The Addison Independent
August 25, 2011
Every historian strains his or her eyes looking carefully at the sources, milking them for all they are worth. Documents in medieval handwriting in particular wreak havoc on your eyesight: I still have no trouble with distance vision, but my close vision prescription just keeps getting stronger. Occupational hazard – does workman’s comp cover things like this?
But any historian needs to use another eye as well: the mind’s eye, which uses a different kind of lens. What I study is so very distant that I need to use my imagination to negotiate all the differences of time and space. It’s like a puzzle, but there is no copy of the picture on the cover of the box.
Lots of people ask me if I enjoy working in “dusty archives,” and if “dusty archives” were all it was, I don’t think I’d enjoy being a historian nearly as much as I do. Sure, there can be dust, spiders, and the occasional crotchety archivist. But as I read and look ever closer, the pieces come together in unexpected ways. They come alive.
Once upon a time, I spent several months reading a 14th-century notary’s register from the southern French city of Montpellier (not Montpelier!). Notarial registers seem like the very definition of dry and dusty: imagine a medieval property lawyer’s datebook combined with the first drafts of all his legalese, and then imagine it written in the very worst of a doctor’s handwriting. In Latin.
But little by little, my mind’s eye began to fill in the spaces in Johan Holanie’s life: he was just beginning his career, his office was in a relatively unsavory part of town near the horse market, and now and again, he probably drank a little more of the strong local wine at lunch than was good for him – or at least his handwriting. I learned who his neighbors were, since they appeared many times as witnesses to completely unrelated acts. I could imagine him holding the very register that was in front of me, dipping his pen into some ink, writing down his clients’ names and business. I touched the paper he touched, and I saw where he scratched out one word to replace it with another – a flash that revealed a moment of indecision or absentmindedness. I was even pleased for him when it appeared that business was looking up and he began to attract wealthier clients.
The world around him began to be visible as well. Whenever the archive was closed, I walked for hours around the town, matching up streets and neighborhoods with those in the register. With the help of a book on the development of medieval Montpellier and another on its medieval houses, I began to see the streets in their medieval form, stripping away the seventeenth-century facades in my mind. My other senses engaged, and I touched the stone, listened for the voices, tasted the cheese, and even tried to imagine the smells. I didn’t try too hard with that one: Johan Holanie’s clients did a lot of business in sheep stomachs and it appears that there was a not very reputable tripery near his office. I didn’t really want to know what that smelled like.
Over the course of those months, Johan Holanie became a kind of friend, albeit a distant one. There are many things I will never know about him, of course. What did he look like? Was he tall, or short? Was his hair dark or light? What did he like to eat? Could he carry a tune? What did his laugh sound like? What did he care about and believe in?
These questions are unanswerable. But even just posing them sharpens the vision of my mind’s eye and brings Johan Holanie’s humanity into sharper focus. I learned to care about my diligent notary by reading, looking and wondering. I have a sense of responsibility towards him to get things right; I believe that caring about someone so entirely distant and foreign makes me a better historian. People who seem foreign to us don’t have to remain so if we only use our mind’s eye to imagine, and see.
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