Perm

I will be donating.

James Hannam

Richard, if I might make a suggestion, have you considered comparing the Acta Sanctorum to the Gospels. As you know, there are hundreds of saints lives from the 4th century onwards which might make a useful test bed for any methodologies that you come up with.

I think the saint’s lives can be used to find out how much narrative space writers of sacred history and biography thought that they had available to them. That really is the question here. Like the Gospels, the saints’ biographers consciously followed precedents from scripture (including the NT of course), moulded events to fit the pattern they thought their saint’s life should follow and used off-the-shelf tropes that they could slot in as necessary (for instance saint turns up, heals leper and village converts to Christianity).

Medieval historians have generally been rather ad hoc about the methods they use to determine the historical content of these stories. Essentially, I’d call their methodology the smell test. However, for your purposes, you will often find that alternative sources (chronicles, diplomatic material and foundation charters etc) contain details of the where the saint in question went and what he got up to. Also, there does not seem to be a great deal of cross-pollination between the Vitae and the chronicles (at least at an early stage). In addition, saints left behind foundations and epigraphs that are often extant physically or in documents. Most of the work to track these references down has been done and is, I believe, included in the editorial material of the Acta themselves.

So, if you want to test a methodology, say that events with biblical antecedents are likely to be fictional, the saint’s lives might well provide an answer. The advantage of this is that you can formulate a hypothesis from the Gospels and then test it with a dataset that you didn’t use to produce the hypothesis itself. I’d also imagine that the saints’ lives are likely to be more relevant to the case than, say, Alexander the Great because the saints are holy men and often have only a local impact (much like Jesus).

Of course, it’s a lot to take on but I thought I’d suggest it.

Best wishes

James

God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science

PS: Thank you for thekind notice above.

Perm

Vincent, are you the author of the aforementioned website? If so, I started to read it and there appears to be data of interest... but to be bluntly honest, the design sucks. It's nearly impossible to follow anything to its conclusion with that design.

Anyway, not to derail too much, but just saying if you are in the middle of constructing it, you may want to think about how you present your material now, before you get further down the path you're on.

Good luck!

Toto

Warning: music plays when you go to that website. (At least it's not hymns, but...)

Clutch

I'm not sure what Richard Carrier means by "persons from other historical eras", but since it strikes me as a fraught leap from the context of the gospels to that of the Acta Sanctorum, I have to say that the comparison of Alexander to the gospels (or to Julius, or to Socrates), with respect to reliability of written accounts and historical context thereof, is strained indeed.

Clutch

If they make money at all from them, academics make money off books mostly by getting higher merit appraisals (salary bumps) and faster promotions than they otherwise would have. The royalties are rarely significant -- though of course a few very popular textbooks are real moneymakers for their authors.

Ted Hoffman

Nice website Hannam. I can see you have stopped using your earlier moniker. I have downloaded the intro and chapter one of your book and will read it if time avails itself.
Carrier, you may be interested in this - some ramblings from another post regarding methodology.

Richard Carrier

The leap is far greater to the medieval era. Caesar is from the exact same period, and Alexander is not far from it in terms of cultural context, and Socrates is likewise comparable, especially if considered as a historical construct (e.g. at the very time Jesus is supposed to have lived, people were still writing books about Socrates, and people with much the same skills and cultural background assumptions) but since no one argues they didn't exist, they are only serving as test cases for hypothetical myth claims (e.g. any method which results in the conclusion that Socrates didn't exist is probably a bad method, and then the question becomes: what exactly is wrong with it and why, and how does that inform what our methods should be). And all these guys are indeed relevant for this (since the historiographic capabilities, technologies, trends, and conventions were culturally the same, at least more so than for medieval hagiography).

Richard Carrier

Good suggestion. I had considered it, though hadn't yet researched the sources (so thanks for that link), because I gave up the idea after a preliminary examination. Although the fictional (and fictionalized) lives are a sort of proof of concept (within the same religion even), they do not serve a good parallel for a number of reasons that will become clear when I publish. I am also not a medievalist so I would be out of my element in using them independently. If you know of any modern (post-1950) scholarship by qualified experts on the historicity (and non) of various saints (and elements of their stories), I would welcome suggested readings in that area (from anyone here), especially works that discuss what you do (the assembly of common tropes into a structure). That is, beyond the "editorial material" of the Acta Sanctorum (which I haven't looked at yet).

If I use this example at all it will be through a reliance on already-existing mainstream scholarship. In fact, the sort of project you suggest is something I will probably include in the book as among the things I think the most qualified experts need still to do. I may, though, cite some examples merely to make the point that legendary development can sometimes be very rapid, but that's a point I can make by relying on established scholarship.

Clutch

Depending on how you define 'medieval', this is unclear with respect to Alexander and Socrates. It may be greater. "Far"? Not obvious.

Yoicks, that's a long sentence. But, bottom line, the question of relevant similarities and differences between the contexts of narratizing/historiography for each of these cases (where context includes but goes well beyond temporal proximity) is something to be determined, and not assumed as methodology. Or so it seems to me.

Only "technologies" in this list strikes me as fairly uncontroversial, or in any case adoptable as a pro tem assumption. But the idea that sources as diverse as Plutarch, Herodotus, and Thucydides were employing, say, the same historiographic conventions as one another, still less as the gospelers, looks like trouble just waiting to happen.

I don't simply want to counsel quietism, or suggest that, because ancient comparative historiography is really, really hard, we just shouldn't try it. My suggestion is rather that the conclusions properly afforded by such study are vastly more qualified and tenuous than even many historians are willing to concede, and this particular sort of comparative study is apt to be more tenuous than usual. Would the book be what its patrons want, suitably qualified?

I suppose I've been influenced in this by recently reading a couple of books by David Henige, whom I might axe-grindingly describe as a historiographer with a conscience, and more neutrally describe as a cautious epistemologist's idea of a historiographer.