Exactly. That's the essense of historical story telling. At best we can nail down when things happened, mostly. At worst, we're left with patchy, biased accounts that need so much triangulation, they're nearly impossible to substantiate. Umberto Eco wrote wonderfully about this in Travels in Hypereality. The fractured interpretation of historical 'fact'. The idea that we can re-create anything historical or historically is fundamentally flawed. That was 'then'. There is no now that will ever be even remotely like then. For more reasons than can be counted. I spent a good chunk of my life studying medieval history. My experience is just as you say. I loved learning that Spain stopped drawing England on their maps for something like a hundred years after the sinking of the armada. Talk about revisionist history.
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Date: 2006-04-16 08:17 am (UTC)I spent a good chunk of my life studying medieval history. My experience is just as you say. I loved learning that Spain stopped drawing England on their maps for something like a hundred years after the sinking of the armada. Talk about revisionist history.