18
[2] The Humanities ........................................................................................................... 19
B. The Politics of History Writing........................................................................................ 20
[1] The Annales................................................................................................................. 20
[2] The “New Left” and New Histories ............................................................................ 21
[3] The New Cultural History ........................................................................................... 21
Lisa Jurrjens 1
,Summary Howell & Prevenier, From reliable sources (2001)
Chapter 5 The Nature of Historical Knowledge ....................................................................... 22
A. Change and Continuity .................................................................................................... 22
B. Causality .......................................................................................................................... 23
[1] Causal Factors ............................................................................................................. 24
[2] The Role of the Individual .......................................................................................... 26
C. History Today .................................................................................................................. 26
[1] The Problem of Objectivity ......................................................................................... 27
[2] The Status of the “Fact” .............................................................................................. 27
Lisa Jurrjens 2
,Summary Howell & Prevenier, From reliable sources (2001)
Chapter 1 The Source: The Basis of Our Knowledge about the Past
A. What is a source?
Sources are artefacts that have been left by the past. They exist either as relics, what we might
call “remains”, or as the testimonies of witnesses to the past.
The first kinds of sources, relics or remains, offer the researcher a clue about the past
simply by virtue of their existence. The wooden columns found at the site of a prehistoric
settlement testify, for example, to the existence of a people and tell historians something
about their culture.
In contrast, testimonies are the oral or written reports that describe an event, whether
simple or complex, such as the record of a property exchange. Speeches or commentaries are
also testimonies. The authors of such testimonies can provide the historian information about
what happened, how and in what circumstances the event occurred, and why it occurred.
Both relics and testimonies were usually created for the specific purposes of the age in
which they were made. One of the historian’s principal tasks is to uncover the original
purpose or function of the relics or testimonies that have come down to posterity, to divine
what use they were intended to serve and what purposes they actually served at the time they
were created.
Testimonies and artefacts, whether oral or written, may have been intentionally
created, perhaps to serve as records, or they might have been created for some other purpose
entirely. Scholars sometimes think of the first as having had an “intention”, the second as
being “unintentional.” In fact, however, the distinction is not as clear as it may at first seem,
for a source designed for one purpose may come to have very different uses for historians.
Unintentional sources are unintentional only in the sense that they were not produced with the
historian’s questions in mind; they are not, however, otherwise “innocent.” Conversely,
intentional sources contain features not under the control of their authors and have lives
beyond their original intentions.
Historians must thus always consider the conditions under which a source was
produced, but they must not assume that such knowledge tells them all they need to know
about its “reliability.” They must also consider the historical context in which it was
produced.
Put another way, a source is an object from the past or testimony concerning the past
on which historians depend in order to create their own depiction of that past. A historical
work or interpretation is thus the result of this depiction.
Sources can be direct or indirect. A direct source might be a law code written in 846,
while an indirect source might be an eleventh-century register cataloguing the contents of a
princely archive that named the ninth-century code.
It is one of the primary responsibilities of the historian to distinguish carefully for
readers between information that comes literally out of the source itself and that which is a
personal interpretation of the material.
Lisa Jurrjens 3
, Summary Howell & Prevenier, From reliable sources (2001)
B. Source Typologies, Their Evolution and Complementarity
Written sources are usually categorized according to a tripartite scheme: as narrative or
“literary”, as diplomatic/juridical, or as social documents.
Sources traditionally classified as narrative or literary include chronicles or tracts
presented in narrative form, written in order to impart a particular message. Such sources take
many different forms, which are highly dependent upon the conventions of the age in which
they were written.
Questions of intentionality become especially important in the case of “ego
documents.” In general, ego documents record the author’s perception of events, perhaps even
his memory of how he experienced them, and they can often tell us a great deal about the
writer’s political intentions and his tactics, as well as his ideology and the culture of the age.
Diplomatic sources are understood to be those which document an existing legal
situation or create a new one, and it is these kinds of sources that professional historians once
treated as the purest, the “best” source.
Technically, a diplomatic source is composed of three parts. The first is the “protocol”,
which is generally quite stereotypical; it includes the names of the author or issuer and of the
recipient, a standard opening or salutation, and an appeal to some higher authority that
legitimates the legal act. The second is the content itself, the recitation of the case and its
determination. The third is the closing; again, the form is stereotypical, containing various
authenticating formulas, witnesses, dates, and so on.
These sources can also be categorized according to function. Some are law-giving,
others are juridical, and still others record voluntary agreements between individuals.
What historians often refer to as social documents are the products of record-keeping
by bureaucracies. Containing information of economic, social, political, or judicial import,
these documents provide accounts of particular charges or agencies, of meetings, or of
business policy. Or they give a survey of an administrative, fiscal, or social structure, or of a
political administration.
Written sources of these kinds are by no means the only kind of historical source.
Unwritten sources, both material and oral, are as essential elements of the historian’s arsenal.
Archaeological evidence counts as one of the most important categories of unwritten
evidence. Such artefacts can tell historians a great deal about the culture of the area, the ways
of life, the artistic ambitions of the people who lived there.
Historians rely heavily on visual representations, whether handmade or hand-finished,
such as paintings, etchings, and drawings, or machine-produced, such as films and
photographs.
Oral evidence is also an important source for historians. Much comes in the form of
tales, sagas, folk songs, popular rituals or protest songs. The interview is another of the major
forms of oral evidence produced in our age.
Technical innovations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have yielded new
kinds of sources that continue to blur the boundaries between written, oral, and “material.” It
was around 1950 that the technology became available to preserve films adequately, and it is
still more recently that efforts have been made to copy and thus preserve films made before
that period.
Lisa Jurrjens 4
