The Historian is a Necromancer

The Addison Independent, April 8, 2011

I am a necromancer: I bring the dead back to life and make them speak. Generally speaking, I do not utter mysterious incantations at a crossroads at midnight with an eviscerated hoopoe tucked under my arm. But my discipline, medieval history, has a secret language (Latin) written in an indecipherable script (medieval handwriting), rituals to separate out the initiates and a secret handshake.

The rituals required to obtain a medieval manuscript at the Bibliothèque nationale de France are particularly arcane. First, you must bow to the guardian of the gates in order to receive the key to the repository of all forbidden things (pens, cell phones, scissors, razor blades..). Once the gatekeeper has given you the green token of your assigned place for the performance of the ritual, you can exchange it for the red talisman held by the keepers of the Holy of Holies, the manuscript storeroom. If you have performed the dance correctly and have been judged sufficiently worthy, they will bring to you the object of your desire -- but only for a limited time, dependant on your level of virtue. But beware! Should you attempt to leave the magic circle without performing the ritual in reverse, you will never recover the green token with which to appease the voracious Cerberus at the gate.  And without this sign of your submission to the spirits of the library, you will be condemned to spend eternity perched uneasily on the elegant but hellishly uncomfortable Louis XIII chairs of the manuscript room. Many a medievalist has failed the test, and has been forced into the purgatory of the Service of Reproductions, there to await a mere simulacrum (a microfilm) of the desired manuscript.

But I digress. The historian's necromantic ritual is much simpler, and consists of identifying documents, reading them with a critical and careful eye, and following each of their threads wherever and as far as they may lead. In the course of my recent research, I have spent time in the library in sections as diverse as those of the history of religion and chemistry, have poured over maps, walked the streets of medieval cities, learned about the mordants used in medieval dyeing, calculated the date of Easter for the year 1315, interrogated the hunters and old men of a small town in the Pyrenees, and have even asked a pregnant friend to boil her urine. Medievalists have more fun!

And why? Because I have a responsibility to the people of the past. If I am going to disturb the dead, I must make their journey to the present count. They have lessons to teach us, if only we can understand them. I need to pay attention: to look for the detail that sticks out and to listen for the word that seems odd, because either one might lead me in an important new direction or provide a precious key to understanding their lives and their world.

Nor is it enough merely to listen: I need to hear.  To look, but most especially to see.  It is too easy to listen without hearing and to look without seeing. We wear prejudices that blind us, and the din of our own noisy self-preoccupation drowns out the voices that are trying to speak to us. We don't even listen to the man ranting on the street corner, and we too often fail to see the loneliness in a neighbor's eyes.  When was the last time you really saw a stranger or heard what she had to say? When we can so shamefully ignore those who are here with us, how much easier is it to brush aside the men and women from that foreign country called the past?

The people of the past may be foreigners, but they are also our distant brothers and sisters, with minds and hearts and souls and bodies not all that different from our own.  The historian, the necromancer, must conjure up both their difference and their similarity, careful not to exaggerate either one. Having rudely disturbed their eternal slumber, we owe them that respect.

(By the way, I was kidding about the secret handshake)

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).