Revolt and Reaction in Twentieth Century Historiography: Microhistorians and the Annalistes

The nineteenth century was instrumental in the development of the modern professional discipline of history. Leopold von Ranke epitomized this movement in Germany and contributed to the advance of historicism, which affirmed that “historical knowledge will not emerge by applying conceptual schemata to the past but…through the analysis of individual instances and concrete events.”[1] The tenets of historicism stood in stark contrast to some of the more progressive notions of Whiggish history all the while accepting the ideas of historical change discoverable through scientific modes of discourse. Ranke promoted objective, empirical, source- and fact-based history and specifically rejected the imposition of overarching themes and principles onto the past.[2] Historians, he asserted, had no business passing judgments on the past using modern-day values, but rather should simply tell history, in the oft quoted phrase, “wie es eigenlich gewesen ist,” or “as it actually happened.”[3] This approach to history owed much to the scientific optimism of the late nineteenth century, as well as the belief that “universal history comprehends the past life of mankind, not in its particular relations and trends, but in its fullness and totality.”[4] Interestingly, Ranke, so keen on this weltgeschichte, conceded that “the study of particulars, even of a single detail, ha[d] its value, if it [was] done well.”[5] It is to the “particulars” of twentieth century microhistory and its reaction to “traditional” history that looms large in modern shifts in historiography.

The greatest expression of these new ways of thinking about history originated with the French Annales School of the early and mid-twentieth century. Applying new techniques of social science to history, the Annalistes rejected the politico-military aspect of history and instead “attempt[ed]…to adapt economic, linguistic, sociological, geographical, anthropological, psychological, and natural science notions to the study of history and to infuse a historical orientation into the social and human sciences.”[6] Beginning with the founding of the Annales journal by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1929, the Annalistes focused primarily on the major social and cultural structures that existed over long arcs of time, or the longue dureé, and on the mentalités, or psychological states, of history’s participants.

The most prominent historian among the second generation of Annalistes was Fernand Braudel, who took the Annales synthesis of social sciences to the next extreme by integrating each of these new aims of history into his grand vision of an all-encompassing history of the Mediterranean. In his Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Braudel expounds upon three levels of history, which correspond not only to the people involved but the geographies and climates as well. Braudel’s history is quantitative and analytical but rarely narrates events. For the Annalistes, this methodology reflected their interest in telling the “total history” of a particular time period, event, or place, in this case, the Mediterranean Sea.[8] As Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie writes in The Territory of the Historian, the topics on which historians should write need not be confined to the human participants, and he contends that the historian may concern himself with any aspect of a subject’s past. For example, “the aim of climatic history, is not to explain human history, nor to offer simplistic accounts of this or that remarkable episode…[but] to produce a clear picture of the changing meteorological patterns of past ages in the spirit of what Paul Veyne calls ‘a cosmological history of nature.’”[9] As history became more and more depersonalized through the use of these social scientific methods, Annales history, by the 1960s and 70s, reached a point at which its explanatory power veered out of the range of normal historical inquiry. Although the techniques used by the Annalistes proved invaluable to later historians, their seeming lack of interest in the actual individuals of history masked what many believed to be the true subject of historical study. As Jim Sharpe has argued, “such quantified evidence,” while important, “cannot be the whole story.”[10] From the 1970s onward, in the new field known as microhistory, human beings reasserted their dominance as the most essential subject matter for historians. By becoming active historical participants, rather than subject to the movement of history around them, people became “the historical actors…[who] created history.”[11] While microhistory deferred to the more traditional narrative forms of history, it was regarded as anything but traditional among academic historians. As a variety of Sharpe’s “history from below,” microhistorians have sought to tell local, often personal, stories of obscure or marginal figures, or they have illuminate little-known or little-documented events from the past. Let us examine three representative microhistories—Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, Robert Darnton’s “The Great Cat Massacre,” and Rhys Isaac’s Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom­—and their relationship with “traditional history.”

One difficulty traditional historians have had with microhistory is the indeterminacy of many of its sources. For example, while the primary source for The Cheese and Worms is the trial record of the principle historical actor, Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio, Ginzburg concedes that oral popular culture has come down to historians largely through the distorted lenses of upper class written sources. Since Menocchio is not among the elites, and left no written record of his own, his story is known to us only through others. “At best, what is noted,” Ginzburg grieves, “is the ‘decay’ or the ‘distortion’ experienced by those ideas or beliefs in the course of their transmission,” and he accedes that “the thoughts, the beliefs and the aspirations of the peasants and artisans of the past reach us…through distorting viewpoints and intermediaries.”[12] At the outset, Ginzburg acknowledges that by dealing with a historical actor for whom we have essentially no other sources, we are at a clear disadvantage over other well-documented histories. Similarly, Robert Darnton seems reluctant to “overload” the story of the seventeenth century massacre of cats on the Rue Saint-Séverin “with social commentary,” but he finds it difficult to proceed without this form of historical analysis. Darnton, too, confess that the primary sources available for his microhistory are scant, with “the only version of the cat massacre available” being “put into writing, long after the fact, by Nicolas Contat,” who “selected details, ordered events, and framed his story in such a way as to bring out what was meaningful for him.”[13] Darnton’s primary source amounts to an admittedly biased secondary source. However, Ginzburg replies to this general charge by asserting that “the fact that a source is not ‘objective’…does not mean that it is not useful,” adding that even “meager, scattered, and obscure documentation can be put to good use.”[14]

Rhys Isaac’s treatment of Landon Carter encounters similar difficulties. His principle primary source is the diary of Carter himself, though in many chapters the narrative he weaves has more to do with other characters involved in Carter’s life—namely, the slaves Carter owned as a plantation patriarch in mid-eighteenth century Virginia. Unfortunately, as Isaac discloses, we have no slave narratives written by “the Eight” runaway slaves, and he attempts to close the gaps in knowledge with other related information. Isaac utilizes the 1930s Federal Writer’s Project archives of aged, former slaves’ stories, claiming that he was “persuaded that these memoirs from the enslaved must be called upon to the one-sided, harsh account of the lives of their people that Landon left to his diary….”[15] These imperfectly-recollected, disparate accounts afford no continuity between the lives of mid-eighteenth century Virginian slaves and the various ex-slaves who were released from bondage as youths in the 1860s. Furthermore, Isaac’s exploitation of these sources presumes that popular and folk cultures existed in a vacuum and remained static over the course of nearly two centuries. By defining slavery as “being compelled to act out not one’s own story but the story imposed on one by another,” Isaac makes it difficult to reconcile his own imposition of stories onto those whom he seeks to historically emancipate.[16]

Another issue traditional historians have with microhistory is its seeming lack of broad explanatory power. Traditionally, history was a discipline used to explicate the origin, causation, or meaning of large historical events. While this focus was narrowed once the nineteenth-century history of “great men” and their politico-military exploits gave way to the more nuanced social and cultural histories of the twentieth century, history remained the story of big events, ideas, and movements. What can we learn of the broader historical implications of sixteenth-century religion, for example, by examining one Friulian miller, and an atypical one at that? Ginzburg claims that we can learn a great deal because even individual stories are important for their own sake. Although he does not claim that Menocchio is representative of his age, Ginzburg does declare that an investigation into his trial “confirm[s] the existence of traits reduceable [sic] to a common peasant culture.”[17] Likewise, the folk traditions of early modern Frenchmen remain largely a matter of guesswork, and while Darnton is careful not to extrapolate too much from his study of the cat massacre, he does imply that “common motifs [can] be found” that bond the French print-shop apprentices to similar popular cultures in space and time.[18] By sifting “through collections of folk tales, superstitions, proverbs, and popular medicine” that “resisted the influence of the printed word,” Darnton grants that the typical historical dimensions may not be able to hold this investigation. As opposed to the Annales School’s interest in mentalités, or the mindset of an entire culture, microhistorians often use the term “cosmology” to describe the individual outlook of one person, not necessarily in the metaphysical sense, but certainly in descriptive terms affirming personal identity or “self-hood.”[19] Personal ideologies constitute “cosmologies,” and it is the microhistorian’s task to elucidate these.

One final issue traditional historians have had with microhistory is its haphazard theoretical approach. While in many ways, microhistory may be viewed as a reaction against the broad and impersonal Annales School, it has maintained, as Giovanni Levi has averred, an “interchange with the social sciences…without…feeling any need to refer to any coherent system of concepts or principles of their own.”[20] In short, with “no body of established orthodoxy,” microhistory may best be regarded as a methodological tool rather than a theoretical construct.[21] If this is true, do historians approach microhistory with preconceived intellectual and interpretive frameworks, and if so, does this defeat the purpose of historical inquiry? While this is a greater issue among postmodernists, microhistorians and their critics must contend with it as well. Levi has argued that microhistory may best be viewed as a form of cultural anthropology, and just as anthropological research is often conducted from within, microhistorical research may be best understood from within as well. This, of course, entails an insertion of the author into his own historical narrative, and certainly this is the case with Ginzburg and Isaac. Ginzburg—the son of a father murdered by Nazis—must refute claims that he may be dehistoricizing Menocchio in order to empathize with him. As a commoner used by elites with power over him, Menocchio provides an excellent canvas on which to paint one’s own personal picture.[22] Still, Ginzburg’s careful handling of the historical material makes this a tenuous position to hold. Rhys Isaac introduces himself into Landon Carter’s story several pages into his narrative, describing his own “fascination with the past” and his conviction that “Landon Carter’s diary…should be systematically read for the riches it contained.”[23] One wonders whether the story is more about him than Carter, though if it does not obscure the telling of the historical narrative, has it really contravened the aim of history?

In conclusion, microhistory, though it has its drawbacks, represents one of the many ways history diversified in the 1970s and 80s, and it remains a methodological tool often employed by historians interested in subjects that otherwise would be given only brief treatment in larger historical works. On the one hand, it utilizes many of the social science tools bequeathed to it by the Annales School, but on the other, it tells a historical story that is deeply narrative in structure and eschews the impersonal tone of those histories against which it reacted. Western historiography has undergone numerous changes in its long history, and microhistory is simply another in a long line of historical writing and thinking, and it is particularly well-suited as a companion of contemporary social, cultural, and intellectual history. As, in part, a product of the societies that produce them, these major historical trends illuminate not only the time periods on which they comment, but also the time periods from which they spring.

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[1] Michael Bentley, Modern Historiography: An Introduction, 37.

[2]Ibid., 39 and 41.

[3]Leopold von Ranke, The Ideal of Universal History, 55.

[4]Ibid., 61.

[5]Ibid.

[6]T. Stoianavich, French Historical Method: The ‘Annales’ Paradigm, quoted in Michael Bentley, Modern Historiography, 107.

[7]Michael Bentley, Modern Historiography, 103.

[8]Thomas Keuhn, The Annales School and Microhistory, Lecture Hardin Hall, Clemson University, 19 October 2009.

[9]Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Territory of the Historian, 295.

[10]Jim Sharpe, “History from Below” in New Perspectives in Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke, 31.

[11]Ibid., 37.

[12]Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi, xv.

[13]Robert Darnton, “The Great Cat Massacre”, 99.

[14]Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, xvii.

[15]Rhys Isaac, Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation, 193.

[16]Ibid., 7, and Paul Anderson, Sources and Themes in Southern History, Lecture Hardin Hall, Clemson University, 16 November 2009.

[17]Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, xxi.

[18]Robert Darnton, “The Great Cat Massacre,” 92.

[19]Paul Anderson, Sources and Themes in Southern History, Lecture Hardin Hall, Clemson University, 16 November 2009.

[20]Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Perter Burke, 93.

[21]Ibid.

[22]Thomas Keuhn, The Annales School and Microhistory, Lecture Hardin Hall, Clemson University, 19 October 2009.

[23]Rhys Isaac, Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation, xix.

Books I Read in 2009

For the first time ever, here is a yearly book list. I've been meaning to start doing this for years, but instead of keeping track of the books I do read, I end up keeping track of books that I intend to read. I compiled this while I was bored at the office today and should have been working on either editing a paper I'm presenting next month or, ironically, doing some reading. As far as I can remember, this is every book I read in 2009. This list includes books I did not finish, provided that I read over half of them, but does not include the many books out of which I read a chapter or two. The latter was mostly via reading assignments from classes or books I used for research. After looking at them all together, I did notice a few things I did not expect. Firstly, there are more women writers on this list than I anticipated. A little over a quarter of the books I read last year were penned by females. While perusing my own bookshelves, I'm often struck by the embarrassing dearth of quality women writers represented in my collection. I don't think I'm sexist; it's just that somehow more of the books I read happen to be written by men. One reason this was probably different this year is because women are rather healthily represented in history, especially social and cultural history written since the 1970s. Secondly, I read more non-history than I expected as well. A little over a quarter of the books I read last year were non-history, and among those, nearly half were fiction. I read much less fiction than I once did, but it's nice to see it represented if only a little. And it was reasonably diverse fiction as well, ranging from science fiction to historical fiction to literary fiction to Gothic to thriller to, er... gross, sexual coming of age tale? These are roughly listed in the order in which I read them. So, here's the list:

+ = books that I did not read in their entirety but read enough of (i.e. over 50%) that inclusion is merited
* = books that I had read before but reread this year
bold = books that I especially recommend reading
@!%& = books that I especially recommend avoiding at all costs

The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity by Elaine Pagels and Karen King
Frankenstein by Mary Shelly*
Astrology by Zohar @!%&
The Fated Sky: Astrology in History by Benson Bobrick
A History of Western Astrology by Jim Tester
The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons of the Dead ed. by Robert Segal
The Holy Grail by Norma Lorre Goodrich + @!%&
A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes
Dreams, Memories, Reflections by Carl Jung
Medieval Thought by Gordon Leff
The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe by Valerie Flint * +
Science and Creation by John Polkinghorne
Freedom of Choice Affirmed by Corliss Lamont
The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot
Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life by Stephen Jay Gould
Religion and Science: Contemporary and Historical Issues by Ian G. Barbour
Psychology and Alchemy by Carl Jung +
Wetlands by Charlotte Roche
The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker
How the Mind Works by Stephen Pinker +
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
Morandi's Last Prophecy by Brendan Dooley +
The Making of the West, Volume 1 by Lynn Hunt et. al.
Universe of Stone: A Biography of Chartres Cathedral by Philip Ball
The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found by Mary Beard
Polis: An Introduction to the Ancient Greek City State by Mogens Herman Hansen
The Histories by Herodotus +*
The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides +*
A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew Dickson White +
Andrew Dickson White: Educator, Historian, Diplomat by Glenn C. Altschuler
Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic by Ingrid Rowland
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances Yates
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller by Carlo Ginzburg
The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England by Richard Godbeer
The Devil in the Shape of a Woman by Carol Karlsen*
The Witchcraft Reader ed. by Darren Oldridge
The Witchcraft Sourcebook ed. by Brian Levack
Witches of the Atlantic World ed. by Elaine Breslaw
The Witch in History by Diane Purkiss
Europe's Inner Demons by Norman Cohn*
The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past by Keith Windschuttle +
Not By Fact Alone: Historical Essays on the Reading and Writing of History by John Clive +
Faces of History: From Herodotus to Herder by Donald Kelley
Modern Historiography: An Introduction by Michael Bentley
Confession by Guibert de Nogent*+
Feudal Society: The Growth of Ties of Dependence by Marc Bloch +
The Historian's Craft by Marc Bloch +
Dark Fire by C.J. Sansom
The History of the English Church and People by the Venerable Bede +*
The History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours +
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon+*
The Old Regime and the French Revolution by Alexis de Tocqueville+
Domenico Scandella, Known as Menocchio: His Trial before the Inquisition, 1583-1599 by Andrea del Col
Beer and Philosophy ed. Stephen Hales

Salem in Social, Cultural, and Religious Context: An Analysis of The Devil's Dominion by Richard Godbeer

When the first colonists began to leave England for North America in the early seventeenth century, they carried a certain subset of beliefs and assumptions with them across the Atlantic which derived culturally from England and religiously from the Calvinist influenced doctrines of Puritanism. In his work The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England, Richard Godbeer examines the complex worldview of these early Puritan settlers and describes their mental and physical realities as far less homogeneous than is often explicated. Although the separation between the elites and the laity was a much smaller gap in Puritan New England than in Europe, many distinctions existed that provided context for their convoluted interpretations of magic, counter-magic, and witchcraft. Godbeer examines the origins of the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 through the historical framework of late seventeenth century New England - specifically, the similarities and differences between European and colonial witchcraft beliefs; the impact of occult counter-magic and folk healing on the witchcraft trials; and the historical circumstances contributing to a cultural climate that allowed witchcraft trials to proliferate.

Throughout The Devil’s Dominion, Godbeer describes the nature of magic and occult phenomena, and embedded within this account is an inherent comparison of colonial beliefs and their European counterparts. Despite the distance across the Atlantic, the Puritan cultural and religious links with England were never completely severed during the seventeenth century. From 1620 to 1692, New England provides us with an excellent historical laboratory in which to observe both the continuity of witchcraft beliefs as they traveled from England to North America and the quintessentially Puritan version which arose organically amidst the political and religious turmoil of the last quarter of the seventeenth century. The most apparent similarity between Puritan and English witchcraft was the emphasis placed on the witches’ interaction with the devil. Indeed, this was the salient feature of most Protestant interpretations of the crime. Before the accused could be held responsible for the crime of witchcraft, it was incumbent upon the prosecution to prove that the witch had dealings with Satan (153-155). Also like Europe, this explanation of witchcraft as a diabolical heresy pertained primarily to the elite, and in New England the elite class was composed of clergymen.

This elite integration of the devil into the idea of witchcraft was itself an indefinite process. How did one even define the devil? As in Europe, the ministerial fixation on Satan did not exactly accord with the preoccupation with practical magic and counter-magic among the Puritan laity. Satan was not simply evil personified but could also be envisioned as a non-anthropomorphized force or power in the world, manifested most dangerously through the actions of people (87). This apperception of Satan extended to broader dimensions than just the context of witchcraft. For example, demonological rhetoric was employed to attack Native Americans, who represented the great heathen Other (192). The racial, religious, and cultural differences between Puritans and Native Americans were obviously vast, and these differences were often highlighted in ways that portrayed these Native Americans as diabolical. In the demonology of witchcraft, the devil often offered the accused wealth in exchange for her services, and any trade between settlers and Native Americans may have been interpreted in diabolical terms.

Enemies from within the Christian fold were not immune from this line of attack either. The odd piety of the Quakers, who shook uncontrollably as they prayed, easily lent credibility to the Puritan belief that they were possessed by the devil. Their behavior likely seemed little different from those who writhed in contortions under the supposed spell of the devil (194). When the assaults fell within the political sphere, the colonists were not averse to using diabolical language to denounce their enemies. The term “adversary,” for example, was applied to Edmund Andros, the wildly unpopular Anglican ruler of the short-lived Dominion of New England, which deferred, perhaps unconsciously, to the original etymology of the word “Satan” (187). Andros was later demonized alongside Native Americans, with whom he was accused of conspiring against the New Englanders (188). This language of diabolical association would later be applied toward witchcraft in Salem.

The social distance between the laity and the clergy was far smaller in New England than Europe, distinctions were far less entrenched, and interaction between them was more common. As Godbeer mentions, the family, the town meeting, and the church provided the cohesive structures that bound society together. The latter two furnished direct contact between elites and the laity (3). Given this more integrated social structure, why did such a brutal witch hunt occur in Salem in 1692? For one thing, women were excluded from the town meetings (4). The social solidarity that collective decision-making supplied to the male colonists not only may have rendered these women outsiders in their own communities but may also have removed any power they had over their own political and social destinies. The harshness and ruggedness of existence in colonial New England already ensured that women heavily participated in the communal work of a village, but the elite cultural and religious assumptions of female weakness exposed women to a paradoxical existence: they did not participate in the civic or political processes but were fully expected to ascribe to its rules (118). Beyond the level of household, women had social contact with men only in church, and Godbeer contends that their religious conviction left them vulnerable to spiritual crises such as those that rocked late seventeenth century New England (114). Godbeer also reports that seventy-nine percent of all witches and eighty-four percent of all demoniacs in New England were women (68 and 114). By many accounts, this was a greater preponderance than in Europe.

There were significant differences between European and New Englander cultures of magic, counter-magic and witchcraft. According to Godbeer, unlike Europe, folk healers seem to have been at greater risk of being accused of witchcraft in New England (66). Godbeer does not detail specific reasons for this difference, though it may have been due to the fact that no folk tradition of lay medical practitioners existed in New England. The line between magical and non-magical healing was a fine one, and practitioners of folk medicine were often either ignorant of the fact that their work was under suspicion or maintained that it was in no way diabolical (66-68). In any case, the ends may have justified the means in the arena of folk healing, and the merits of the medicine—whether a natural or supernatural antidote—seemed to hinge on its results. In New England there may have been a paradoxical increase in the Puritan use of magic and counter-magic due to the decline of the legal prosecution of witches from the early 1660s to the late 1680s. By taking spiritual matters into their own hands, these Puritans may have inadvertently created the very social conditions that condemned many of them for this use (177-8).

Pluralism, both religious and cultural, also produced different results in New England than in Europe. According to some scholars, pluralism led to greater tolerance in Europe, especially following the Peace of Westphalia, whereas pluralism disrupted the fragile existence to which Puritan New Englanders clung. After the Protestant Reformation began, Catholics and Protestants fought bitterly with one another in Europe, but after generations of living side-by-side, a mutual, if begrudging, respect emerged. Puritan settlers left England for North America, in part, because they desired religious freedom for themselves apart from other Christian sects. The presence of Native Americans, French Catholics to the north, Dutch to the south, and an influx of secular merchants and non-Congregationalist Protestants throughout the late seventeenth century upended their perceived homogeneous environment.

Though its themes come to a head with the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, The Devil’s Dominion is more concerned with the cultural and political climate of New England in the decades leading up to this event. Godbeer is at his most erudite when synthesizing the cultural, political, and religious trends and explicating how they coalesced and contributed to the trials. Historically, he asserts that the years from the founding of Plymouth colony in 1620 to around 1675 were relatively peaceful. This peace was disrupted by a series of events that shattered the Puritan world. King Philip’s War (1675-6), a brutal conflict with the Wampanoag tribe and a following small-pox epidemic, decimated the New Englander population (182-3). During the next decade, the revocation of the Massachusetts Charter and imposition of the Anglican-controlled Dominion of New England (1686-9) eliminated self-rule among the Puritan colonies and for a short time returned them to the very political conditions they sought to escape in England (184). In 1690 hostilities with Native Americans renewed, this time with French support, and shortly thereafter, the new colony charter granted religious toleration to Anglicans, Quakers, and other Protestant denominations, breaking the Puritan monopoly on religious authority in New England. Richard Godbeer convincingly argues that these events, amidst the cultural climate I have detailed above, generated suitable conditions for the witchcraft trials at Salem to flourish.

The Salem witchcraft trials, though violent, were ephemeral compared to the sustained witch craze of early modern Europe. The trials reached very high up the social ladder into relatives of the very people prosecuting the cases and, unlike the more natural progression of events in Europe, the ministerial authorities made a conscious decision to halt the trials. The very act of uncovering a witch undermined the self-proclaimed godliness of these Puritan authorities because the methods for discovering a witch had much in common with the counter-magic for which the laity was accused—trial by water, hot iron, scalding water, or other ordeals (160-1). If supernatural knowledge was required to a investigate magic, it defeated the purpose of the trials in the first place and exposed the clergy to charges of hypocrisy (220-222). Like England, Puritan elites and commoners never came to a consensus regarding the nature of witchcraft, but unlike England, the common ideas were never truly assimilated into the legal process. Ministers seemed to be at a loss to interpret counter-magic as anything other than witchcraft. Godbeer’s sophisticated treatment of the events leading up to the Salem witch trials masterfully contextualizes the cultural, political, and religious circumstances of late seventeenth century New England and their bearings on Puritan ideas of witchcraft.

On Organizing a Personal Library

"Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one."

~Augustine Birrell, Obiter Dicta, "Book Buying"

Despite the fact that I have been reading regularly since I was five or six and have been collecting books since I was at least a sophomore in college, I have never really sat down to organize my library or really put much thought at all in to how I arrange my books. Up till now, it's mostly been an issue of aesthetics, arranging books based on how well they looked on a particular shelf in a particular room; or on logistics, fitting an ever growing number of books onto ever shrinking shelf space. This may surprise some people since I tend to be a compulsive list-maker and categorizer, but I am, in general, an unorganized person, so developing a really well-planned-out library has never been at the top of my to-do list. It's been nearly three years since I have had all of my books in one location, and even when I did have them all together at my parents' house, the structure of the house was not terribly conducive to getting all of them in one place and shelving them on the basis of subject. Unfortunately, I was not able (nor really willing) to transport all of my collection from Indiana to South Carolina and ended up bringing down a little over a third of the books I own. I haven't been so anal as to count every book I own in two or three years, but at last count I had just short of 1600 and I'm sure I've accumulated at least another hundred since then. God bless Archives Book Shop and Curious Book Shop in East Lansing for providing me with an inexpensive, relatively wide array of books from which to choose. For obvious reasons, the books that made the cut are primarily non-fiction humanities and social sciences. Some major books left behind include almost my entire science fiction collection, most of my general and classic fiction and poetry, and even a fair amount of history not germane to my focus, such as the many general histories of the United States and World War II now whiling away in storage at my parents' house. It's always a tough decision to make, but after heaving the tenth or eleventh enormous box of books onto and off of the U-Haul I felt vindicated in leaving behind Page Smith's eight volume People's History of the United States and three years worth of Asimov's Science Fiction magazines.

"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."
~Anna Quindlen, "Enough Bookshelves," New York Times, 7 August 1991

So the real question is, how does one arrange a personal library? Using an existing method, such as the Dewey Decimal system or Library of Congress? The way a bookstore would arrange by genre? Or something a little more personal that really underscores my own mental arrangement of information? I opted for the personal, since I feel a library is at best a material representation of one's education and knowledge base, but with some important advice from the previous tried and true systems. For one thing, it doesn't make too much sense to use, say, the Library of Congress system to the letter when the vast majority of my books fit into only a few of their categories. Something much broader, but also more specifically tailored to my collection is important. I'm probably making this sound like it was a lot bigger an ordeal than it actually was, but I have to admit that I spent a fair amount of time staring a the stacks of books scattered about the floor completely flabbergasted as to how I was going to arrange all of these on the limited bookcases I possess.

"Far more seemly were it for thee to have thy study full of books, than thy purse full of money. "
~John Lyly

First off, I essentially eliminated anything that did not fit roughly and broadly into the categories of history, political science, philosophy, religion/mythology/folklore, science (mostly human perspectives on), language, and psychology from the equation. About 95% of all the non-fiction I own can be categorized as such, and I used them as my macro-categories. Anything not in those categories went to the miscellaneous shelf in our bedroom. I arranged philosophy and religion together partially because I think they are (or at least can be) facets of the same inquiry but also because Clemson groups them both into the same academic department and because many of the philosophy books I have are on the philosophy of religion. Mythology and folklore are in the same bookcase buffered by psychology, as most of the psychology books I own pertain to an exploration of the collective unconscious, Jungian and non-Jungian, and the greater sociological factors related to cultural anthropology and group psychology. I have about a shelf's worth of language studies, mostly dictionaries and grammar books for French and Latin, but also a few works in these languages as well as Spanish and Italian dictionaries, a book on defunct ancient writing systems, several histories of the English language, and most of Kirsten's books on speech-language pathology, audiology, and communicative sciences and disorders. Political science was a difficult one to arrange, primarily because I have just enough to justify its having its own section, but not so many that it really distinguishes itself. I opted to include it as sort of an addendum to history, as I see it as related in the way that psychology is related to mythology, but I'm not terribly happy with its location and may change it in the future. History was paradoxically the easiest and the most difficult. It was easy, in that I arranged them chronologically by subject matter, but difficult in that it is by far the largest section and took me a long time to decide how to integrate primary sources and very specific topics that cover long periods of time not related to any particular chronological era (histories of witchcraft and astrology being the primary examples). It was also difficult to decide how I wanted to incorporate ancient and medieval authors. Do I put Plato and Aristotle in with philosophy or ancient history? If ancient history, do I put them in chronologically with all the secondary sources or do I group all ancient writers together in their own subsection? Needless to say, I put a fair amount of thought into what, in reality, are mostly trivial matters.

"Let your bookcases and your shelves be your gardens and your pleasure-grounds. Pluck the fruit that grows therein, gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh."
~Judah Ibn Tibbon

It probably sounds like I have a lot more books than I actually do after going through all of that. As I mentioned earlier, only a fraction of my books made it down from Indiana. I think somewhere slightly over one-third, or between 500 and 600 are here, so I may be a bit overzealous in calling it a "library". But Alcuin of York's library at the court of Charlemagne in the early ninth century, the envy of many a medieval scholar, reputedly had only a few thousand texts and the far flung monasteries at Jarrow and Lindisfarne even fewer and they were no less important to their owners. Perhaps one day when we own a house or at least have a larger study/office/library and I have a stronger back, I'll get all of them in one place finally. For now, I'm pretty content with what we have arranged. And, being in graduate school, I've already accumulated somewhere in the vicinity of thirty new books just in the month we've been here in South Carolina, and I'm sure that number will continue to grow. Happy reading all!

The Move to South Carolina and the Clemson Graduate History Program

So, we're finally settled into our new home in South Carolina. The move went swimmingly and we had no snafus along the way. Kirsten and I ended up getting a place in Central, South Carolina, which is about two miles east of Clemson, back towards the Greenville direction. It's in fact no where near centrally located in the state and is called Central because it is exactly halfway between Charlotte, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. The town grew up here because it's right along the railroad line between the two cities. It is fairly small at only a few thousand people, and outside of the downtown area, it seems to be primarily a town for Clemson University upperclassmen and graduate students who commute to school. One other notable tidbit about Central: it's the hometown of Senator Lindsey Graham. So, yeah, there's that, too.

The first week of graduate school hasn't entailed a whole lot just yet. I currently feel like I'm living through the calm before the storm as I have my reading list (22 books long, plus 5 for my TA class, plus thesis research) and am theoretically supposed to start doing some preliminary research for my thesis this semester, which begins in earnest next January. So far, it's mostly been attending meetings and getting acquainted with the faculty, staff, and campus. I am taking three classes this semester, though in a sense one could argue that I'm taking as many as four or as few as two (ah, the grad school factual argumentativeness). I have Historiography, which is essentially a history of history, and this will explore historical methods, modes of historical inquiry, phases through which the idea of history has passed, and how past and present historians have regarded the craft, beginning with Herodotus and Thucydides and wending our way all the way to the 20th century. My "substantive" course is on witchcraft, and considering that I wrote my writing sample for the department, in part, on witchcraft, this felt like a natural choice. I have to admit I was a bit reticent about taking this course because it is taught by an American postmodernist historian of women and gender, and I am neither an American or postmodernist historian. However, after looking at the reading list, at least the first half of the course seems to focus on witchcraft's European origins and tracks its development from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe before it jumps the pond to America. This seems like it is, in a sense, going to be another historiography course, in that the methods and interpretations of witchcraft history will be studied even more than the content of the historical record, but for a topic with such scant historical evidence and even less historical consensus, I think this is a fair approach. The third "course" I have is thesis research, which is entirely independent research I'll do on my own about whatever topic I want my thesis to be on. Since I probably won't sit down with anyone to discuss this in any major way until January, this will be less like taking a class and more like gathering materials I may want to use down the road. Presumably, when I'm not reading and researching for my other two courses, I'll be scouring the library looking for resources for this future project. However, I have no idea yet what I want to write my thesis on (actually, I have several, but don't really know what I'll pick).

The final "course" is the course in which I'm a teaching assistant. It's a freshman level lecture called "The West and the World Part 1" and essentially it's Western Civ. meets world history from prehistory to about the late 17th century. So, this is exactly along my lines of interest, and since TA assignments tend to be random, I'm very lucky to have gotten it. The course looks like it will be, as its name implies, about integrating the traditional study of Western history within the global context and looking at its unfolding comparatively with much of the rest of the world. It's lecture-based (there are about 125 students) and the professor said that almost the entirety of the tests will be based around his notes. My role, along with the other TA, will be primarily supportive: attendance taking, paper and test grading, student advising, running review sessions, etc. So, I'll certainly treat it like a "real" class that I'm taking, in that I'll take notes and read all the books so as to better serve the students. Plus the reading list actually looks very interesting and includes brand new books on, among other things, the formation of the polis in ancient Greece, the most recent archaeological studies on the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and the theological, philosophical, and political motivations behind the Gothic cathedral of Chartres.

Although I don't want this blog to turn into a "here's what I did today" type of blog, I think that I might be writing more of that in the coming months as the bulk of my time will be spent with my nose in a book and conducting research, for which this blog may serve as a "rough draft of thoughts" so to speak. Coming soon, I anticipate I'll write about the organization of my library, as it was an ordeal that was much more difficult than I thought it would be, and to bounce a few thesis topics around. And in the slightly more distant future, I will likely post some of my papers or versions/edits of them. So, if you don't like history, now would be the time to stop reading.

Reading Habits of Highly (Un)Effective People

I've been thinking about my reading habits lately, primarily because after some reflection, I can't remember the last book I read cover to cover. I think it was Elaine Pagels and Karen King's Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity. A good book. Pagels, more than just about any other writer on theological topics, is capable of distilling information on extremely complex topics and elucidating them in simple language. However, sometimes this asset can be a weakness. I definitely wanted to hear more about how Judas was special because of his mission to hand Jesus over to the authorities, as some Gnostics and other non-Orthodox groups in the second century believed. If Jesus had to die to atone for human sins, I feel like this makes an exegesis of Judas' mission essential, and in light of the newly discovered (relatively speaking) gospel, it makes sense that some early Christians would view Judas as special--after all, he had to die for the cause just as Jesus did. Unfortunately, Pagles concerns herself less with a literary/critical interpretation and focuses on the more the political and social arguments raging amongst Christians at during the second century: the role of martyrs and martyrdom, the reasons provided by Christian apologists for Christ's death, etc. Normally, I'd be more interested in these historical aspects, but I've read several other works detailing those issues, and very few scholars do exegesis better than Pagels. But I digress...

The point is that I think I finished that book in August or September 2008 and even though I've read a ton since then, I don't think I've started on page one and ended on the last page of any of the books I've picked up. When I was younger, this was intolerable. When I started reading a book, it was a point of personal pride or possibly even a mild obsession that I finish the book. I once told this to my high school librarian and she nodded knowingly, saying she too had once been a compulsive start-to-finish reader but learned over time that there were simply too many good books out there to waste any time on the bad ones. I resolved then to allow myself the pleasure of saying "no thanks" and closing the book forever. This was back when essentially all I read was fiction. Now, however, fiction makes up probably somewhere between 10 and 15% of my reading list as history, philosophy, and science have taken over the bulk of books in my "to read" pile. This makes it more difficult to read books all the way through since with non-fiction it's much less a necessity than with fiction.

But that's not really the whole story. The real change in my reading habits, and what tends to prevent me from finishing things, is (drum roll please) the internet. I sit online reading stuff all the time. News articles, wikipedia articles, silly internet joke sites, stuff from JSTOR, blogs, Facebook posts, you name it. The hypertextuality and structureless randomness of surfing means that I retain less of what I read and that finality, that sense of accomplishment that comes from finishing a book, is lacking. Has the instant gratification that comes with internet surfing turned even we voracious readers into mindless information consumers? I just started using Google Reader a few days ago and I think I read no fewer 25 articles yesterday. Maybe this will provide some semblance of structure but I doubt it. I don't begrudge the internet or feel that the medium is somehow less worthy than a book, but so far, nothing has replaced ink on dead trees for me. Unlike a book, you can't "finish the internet." Or can you? I'm currently reading Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order and it seems a likely candidate to be the next book I read to the end. Maybe I'll blog about that next...