Irk and distress
I was massively exasperated during the week by something that came across my Twitterfeed by somebody moaning that early modern handwriting was illegible and that archivists not transcribing things was systematic oppression.
Okay, I do not think the person (who I think has advanced degree/s) is a historian by training and it's possible, even if somebody is a historian, that they may be thrown upon first encountering medieval/early modern script. But if you went to a library and asked for a book and the book was in [foreign language], would you expect the librarian to supply you with a translation?
I am only too aware that even historians have little idea about What Archivists Actually Do, but I can say that making a large swathe of records available to a lot of readers tends to take priority over making a few records accessible to a handful (we are no longer in the days of published edited collections of documents). (Do not get me started on all the repositories I have done research in that have entirely inadequate finding aids for important collections, and also, not available online.)
Also, there are books, evening classes, and free online tutorials in palaeography, and I don't think that something that genealogists and local historians can and do teach themselves in order to pursue their research is a high barrier imposed by evil gatekeepers. It's about reasonable preparation.
***
I should not be surprised to find things being read into something I've written that I didn't, I think, put there, and didn't intend. I've come across people citing my academic stuff and either going well beyond what I actually wrote (if I wrote an essay on how a certain delimited group of people in a very specific context were talking about something it doesn't mean, o hey, people generally were entirely cool about discussions of it at the period: example from a recent review) or even going entirely contrary to what I was saying.
But it's still distressing quite by chance to come across somebody expressing upset at something that I certainly hadn't intended as [pernicious trope] but as 'people negotiating some delicate issues/doing damage limitation in a particular context'. But I guess it could look as if it was going that way. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2624258.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.