Monday Methods|Dealing with Earlier Standards of Scholarship.

[u/Commustar]

Today's Monday Methods was inspired by a question from /u/VineFynn.

An underlying assumption in modern mainstream historical scholarship is that authors are striving towards historical truth/accuracy/historicity. Through various theoretical bents, they may privilege certain pieces of information, but the underlying goal is to understand "history as it really was".

/u/VineFynn's question was, how long has this been the case? Did earlier historians (or documenters of history) see their priority as documenting as much as they knew, or could they prioritize selling a narrative, glorifying a royal lineage, or shaping popular opinion around a political or national goal?

How and when did standards of scholarship change?

[u/CptBuck]

This might only be tangentially related but I was having a bit of a showerthought this morning about Patricia Crone (as you do), in that her greatest legacy to Islamic studies will be her radical source criticism, but at the same time almost all of her works have been attacked (including by me in this sub) for proposing revisionist alternatives that just seem implausible (Hagarism, Mecca and Medina not being where we think they are, etc) even given her methodology.

But what had me wondering is whether, if she had played it safe and simply challenged the sources without proposing radically revisionist alternatives, whether she would ever have actually shifted the Overton window of consensus that the traditional sources were unreliable. Or would source criticism have remained a minor historiographical parenthetical despite previous doubts about the sources going back at least to Ignaz Goldziher.

In other words, is there historical value in being accurate on the one hand, but provocative enough to get attention on the other? I suspect there is, and I think that's very much reflected in the more strictly accurate approach taken by her student Robert Hoyland.

[u/[deleted] → u/CptBuck]

I think that it is worth being a bit provocative in your analysis where reasonable. That doesn't mean you should make unfounded claims, but I do think that pushing the boundaries of what your analysis allowed for helps you probe the limits of its usefulness and demonstrate that to other scholars. It's not just about attention, but also about being willing to really see through your analysis. To some extent we all live in that world of historical uncertainty, where we know that we are building a narrative/picture/argument that is necessarily imperfect. However, if we get too gun shy as a result, we can often find ourselves being unwilling to make any kind of argument at all, and that is even worse.

My general feeling is you're better off slightly overshooting and letting other scholars reign it in during subsequent studies. That's the power of peer review and historical discourse in general, and we make the best use of that by being bold (again, within reason and our sources).