Horizon

Another way of reintroducing the human element back into history without all the baggage of Great Men can be found in e.g. the work of Natalie Zemon Davis and Carlo Ginzberg, in which they observe ordinary life through the prism of one unusual case study. Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre attempted something similar, although its method was more controversial. The German school of Alltagsgeschichte, literally 'history of everyday life', has become very fashionable since the 1980s, and is certainly a pleasant relief from the asphyxiating grand narratives of Foucault and Co.

Hey, last I heard there was still some controversy over whether to dump Gregory of Tours into the fiction bin.

I've so far managed to find the 'everyday life' sort of history fairly boring, I must admit. I tried rifling through The Cheese and the Worms once but it really just read like another day on Telegraph Avenue here in Berkeley, where everyone's got a crazy theory and would love to tell you about it. I should give it another try, though.

...Then again, it's high drama compared to the long article I just finished on the late Roman tax system. People spend their whole lives studying these things, go figure.

Doggone it -- I meant Gregory of Monmouth! And I wouldn't dump all of HRB as fiction, just mainly the Troy bits. I'll go edit the entry.

Never actually gotten my hands on a cheap enough copy of History of the Franks to read it. Any good?

Gregory -> Geoffrey. Sigh.

Yeah! The History of the Franks is awesome. It's probably my favorite medieval chronicle of all time, so to speak. But beware, if you aren't stout of heart you should not feel bad about skipping the first long bit where he starts with creation and brings us up to date. That part gets really dry unless you are into that sort of thing. This is the translation I have and it's only $11. Although if you want the Latin that will cost you.

Apart from the incredibly bizarre folklore that Gregory credulously recounts at every turn (in between stories of Frankish thugs braining each other) his prose style is really interesting and, in my opinion, refreshingly simple--paratactic to the point almost of being hypnotic.

Alan, if you didn't care for Cheese and Worms then you might want to try The Night Battles. This chronicles the way that a folk legend about white witchcraft became transformed under Inquisitorial pressure into a series of confessions about devil-worship, although the inquisitors themselves come across as rather fastidious and sniffy.

That sounds good. I'll keep that on my list. I might get to work with someone who specializes in medieval supernatural beliefs so that couldn't hurt.

Actually the Orwell thing with me was always a kind of genealogy, in the sense of tracing back antecedents. I've managed to stay awake through a lot of otherwise doughy Victorian/Edwardian literature (e.g. Maugham) by hunting proto-Orwell themes and phrases. Maybe this is a defect in my particular approach to literature -- a good chunk of which is basically forensic, not artistic -- but it's a defect that others seemingly share.

So to generalize my question, isn't tracing influences on a contemporary figure another way to bring personality into history?

Then there's the George Packer approach in *Blood of the Liberals*, which is basically a history of certain 20th-century U.S. political ideas as personalized through his father and maternal grandfather. It's a nice hybrid of literal and political genealogy. Can't think of any other books like that right now, tho.

(Sorry if this is a little disjointed. Got a bad cold today.)