Historian at birth, a lifetime learner

Ways of Seeing:  The Historian
Column in The Addison Independent, January 13, 2011

Historian at birth, a lifetime learner*
I am a historian. Even when I was a little girl, I knew that was what I wanted to be when I grew up, though I didn’t really know what historians did. I just knew I wanted to read and think about Abraham Lincoln, on whom I had a massive crush.

I do indeed spend a lot of time reading and thinking about the past, though I abandoned Honest Abe for my other love, the Middle Ages (I remain just a tad jealous of that clever beauty, Mary Todd). For me, being a historian boils down to looking and seeing. I am constantly reading, looking and thinking; hoping to see and understand. How does a historian look? How can a historian see the past?

In The Go-Between (1953), novelist L. P. Hartley famously declared “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” That phrase has become a maxim of historians ever since. Hartley’s “they,” the people of the past, saw things differently. As historians, we must learn to see the way “they” did, if we are ever going to make sense of the past. My favorite way to start a class discussion is to ask “what surprised you about the readings?”

We are surprised, for instance, that Charlemagne could read in both his Frankish vernacular and Latin, but kept wax tablets under his pillow in order to “try to form letters.” His biographer Einhard remarked, without surprise, “he had only learned late in life, and had little success.” When we learn to read, we practice our ABCs with a pencil: how did he learn his? Did his inability to write make a difference in the way Charlemagne looked, saw and perceived?

Once, I asked some students what they had thought about the deposition of an illiterate medieval heretic named Prous Boneta. Boneta  described a multitude of apocalyptic visions: she had given birth to the Holy Spirit and walked arm and arm with the Holy Trinity, and was the herald of a New Age. It is easy to dismiss Boneta as mentally ill. In class, one of my students replied “I believe her.” When we all turned to this student in shock, she clarified: “I believe that she believed.” Not only did Boneta believe, but people around her believed her and believed in her. Our modern psychiatric eye doesn’t help us much in understanding a crucial figure in an important religious movement.

We actually do see differently. The December 3, 2010 issue of Science contains a study on the impact of literacy on the brain. By analyzing the brains of literates and illiterates, scientists have discovered that when we learn to read, we lose other capabilities. Reading and writing only date back about 6,000 years, and the brain has had to compensate. One place that suffers is the part of the brain responsible for the recognition of faces and places. If you are reading this article, your brain has less room for “reading” faces than the brain of someone who never learned to read. Most people in the Middle Ages could not read. They literally saw differently than we do when they looked at a person’s face. Does that help us think differently about their experiences? What about Charlemagne? Or Boneta?

Over the course of the next few months, I’d like to take you with me on an adventure in seeing as a historian. I am writing about another outrageous heretic, Limoux, who testified (among other things) that the earth was created when the sun and the moon urinated and their urine coagulated. Perhaps Limoux was crazy. But if we only see him with a psychiatric eye, we miss the point: his deposition is a privileged window into the world of the past, and “they do things differently there.”

Louisa A. Burnham is Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College, and author of So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke:  The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc (2008).

*I did NOT write the title. I also did not refer to Na Prous as "Boneta."  I know that's the AP/NYT style guide way of doing things, but can't we make an exception for the Middle Ages??