"History is the bunk."

I'm starting to wonder if Henry Ford had a point. I'd like to get some opinions about how a reader should judge an historian, or the author of a history who is not a degreed historian. Reviews aren't much help. Someone can be found to heap praise upon just about any book, or upon a colleague's work. Reviews in scholarly journals might be more useful, but aren't as easy to come by.

If there are factual errors, how many and how serious should they be before one gives up on the book or author? Can you trust any statement of fact once you have spotted a misstatement?

Is the writer expected to have read all works listed in the bibliography? All works cited in notes? Does an absence of notes constitute a "caveat lector" in itself?

Yes IMO no notes does. I guess it matters how big the mistake is. After all typographic mistakes get in all the time. It also matters what the book is meant for. I'll pick up an Osprey campaign book even if there's no endnotes just because it's a good summary. Probably wouldn't use it in academic paper without verifying with a second source that I can track back.

A degree may not help either I'd argue that most of Victor Davis Hanson's recent output is highly problematic and he was in academia. Doesn't Barbara Tuchman "only" have a B.A.?

jmnlman
http://jmnlman.blogspot.com/

I'm not worrying about typos. I'm concerned about misstatements of fact.

A degree may not help either

Even beyond that, I'm more inclined to trust George MacDonald Fraser's fiction (which does have footnotes) than some books by academics. I'd be interested to know how he is regarded by historians.

It sure would be useful to have lists of "people/works that get it right" and of "unreliable history books/writers." :-) If I've read a lot of original source material on a subject, I'm better equipped to judge. But I'm not an academic, or an historian, just a dabbler.

George MacDonald Fraser is considered to be pretty good the same for Bernard Cornwell who explains what if anything he changed in a historical note at the end. You can usually use Amazon revues if you know how to read them. If an author gets nothing then ad hominem attacks than your probably on the right track. For example I worked up a reading list on the Israeli-Palestinian issue by just looking to see which books each side attacked without providing evidence. On the other hand people have written miniature essays on why Stephen Ambrose was wrong in assigning all the credit for World War II to the Americans.

Basically the more you read on a given topic you'll be able to spot the BS.

Thanks.

I have a fairly good BS detector. I'm not talking about bias. I'm concerned about a writer's grasp of the facts. Giving the Americans credit for winning WWII is opinion. Mentioning, in passing, that Patton commanded Eighth Army would be more the sort of thing I mean. :-)

Everyone makes mistakes. If I spot one or two mistakes, not too critical in the overall context, I don't know whether I should shrug them off, or consider every statement of fact in the rest of the book to be suspect. (And in the latter case, there isn't much point to reading on.)

Maybe publishers of history ought to hire fact-checkers!

It's an interesting question. IMO the veracity of the a book would be damaged if there was a major error at the heart of it, i.e., Russia starting WWII, or numerous small errors.

The difficulty for the general reader is, how do we if there are errors. We would get the obvious ones but there could be other errors that are missed due to the fact we are not experts. Therefore is a reader expected to read a number of reviews of the book to get a balanced opinion of it. (As you say, one reviewer could be untrustworthy).

Other than reading a number of books on a particular subject, which is not always desirable with TBR piles constantly growing, the general reader has to trust the author's knowledge, and research.

There is also the related situation, where the author has written the truth but new facts have come to light changing our perspective on the events. This is a particular problem for writers on modern historical events.

George MacDonald Fraser has published at least one historical work, The Steel Bonnets, which has become the standard work on it's subject.

myshelves - Truth in history is a difficult problem and there are no iron-clad answers to your questions. I think that first you have to ask yourself, "what do I want to get out of this book?" If you want triple-checked facts, your best bet is a reference book, not that they are much fun to read. If you want an engaging historical story, then popular histories may be sufficient, even at the expense of some factual errors.

Footnotes are essential because they answer the question, "How do you know what you know?" I often read through the end-notes (and I really prefer footnotes - but they are so rare) to get an idea of where authors are getting their information. I was recently surprised when I found that the principle source for much of Ali M. Ansari's Modern Iran since 1921 was the records of the British Foreign Office. Now this doesn't necessarily indicate British bias (I didn't notice any) and it actually fits fairly well with the text, which is a high-level political history. If the text had presented a 'people's history of Iran' with the same sources - that would have been a problem.

In the end though, quality in history is far less about factual truth than is is about interpretation, less about errors in what is presented than about the choice of what to include and what to leave out. I frequently read those academic journals that you mention (I live only a short distance from Rutgers University) and bad reviews are rarely about true errors. Typical complaints are: the book isn't novel - it's been done before and nothing important has been added; the facts presented don't justify the arguments made - it's a novel idea but the author doesn't back it up; and the big one - the author fails to consider other issues or sources that would contradict or alter the argument.

jmnlman mentioned Barbara Tuchman. Her popular A Distant Mirror received very poor reviews from the academics, not because her facts were wrong, but because they argue that her attempt to use the 14th century as a mirror for the present skews her presentation of the past. (I'm using rather calm language, the reviewer in American Historical Review was scathing.)

So after that long aside, I would suggest that if you (myshelves) had a particular book in mind, post it here. Perhaps someone will know something, or will be able to lead you to a better source.

Good comments, eromsted. My sentiments precisely.

Interesting discussion. I think we all would like to have some way of assessing the reliability of historical writing. What I would like to see is for later printings of a book to have appendixes devoted to critical comment. Academic publishers should certainly be ready to step up to the plate for a procedure like this. Of course, the authors should be given the right to respond to any critics.

#7
I have more than one book in mind. But let's take the book I gave up reading a week or so ago. It is The Last Knight: The Twilight of the Middle Ages and the Birth of the Modern Era by Norman F. Cantor. The "Last Knight" is John of Gaunt. I won't go into the childish sentence structure and constant repetition. That's style. I'm talking about errors of fact. Here's a good one:

"A daughter of Catherine and Gaunt named Margaret Beaufort married Edmund Tudor, the son of Henry V's widow and her master of the horse, a young Welshman by the name of Owen Tudor. Margaret and Edmund's son was Henry, Earl of Richmond. . . . he would . . . rule as Henry VII."

Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, was Gaunt's great-granddaughter. (It would have been fascinating to see a tree of Gaunt's descendants in the book. This isn't the only one he has wrong.)

Can I give any credence to the statement that Oxford University had 3,000 students in 1310, and 7,500 in 1954? Or to anything found in the book?

#7

The short answer is probably not. The sad thing here is that Cantor is a noted medievalist and he really should be ashamed of himself if the book in question is as shoddily put together as you mentioned.

The Cantor issue is interesting. It is all well and good for someone who has a knowledge of the time period to recognise the faults but what about the reader who lacks any knowledge of this time period. To that reader what they are reading is the truth. If we acknowledge that the author has a responsibility to the reader, what level of error is allowable? An honest mistake? What is an honest mistake? Due to the length of an average book there will always be simplifications, unless it is a work focusing on a very small timescale, so is it acceptable if a writer gets all the main facts correct, but commits errors dealing with minor facts?

#11
He died in 2004, the date of the hardcover publication. Perhaps he was "losing it," or perhaps his (very) rough notes were rushed into print after his death for the money? Someone certainly should be ashamed!

#12
Just want to mention that it was knowledge of the "Yorkist age" and of Henry VII, not of the 14th century (the time period of the book), that caused the mistake that I posted to jump out at me. He may be getting facts about the 14th century wrong without my noticing.

I just picked up The Last Knight: The Twilight of the Middle Ages and the Birth of the Modern Era at a remainder table for only $6 Australian. The heads up that it may contain factual errors is much appreciated.

Cheers

#14

You wuz robbed. :-)

I wouldn't give 25¢ US for it now that I've read a few chapters.

If this discussion isn't already dead, I'd just like to say (in relation to A Distant Mirror) that I read it a few years ago, and I must admit I don't recall much about any comparisons she made with the present. I just remember an extraordinarily vivid picture of the 14th century.

But, my question - and my concern - is: was that picture wrong? And, if so, what do I read to put it right?

I think people should moderate their expectations. Do you as an individual have ‘the right picture’ of the world today? Does Tuchman claim to provide ‘the right picture’ of the 14th century?

With these questions I mean to say that the relationship between historians and the past is not much different from the one between present day humans and the present. What do we do to establish the facts of what happens in the world around us? It depends on how important we judge them to be. Largely, we depend on the authority of others. We make educated guesses. The more important something is to us, the more of an effort we make, the more critical our approach to indirect information, up to the point where we want to go somewhere and find out for ourselves. Similarly, a historian, when writing a book about a subject, goes, as best he can, to information from the past to find out for himself.

The result is a residue, an ordered selection of material the trustworthyness of which depends on transparency and accountability. A modern historian usually will tell you why he writes about subject X, which sources he includes, why he omits others, how he approaches his material, what is fact and what merely supposition. He will give you footnotes in order that you can check the original sources. All this when it comes to the core subject of the piece he’s writing. But no matter what the subject, any piece will contain information of a more marginal nature, of relative unimportance to the core subject. That’s where, generally, a historian will increasingly rely, not on his own observation of source material, but on the work of fellow historians, which (#1) he may (and rightly so) only browse, looking up a single fact (and then include it in the bibliography).

In a way, the reader is a lukewarm historian himself. If he takes only slight interest in a subject, he will merely browse the book. He may fancy the subject and read it from cover to cover. The more he cares, the more he will read about and around a single subject. He will increasingly be able to judge for himself.

So, as a reader, either you care enough and you find out, or you don’t and you don’t – and live with it. I myself do both, all the time, as a human being in 2007 and as a trained historian.

Desultory, for a start you might want to read Tuchman’s essays in Practicing history, so as to grasp what she claims historiography (not) to be and (not) to do. Maybe also of interest, for different approaches to life in the 14th century: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou; Iris Origo’s The merchant of Prato, Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335-1410. I hope you find them enjoyable.

So a while back I made a brief comment about A Distant Mirror based on two reviews I had read. But many people here probably don't have access to back issues of American Historical Review and Speculum. And I would be curious to have someone eho has read the book and liked it, respond to these reviews. So, though it isn't really kosher I'm going to paste in the two reviews below. They are copied out of pdfs in acrobat, so you'll have to excuse the typographical errors. The first is from AHR, June 1979; the second Speculum, April 1979.

BARBARA M:. TUCHMAN. A Dzstan! Mzrror: The Calamitous
14th Century. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
1978. Pp. xx, 677 $15.95.
A Dlstant Mirror is a book about the Middle Ages,
more particularly about the fourteenth century,
which was written by a specialist in modern history
and intended for a popular audience. How
does a specialist in medieval history review such a
work for a journal read essentially by professional
historians? Certainly, it would not be appropriate
to devote the several hundred words allotted to this
review to a truncated scholarly critique that made
it abundantly clear that the apparatus criticus is
appallingly inadequate, that the bibliography is
riddled with significant lacunae, and that, for a
reputable modern historian who enthusiastically
blundered into the fourteenth century, Barbara W.
Tuchman has failed to gain a firm grasp of the
world through which she rambles. To medievalists,
suffice it to say, nothing of value-either new
data or useful interpretations-has emerged from
Tuchman's seven years of research.
What then of the popular reader for whom this
book is intended and whose knowledge of the
medieval world generally comes from some combination
of exposure to Sunday school, movies, television,
Sir Walter Scott, and high school social
studies classes? Those who just love the Middle
Ages may well find that A Distant Mirror provides
the kind of gossip that they will not get in a college-
level medieval history course. Indeed, Tuchman
has provided a readable fourteenth-century
version of the Fuzz n' Wuz (cops and corpses) that
dominates the evening news on television.
Tuchman's emphasis on plunder, rape, burning,
carnage, and high-level stupidity (not necessarily
in that order) is balanced by her preoccupation
with lying, cheating, deceit, immorality, and highlevel
insanity (not necessarily in that order). All
this and more is provided-in lurid detail when
she can find it-and frequently it is presented in
quotations from archaic English translations of
Old French and Latin chronicles. Tuchman has
scoured the published and translated literary and
narrative sources-documents have generally been
neglected-in her search for scandal and has used
their "evidence" with more credulity than critical
attention.
Tuchman would have us believe that the
fourteenth century is A Dtstant Mirror of our world
today. From this work, however, emerges neither a
panorama of the fourteenth century nor a biography
of Enguerrand VII de Coucy, Tuchman's
"hero" (enough data survives concerning de
Coucy to write a useful monograph), but a far off
reflection of what Tuchman seems to see as central
or, at least, marketable about the world in which
she lives Television "newsH-high in the ratings
but low in thought and balance-seems to have
shaped her view. In response, she apparently has
selected her data from the fourteenth century to
conform to this distorted picture of the modern
world. Whether Tuchman set out consciously to
shape the fourteenth century in the image of the
twentieth, as she sees it, is unlikely. More probably,
it is the result of her relative ignorance of
medieval history combined with an unerring sense
of what will be popular.
Readers of Tuchman's earlier works will be particularly
disappointed to learn that her generalizations
about medieval warfare are grossly inaccurate.
Her discussions of individual psychology
and group psychology are equally foolish. She
seems to have little understanding of what motivated
the people about whom she writes and generally
resorts to clichts such as chivalry or indiv~dual
neuroses as explanations. A Dzstant Mzrror
makes clear by what it is not that the American reading public deserves access to history that holds
a middle ground between the unreadable monograph
and unreliable gossip.
BERNARD S. BACHRACH
University of Minesota,
Twin Cities

BARBARWA. TUCHMAA DNis,t ant Mivor: The Calamitous 14th Century. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1978. Pp. xx, 677; '5 maps and 40 pages of illustrations, 8 pages in full
color. $15.95.
As Barbara Tuchman once put it, "The problem of writing a book laid in the Middle
Ages -specifically in France in the second half of the fourteenth century -is that one
can never be certain of achieving a likeness that is valid."' Yet even so, A Distant Mirror has become a main selection of both the Literary Guild and the History Book Club, an
alternate selection of Readers' Subscription, and, six weeks after publication, had gone
through ten printings, with 217,000 copies available. Moreover, by then it had already
achieved first place on Time's non-fiction best-seller list and stood second in The New
Ymk Times -though in a virtual tie with its leader, Erma Bombeck's If Life Is A Bowl of
Cha'es -What Am I Doing in the Pits?. This is not the kind of reception ordinarily
accorded to books on the fourteenth century.
But then again, Barbara Tuchman is no ordinary medievalist. Twice winner of the
Pulitzer Prize, she has consistently displayed a remarkable capacity for bringing history
to life, and in ways that have captivated specialists and general readers alike. Each of
her recent books has sold over a million copies, and if the present one seems destined
to experience a similar fate, the explanation lies less in the merits of A Distant Mirror
than in the reading public's long-established confidence in Mrs. Tuchman's writing
abilities. In the present instance, however, many buyers may find themselves disappointed,
and, if so, A Distant Miwor is apt to prove the leading partially read best-seller
of all time. Curiously, the basic flaw is more literary than historical.
This is not to say that the book does not contain historical errors. It does. Mrs.
Tuchman is primarily a storyteller in the narrative mode, a very good one at that, but
as many passages here demonstrate, and as she herself has elsewhere admitted,2 she is
not an especially good causative, categorical, or analytical thinker. Further, because the
Middle Ages are new to her, she tends to report background information a bit shakily.
Thus, even though she presents her principal story accurately enough, the nit-picking
professional could have a field day pointing out and totaling up small errors in detail.
Specialists will also be struck by the lack of fresh materials or insights, and insofar as
Mrs. Tuchman has used Froissart as her major source, frequently backing him up
with Gibbon and Michelet, almost inevitably A Distant Mirror reads as a curiously dated
and old-fashioned work. Lastly, although the bibliography listed is extensive, it is not of a
kind that would have alerted the author to the fact that interpretations and focus have
changed -that, for example, Wyclif is seldom viewed these days as the first of the
proto-Protestant martyrs, a point on which Mrs. Tuchman repeatedly insists.
Nevertheless, in the case of A Distant Mirror these traditional quibbles about popular
history are largely irrelevant. Mrs. Tuchman h h done her homework, and if the
framework within which she presents her vision of the fourteenth century is not that of
most modern research, the choice is clearly defensible, and it must also be said that the
errors in background and interpretive detail are genuinely minor, not of the sort that
would vitiate the book as a whole. The problems lie elsewhere.
Since this review appears in Speculum, it is perhaps not inappropriate to explore the
relationship between Mrs. Tuchman and mirrors. To judge from her title, she is quite
drawn to them, but her use of this literary conceit causes many of her problems. One
finds, for example, that she started this project because she wanted "to try to portray
fifty years of a tormented and disintegrating society in which I see reflections of our
own."3 From the beginning, then, she has fashioned a mirror in which the fourteenth
century is made to throw back images of the twentieth, not the other way 'round, and
in this history-through-the-looking-glass a Spanish archdeacon can preach "a version of
Hilter's final solution" while the abortive French expedition to England of 1386 becomes
comprehensible only in terms of German plans in 1940 and the more successful Allied efforts of four years later. In short, Mrs. Tuchman's approach to mirrors makes
this a history turned upside down.
Moreover, the images reflected in her mirror have changed substantially during the
seven years needed to produce this book. In 1973, Mrs. Tuchman found much to
distress her about contemporary society: "our last decade of collapsing assumptions . . .
processes of government that are for sale . . . the decay of public confidence in our
governing institutions . . . the clock still ticking in Indochina . . . the White House word,
inoperative . . . and lost confidence in man's capacity to control his fate and even in
his capacity to be She could then only conclude: "After absorbing the daily
paper and weekly magazine, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes,
crimes, power shortages, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, Black
Panthers, addicts, transvestites, rapists, and militant lesbians.""
In A Distant Miwor, however, one finds that the corresponding sentence has changed
significantly. All time-specific references such as those to Black Panthers, transvestites,
and militant lesbians have been dropped, replaced by others (e.g., neo-Nazis and
muggers) that are less restrictive in time and space.6 One would hesitate, on such
evidence, to argue that Mrs. Tuchman now sees the world as a better place, but the
changes do suggest that many of the phenomena that provided the initial impetus for
this book - the Kennedy and other assassinations, Vietnam, the counterculture,
Watergate - have stopped visiting her glass, however darkly. Instead, and even
though the fourteenth century itself has not changed, it has been forced to yield up
new images, ones more suggestive of World War I, the Holocaust, and (less markedly)
World War 11 in general.
Because the fourteenth-century parallels Mrs. Tuchman has chosen are distinctly
more appropriate to her old concerns than her new, the results of this substitution are
less than fortunate. If A Distant Mimor has a dominant theme, it is that of the
coruscating stupidities of chivalry and of "those strange bewitchments, honor and
glory." Pursuing those elusive will-o'-the-wisps, Valois France soon finds itself plunged
into the abyss, weighted down by famine, plague, war at home and war in the East,
mounting inflation, crushing taxes, peasant revolt, urban uprisings, unruly students,
venal government, papal schism -and all spurred on by a profligate, unthinking
nobility that cares for nothing save its long pointed shoes (a feature of dress mentioned
no less than six times in the text). One may or may not respond favorably to this vision
of civilization in crisis (though this reviewer does admit to wondering, idly, what Mrs.
Tuchman would make of J. R. Strayer's "The Promise of the Fourteenth Century"), but
the fact remains that most of these specifics, with the notable exception of the plague,
are much more in keeping with the alarmed rhetoric and dire predictions of a decade
ago, with the circumstances of the late 1960s and early 1970s, than they are with the
broad experience of the century as a whole. In effect, fourteenth-century events that
were once supposed to reflect Watergate and Vietnam have been forced to produce
changed images, and all too often this transmogrification leads to strained and bizarre
perceptions, "not unlike a passage through one of those tunnels of distorting mirrors
. . . in an amusement park."'
Although a speculum can symbolize many things, in medieval iconography it usually stands for superbia, a quality present in Mrs. Tuchman's mirror as well. Most readers
will accept or not even notice some of her authorial quirks: for example, her failure to
modernize quotations from Froissart in what is supposed to be a work for the general
public; her tendency to display unexpected and usually irrelevant knowledge in asterisked
footnotes at the bottom of the page whereas, in contrast, all other citations,
unnumbered and often without page references, are placed at the back of the volume;
or her dismissal of all technicalities related to names, coinage, and dating as problems
"which should be resolutely ignored." Individually, such quirks are harmless enough
and may even be signs of the author's shrewd salesmanship, of her ability to impress
readers with the high quality of her scholarship. In their totality, however, they suggest
an attitude of mind for which superbia is the only adequate label, and that quality lies at
the heart of the book's literary problems.
If A Distant Mirror proves difficult reading for the general public, a plausible explanation,
though appropriately speculative, is that Mrs. Tuchman's superbia has overcome
her usual sense of balanced proportion. In any work of history, a central problem is
context: to echo a once-familiar image, what do readers have to know, and when do
they have to know it? Moreover, here the problem is unusually acute because story and
background are so unfamiliar. As a result, Mrs. Tuchman finds herself constantly
under the necessity of having to present explanatory details before she can proceed
with her narrative. Unfortunately, though, these passages show a distressing tendency
to get out of control. Again and again the reader is subjected to long asides and to
encyclopedic lists of people, places, and things that are fuller than Tom Sawyer's
pockets. Possibly Mrs. Tuchman was seeking to emulate Brueghel in all this, to recreate
the cacophony and excitement of the milling medieval crowd, but the technique grows
tedious, and as it recurs, one begins increasingly to wonder whether the true explanation
may not lie in superbia and in a desire to show off the vast quantities of information
that the author has acquired. Still, whatever the intention, the practical effect is
endlessly to block the flow of that narrative at which Mrs. Tuchman excels, thus
making it more than likely that many readers will simply give up in despair, overwhelmed
by a superabundance of distracting and confusing detail. One suspects, as a
result, that if the paperback edition were to be abridged, it would be significantly better
than the original.
Nevertheless, even as one doubts the wisdom of all these clogging displays of
erudition, one has also to point out that Mrs. Tuchman's knowledge, while extensive in
some areas, is surprisingly scanty in others. Much in the Middle Ages is alien and
distasteful to her, and at times she seems to lack the information needed to understand
medieval actions and attitudes. Although gaps are certainly to be expected, given her
lack of background, some of them undermine her very ability to present the kind of
history through mirrors that is her principal goal. To cite only the most glaring
example, when she relates the story of the battle of Kossovo, "the grave of Serbian
independence," she knows that the sultan, Murad I, was killed after the battle by a
dying Serb, but appears not to appreciate that Kossovo took place on June 28 or that its
anniversary subsequently became the great Serbian national holiday, Vidou Dan. These
facts are not without their significance if history is a mirror, for it was on that day of all
days, 525 years later at Sarajevo, that another foreign prince dared set foot on the
fatherland's sacred soil and was himself assassinated for the impiety, thus ushering in
the guns of August.
Further, precisely because this is a history based on mirrors, its principal historiographic
assumptions are cyclical. Like Gibbon, Mrs. Tuchman finds human nature
unchanged and unchanging, so, also like Gibbon, she conveys the point in elegantly phrased, semi-philosophic aphorisms. If, for example, Deschamps thinks badly of a
campaign, Mrs. Tuchman will explain that he had an intestinal flux, adding: "The
military do not find their best friend in a war correspondent suffering from dysentery."
Similarly, if royalty attempts to enhance its authority over its subjects through sumptuous
display, she will ask, rhetorically: "What is government but an arrangement by
which the many accept the authority of the few?" If chivalrous nobles seek foolishly for
glory and honor, "Vainglory . . . is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex."
Lastly, and even more debatably: "Human beings of any age need to approve of
themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot."
Like Mrs. Tuchman's catalogues and extensive asides, these aphorisms have a
marked tendency to get out of hand. Often they work, but often they do not. The
reader senses uneasily that their purpose may be as much to demonstrate the author's
elegance of style as to convey anything of historical substance. Doubtless the point may
seem petty, and yet it is not, for the very presence of these aphorisms serves to
underscore the limitations of cyclical history when used as a vehicle for illuminating the
Middle Ages. For example, probably it makes no real difference whether the Hundred
Years War is supposed to mirror World War I or 11, Korea or Vietnam; after all, every
conflict must be pretty much the same when one assumes that human psychology is
ever the same. But that is precisely a view that Mrs. Tuchman can neither document
nor demonstrate: confronted with the vision of a John the Good returning to captivity
after the failure to pay his full ransom, she has no explanation. All she can do is to
remark in despair: "The motivations of this curious monarch are not readily understood
600 years later; only the train of circumstances is clear." That is a damning
admission from a supporter of cyclical history.
Still, for all Mrs. Tuchman's emphasis on mirrors, in the end one wonders whether
she appreciates the extent to which the manner in which she presents her story is
literarily at war with her cyclical assumptions. In one sense, A Distant Mirror is a history
of the second half of the fourteenth century, but in another, it is only a fragment of
that history, the part experienced by Mrs. Tuchman's hero, Enguerrand VII, sire de
Coucy. For she has almost totally envisaged the book as his story, not history. Indeed,
some early reviews faulted her for this decision, arguing that it led to a skewed and
narrowed focus even as the paucity of documentation about Coucy led to an overreliance
on unprovable assertions and hypothetical reconstructions. In some measure,
these criticisms are justified: a story using Coucy as its vehicle will inevitably rely on
sources like .Frohart, and it is surely true that few verifiable details about his personality
and character emerge from the pages of this'book. As Mrs. Tuchman herself puts
it: "He can be glimpsed only intermittently in the documents, like a patch of sky
through moving clouds."
Because, however, A Distant Mirror is popular history, the present reviewer finds
himself sympathizing with Mrs. Tuchman's decision, at least in theory. To tell one's
story through the eyes of a participant is obviously to personalize the narrative, making
it more readily comprehensible and entertaining for the general reading public. Thus,
if Mrs. Tuchman is forced to flesh out the life of her hero with a good bit of
hypothetical history -a meeting with Chaucer here, a reconstructed conversation with
Gian Galeazzo Visconti there -no real harm ensues. The scenes are plausible; they
could have happened; and in no way do they affect interpretation of the period as a
whole.
If the approach creates problems, and it does, they are literary, not historical.
Because Mrs. Tuchman sees nothing but savage slaughter and senseless chivalry in the
fourteenth century, she is inexorably drawn to representing Enguerrand de Coucy as an epic hero, more precisely as "the Odysseus of this new war." Thus, toward the end of
the book and as he stands a Turkish captive on the European side of the Hellespont,
opposite "the fatal shores of Troy," she can only wonder: "Did he . . . think of that
ancient siege and hollow triumph as he gazed across the straits?" If so, he, like his
Homeric model, must have been led to ponder the meaning of that place where
. . . the most famous, most foolish, most grievous war of myth or history, the
archetype of human bellicosity, had been played out. Nothing mean nor great,
sorrowful, heroic nor absurd had been missing from that ten years' catalogue of woe.
Agamemnon had sacrificed a daughter for a wind to fill his sails, Cassandra had
warned her city and was not believed, Helen regretted in bitterness her fatal elopement,
Achilles, to vent his rage for the death of his friend, seven times dragged
dead Hector through the dust at his chariot wheels. When the combatants offered
each other peace, the gods whispered lies and played tricks until they quarreled and
fought again. Troy fell and flames consumed it, and from that prodigious ruin
Agamemnon went home to be betrayed and murdered. Since then, through some
2,500 years, how much had ~hanged?~
Now this is extremely fine writing, among the best that Mrs. Tuchman has ever
done, and it is typical of her style whenever Coucy enters the scene. At the same time,
though, it should be noted that this is epic prose, a kind that depends not on aphorisms
and history through mirrors, but rather on the author's ability to call forth and play
upon those myths in which our civilization has treasured up its collective wisdom, its
shared understanding of the tragedy inherent in the human condition. Historians of
the cyclical school cannot use such prose, for those whose theme is one of the constant
return of false Augustus, of the repeated triumphs of blind superstition, do not live
in a world that was once peopled with heroes. On the contrary, theirs is a past in which
there were no heroes, nor could there have been, simply because knowledge of the
frailties of the present makes it impossible for them to conceive of a time when human
grandeur could have visited -and touched - the earth.
This is a point that Mrs. Tuchman does not see. The historical views of the philosophic
Gibbon are fundamentally incompatible with those of that Romantic tribune of
the heroic people, Michelet, but she uses them both: frequently, approvingly, and
totally without discrimination. In so doing, she fails to understand that this is hopelessly
to mix her literary genres, thereby creating a book in which form can do little but war
with content. Epic heroes do not belong in cyclical histories, and since Mrs. Tuchman is
especially a historian of the epic, with few to rival her, it is here that her real problem
lies. She simply does not know enough about Enguerrand de Coucy to write purely in
the epic mode, and yet, when she is forced to abandon it to fill out her story, she does
SO in ways that destroy her artistic vision. As a result, A Distant Mirror must be judged
distinctly a failure, and yet, in the end, because occasionally the epic shines through -
"like a patch of sky through moving clouds" -this failure is not without its redeeming
merits.
CHARLEST. WOOD
Dartmouth College

Eromsted, you read the book and the reviews. What's your own view on things?

No, no. I never said I read the book. I guess I did neglect to directly say that I hadn't read it.

I was first interested because LT kept putting "A Different Mirror" high on my suggestions lists. Then I found the above reviews and said to myself, "Yeesh, I really don't want to bother with that." But since then I have noticed quite a few people speaking kindly of the book in the forums, and when I saw desultory's question and knarf's response, I decided to throw the reviews out their and see if anyone wanted to respond.

I also think the types of criticisms in the above reviews bear on the question of this thread: what makes bad history, factual or interpretive problems? And are these reviews really examples of bad criticism, i.e. the factual claims may be correct but the reviewers willfully miss the point of what Tuchman was trying to accomplish with her book, or what a reader might gain from reading it.

I don't know in this case, but I would be interested in other people's thoughts.

Expanding on what eromsted said in #7, almost all histories contain some factual errors, because nobody - not even historians - can know enough about every aspect of a topic to get every detail right. There will also always be oversimplifications, because there's never enough space in a book for all of the relevant detail. Readers who know more than the author about some aspect of the book will spot these problems. That's normal, and that's why the footnotes are there - if you're worried that the author got something wrong, you can check for yourself. Finding an error about something crucial to the book's argument is a caveat lector; finding an error of detail somewhere is not particularly, unless the author hasn't given adequate citations.

I happen to think Barbara Tuchman was a lousy historian, due to her habit of twisting the past to fit the moral schema she always imposed on her stories, but her style does make for a more entertaining book than you generally get from more serious historians. You might think of her books as extremely well researched historical novels - since Fraser and Cornwell have already been mentioned in this thread.