Yet another annoying Guardian article

[estellacat]

So I just read this article which I have several problems with. Don't get me wrong; I see where the author is coming from. He's pointing out the difference between mistakes and intentional changes to the historical record in history. This is an important distinction to make. However, I must differ with his idea that this is the fundamental

Comments

Re: Fascinating

[silverwhistle]

I'm inclined to agree. I can't dismiss mediæval characters (after all, I am originally a mediæval historian) because they (for obvious reasons) cannot share my post-Enlightenment philosophical and political values. Contempt, like respect, has to be earned, and it's not earned by simply not being able to look centuries into the future and advocate modern democratic values anachronistically.

And it seems to me that a lot of the historical people I have come to love most are ones who have been given a hard time posthumously for various reasons, many of which don't stand up: Julian, Conrad of Montferrat, Richard and Maximilien.

While I was glad to see that poster call out Mantel's abuse of Elisabeth Duplay, another thing I dislike re: the "humane yet corrupt indulgence" vs. "idealistic but ruthless virtue" trope is that it can end up as justifying vice at the expense of virtue. (It's the old "but good people are soooo boring…" line.)

Re: Fascinating

[estellacat]

Of course, you often also see equally anachronistic hand-waves of certain regressive positions being "of their time" when in reality they were already controversial. I'll excuse a late-18th century person as being of their time for not advocating for women's rights, but the same doesn't go for advocates of slavery from the same period. The notion that history is linear progress and therefore the further back in time you go the more backward people are by some kind of mathematical formula leads as much to blanket acceptance as blanket condemnation