Introduction to the study of history

by Charles Victor Langlois; Charles Seignobos

Suppose a document has been deciphered. How is it to be turned to account, unless it be first understood? Inscriptions in Etruscan and the ancient language of Cambodia have been read, but no one understands them. As long as this is the case they must remain useless. It is clear that in order to deal with Greek history it is necessary to consult documents in the Greek language, and therefore necessary to know Greek. Rank truism, the reader will say. Yes, but many proceed as if it had never occurred to them. Young students attack ancient history with only a superficial tincture of Greek and Latin. Many who have never studied mediæval French and Latin think they know them because they understand classical Latin and modern French, and they attempt the interpretation of texts whose literal meaning escapes them, or appears to be obscure when in reality perfectly plain. Innumerable historical errors owe their origin to false or inexact interpretations of quite straightforward texts, perpetrated by men who were insufficiently acquainted with the grammar, the vocabulary, or the niceties of ancient languages. Solid philological study ought logically to precede historical research in every instance where the documents to be employed are not to be had in a modern language, and in a form in which they can be easily understood.

Suppose a document is intelligible. It would not be legitimate to take it into consideration without having verified its authenticity, if its authenticity has not been already settled beyond a doubt. Now in order to verify the authenticity or ascertain the origin of a document two things are required—reasoning power and knowledge. In other words, it is necessary to reason from certain positive data which represent the condensed results of previous research, which cannot be improvised, and must, therefore, be learnt. To distinguish a genuine from a spurious charter would, in fact, be often an impossible task for the best trained logician, if he were unacquainted with the practice of such and such a chancery, at such and such a date, or with the features common to all the admittedly genuine charters of a particular class. He would be obliged to do what the first scholars did—ascertain for himself, by the comparison of a great number of similar documents, what features distinguish the admittedly genuine documents from the others, before allowing himself to pronounce judgment in any special instance. Will not his task be enormously simplified if there is in existence a body of doctrine, a treasury of accumulated observations, a system of results obtained by workers who have already made, repeated, and checked the minute comparisons he would otherwise have been obliged to make for himself? This body of doctrines, observations, and results, calculated to assist the criticism of diplomas and charters, does exist; it is called Diplomatic. We shall, therefore, assign to Diplomatic, along with Epigraphy, Palæography, and Philology, the character of a subject auxiliary to historical research.

Epigraphy and Palæography, Philology, and Diplomatic with its adjuncts (technical Chronology and Sphragistic) are not the only subjects of study which subserve historical research. It would be extremely injudicious to undertake to deal critically with literary documents on which no critical work has as yet been done without making oneself familiar with the results obtained by those who have already dealt critically with documents of the same class: the sum of these results forms a department to itself, which has a name—the History of Literature.[47] The critical treatment of illustrative documents, such as the productions of architecture, sculpture, and painting, objects of all kinds (arms, dress, utensils, coins, medals, armorial bearings, and so forth), presupposes a thorough acquaintance with the rules and observations which constitute Archæology properly so called and its detached branches—Numismatic and Heraldry.

We are now in a position to examine to some purpose the hazy notion expressed by the phrase, "the sciences auxiliary to history." We also read of "ancillary sciences," and, in French, "sciences satellites." None of these expressions is really satisfactory.

First of all, the so-called "auxiliary sciences" are not all of them sciences. Diplomatic, for example, and the History of Literature are only systematised accumulations of facts, acquired by criticism, which are of a nature to facilitate the application of critical methods to documents hitherto untouched. On the other hand, Philology is an organised science, and has its own laws.

In the second place, among the branches of knowledge auxiliary—properly speaking, not to history, but to historical research—we must distinguish between those which every worker in the field ought to master, and those in respect of which he needs only to know where to look when he has occasion to make use of them; between knowledge which ought to become part of a man's self, and information which he may be content to possess only in potentiality. A mediævalist should know how to read and understand mediæval texts; he would gain no advantage by accumulating in his memory the mass of particular facts pertaining to the History of Literature and Diplomatic which are to be found, in their proper place, in well-constructed works of reference.

Lastly, there are no branches of knowledge which are auxiliary to History (or even historical research) in general—that is, which are useful to all students irrespectively of the particular part of history on which they are engaged.[48] It appears, then, that there is no general answer possible to the question raised at the beginning of this chapter: in what should the technical apprenticeship of the scholar or historian consist? In what does it consist? That depends. It depends on the part of history he proposes to study. A knowledge of palæography is quite useless for the purpose of investigating the history of the French Revolution, and a knowledge of Greek is equally useless for the treatment of a question in mediæval French history.[49] But we may go so far as to say that the preliminary outfit of every one who wishes to do original work in history should consist (in addition to the "common education," that is, general culture, of which Daunou writes) in the knowledge calculated to aid in the discovery, the understanding, and the criticism of documents. The exact nature of this knowledge varies from case to case according as the student specialises in one or another part of universal history. The technical apprenticeship is relatively short and easy for those who occupy themselves with modern or contemporary history, long and laborious for those who occupy themselves with ancient and mediæval history.

This reform of the historian's technical apprenticeship which consists in substituting the acquisition of positive knowledge, truly auxiliary to historical research, for the study of the "great models," literary and philosophical, is of quite recent date. In France, for the greater part of the present century, students of history received none but a literary education, after Daunou's pattern. Almost all of them were contented with such a preparation, and did not look beyond it; some few perceived and regretted, when it was too late for a remedy, the insufficiency of their early training; with a few illustrious exceptions, the best of them never rose to be more than distinguished men of letters, incapable of scientific work. There was at that time no organisation for teaching the "auxiliary sciences" and the technique of research except in the case of French mediæval history, and that in a special school, the École des chartes. This simple fact, moreover, secured for this school during a period of fifty years a marked superiority over all the other French (or even foreign) institutions of higher education; excellent workers were there trained who contributed many new results, while elsewhere people were idly discussing problems.[50] To-day it is still at the École des chartes that the mediævalist has the opportunity of going through his technical apprenticeship in the best and most complete manner, thanks to the combined and progressive three-years courses of Romance philology, palæography, archæology, historiography, and mediæval law. But the "auxiliary sciences" are now taught everywhere more or less adequately; they have been introduced into the university curricula. On the other hand, students' handbooks of epigraphy, palæography, diplomatic, and so forth, have multiplied during the last twenty-five years. Twenty-five years ago it would have been vain to look for a good book which should supply the want of oral instruction on these subjects; since the establishment of professorships "manuals" have appeared[51] which would almost make them superfluous were it not that oral instruction, based on practical exercises, has here an exceptional value. Whether a student does or does not enjoy the advantage of a regular drilling in an institution for higher education, he has henceforth no excuse for remaining in ignorance of those things which he ought to know before entering upon historical work. There is, in fact, less of this kind of neglect than there used to be. On this head, the success of the above-mentioned "manuals," with their rapid succession of editions, is very significant.[52]

Here, then, we have the future historian armed with the preliminary knowledge, the neglect of which would have condemned him to powerlessness or to continual mistakes. We suppose him protected from the errors without number which have their origin in an imperfect knowledge of the writing and the language of documents, in ignorance of previous work and the results obtained by textual criticism; he has an irreproachable cognitio cogniti et cognoscendi. A very optimistic supposition, by the way, as we are bound to admit. We know but too well that to have gone through a regular course of "auxiliary sciences," or to have read attentively the best treatises on bibliography, palæography, philology, and so on, or even to have acquired some personal experience by practical exercises, is not enough to ensure that a man shall always be well informed, still less to make him infallible. In the first place, those who have for a long time studied documents of a given class or of a given period possess, in regard to these, incommunicable knowledge in virtue of which they are able to deal better than others with new documents which they may meet with of the same class or period; nothing can replace the "special erudition" which is the specialist's reward for hard work.[53] And secondly, specialists themselves make mistakes: palæographers must be perpetually on their guard not to decipher falsely; is there a philologist who has not some faults of construing on his conscience? Scholars usually well informed have printed as unedited texts which had already been published, and have neglected documents it was their business to know. Scholars spend their lives in incessantly perfecting their "auxiliary" knowledge, which they rightly regard as never perfect. But all this does not prevent us from maintaining our hypothesis. Only let it be understood that in practice we do not postpone work upon documents till we shall have gained a serene and absolute mastery over all the "auxiliary branches of knowledge:" we should never dare to begin.

It remains to know how to treat documents supposing one has successfully passed through the preliminary apprenticeship.