Conservative Book Talk

Full Text

This is one of those times when I fall in love with the internet all over again. I wandered onto this great website, and found a typed version of this 12th century “dialogue.” It should be a must-read for all history majors at college. I learned a lot about chivalry and the 12th century in general; most of the following I learned by reading this 19-page work.

STORY: A recounting of an evening spent in the hospitality of the Duke Finnvarr de Taahe. This being the 12th century, the Duke and his fellow peers are peers by virtue of personal merit/selection by a committee of other peers and the king (not, as most people now understand it, by ancestry). These educated elite gather in one another’s homes and at tournaments to have fun and take pleasure in educating themselves. The evening, as recorded by a scribe of de Taahe’s entourage, is unusual in that the peers spent all night talking about the problems of their society and ways to fix them. Most of their concerns are about the knights and peers who are supposed to set the example for society; pride, trying to appear all-knowing instead of knowledgeable, arrogance, over-competitiveness, and putting appearances over substance. Most of which sound like modern social problems.

BAD: Well, being a typed version, there are a few adjustments of translation. I don’t know if this was originally in Olde English or Latin or even French, but the transliterator mixes a few modern colloquialisms, so certain points of accuracy could be in question. Otherwise, nothing else objectionable. However, some parts may be confusing for the un-medieval-Europe-literate; especially since no background information is given for the characters or even the placement of their story into a particular era or country. I figured it out from reading other works (“The Troubador’s Song”, and especially “Henry II”). If anyone has more specific research on this work, please enlighten me, but my estimation is that these are Irish people (or possibly Britons, from Brittany aka France), 12th century, and they’re talking when King Henry the Younger (III) is reigning (possibly his brother Richard aka the Lionheart: it’s hard to tell as their reigns were intertwined).

GOOD: What I loved about this “book” was how closely related the “modern” problems of today and the “modern” problems of the 12th century are. Its easy to forget, when reading history, that at any given point in time, what was happening was “modern” to the people living through it. It seemed like the high point in history, and the low point in culture, for just about every generation. Considering how this election went, it’s a comforting thought that humanity has survived poor leadership before, and will continue to do so for a while yet. This “book” is extremely quotable, with dozens of good stories and examples of proper “gentle” behavior, bad form in manners, and ways that people can recover from the latter and regain honor lost in the heat of the moment. Despite my delight in the similarities of modernity, I must note that the discretion of wording is impressive. No ad hominem (personal) attacks, only examples of poor behavior with the names omitted. No curse words or discussions of lust, torture, or other disgusting things, even when their occurrence is implied. And the ladies are not kept out of the discussion, but they don’t dominate it either (ironicly, for a discussion on chivalry, it was the example of true compatability by the females that most impressed me).

OVERALL: highly recommended. If you enjoy reading history, this will give you a fresh perspective (I recommend reading through W. L. Warren’s “Henry II”, which is about the previous century, for background information on where all these chivalric ideals fit into the big picture).

Tags: History, Sincerelyornot

DISCLAIMER: I had to read this book for a historiography class, so it wasn’t my idea, for one thing. Also, the point of the assignment was to learn as much as I could from skimming/reading really fast, so portions of the book were skimmed over.

The title of this book caught my eye because, as a history fan, I love a good footnote. Long dissertations on sources and people not directly relevant to the point at hand make for great biographies. By way of explanation: a footnote is when there’s a little number or parenthetic citation in a sentence, and the source is at the bottom of the page. An endnote is the same thing, only all the information is at the back of the book (more cumbersome as a reading aid, but still worth looking at in most good biographies). An explanatory footnote is a footnote that not only lists the source, but also some useful or interesting information (a mini-biography on this servant of Edward III, the full Latin text of the Magna Karta, a recipe, etc).

PLOT: Unfortunately, Grafton isn’t really interested in explaining his promised history of the footnote (I had to ask the professor for that), more in rambling on about how we can’t really know the truth or accuracy of anything, and other elements of post-modernist philosophy. Its really confusing, because he also isn’t big on grammar or specificity. Apparently there is a school of post-modernist thought that argues for obscurity in writing (as a way of emphasizing their theory that all meaning is defined by what other people think of what is written, not what the writer thinks he wrote). I didn’t understand that from the book itself, either, but again asked the professor and my Dad about postmodernism, and figured it out from there.

GOOD: To illustrate his philosophy about history writing, Grafton mentions many important figures in the field of historiography (the study of the history of writing history). So we are introduced to a lot of obscure but influential people like Leopold von Ranke (German historiographer, he argued for history as the study of facts as recovered from written sources, of which the best were eye-witness accounts, and of these the best were in state archives, because the state is the ultimate figure in history). These people are all important because their theories have profoundly influenced thought and scholarly practice in our modern society (Ranke, for example, invented the idea of a college seminar, where students do their own research instead of just listening to the professor talk about doing it, and writing their own research papers, etc). I’d never read a book that actually USED postmodern writing techniques, and to such a blatant extent; so that was enlightening…

BAD: …if really confusing. I wanted to learn more about the drift from marginal notes in Bibles to numbered verses to combining both elements in other areas of scholarship (Shakespeare’s numbered lines for example), and how all that evolved into Chicago style, MLA, etc. Instead, I found a jumbled mess of obscure people and even more obscure explanations of why they were important. The assignment for my class was to skim the book and grasp its basic meaning. I couldn’t make heads or tails of any points he might have been trying to make, or any narrative structure at all, even after reading twice or three times.

OVERALL: Not recommended. If a reader can’t make heads or tails of your argument, the book is pointless: which may be the point, but it isn’t worth 250 pages of monotony to figure that out.

Tags: Anthony Grafton, History, Sincerelyornot, The Footnote

Whenever I read a book about the history of the United States of America, I am impressed with the amazing hand of God. Some may call it what they will (some called the recapture of Boston luck while others called it the hand of Providence), but I see the mighty hand of God interjected into human affairs. And they want me to believe that God doesn’t work today. Hah!

I find it mind blowing to see how God uses little events to change the course of history. In “Flags of Our Fathers,” it was an accidental photograph on top Iwo Jima that inspired the nation to finish the war. In 1776, it was the capture of Trenton New Jersey. I find my reaction to the story that McCullough tells to be simply: Wow. Not sure that there’s anything more to say.

By the way, if you haven’t ever read David McCullough, you must. This is history like you haven’t read it before. He weaves a masterful tale that blends historical quotes, letters, and documents together along with his commentary and overview into a page turner. Mind you, this is history but not boring history. People have told me that McCullough was good, but let me say this: you haven’t read history written this well.

The story of 1776 is a story of an army’s birth. Washington took over the army in the middle of 1775 while the Continental army had the British bottled up in Boston. The Americans sought a resolution with England not independence. On December 31, 1775, most of the army was relieved of their contracts. Then as the army was disbanding before his eyes, Washington received, nay the army received the proclamation of King George. King George had declared that his army was to do whatever was necessary to squelch the rebellion. That proclamation stopped the exodus of the army, inspired the Declaration of Independence and breathed new life into the army.

And they want to say the timing was luck? Hah! God intervened in the history of this nation.
I won’t spoil the story for you, but suffice it to say, the year 1776 was about as bleak as life becomes. In fact, those immortal words, “these are the times that try men’s souls,” were penned during this time. The nation was fast losing faith in Washington for his indecision, bad judgment and inability to strategize. Yet, when it got blackest, the Lord intervened on December 27th, 1776. That was the turning point in the rebellion. If God had not granted a miraculous victory that blackest of nights, the war for independence would have been lost.

McCullough traces the first 18 months of Washington’s command. The war would continue for another six and half years, but after the brutal year of 1776, the rest was uphill.

Do yourself a favor this July. Read this book and appreciate what God has done to birth this nation. What other nation has ever had men willing to struggle and die through such terrible times? What other nation was birthed successfully with such great stress? This is truly a nation founded under the guiding hand of almighty God.

Tags: 1776, David McCullough, History, Matt Gardenghi