Reading Primary Sources

The Interpretation of Texts from Nineteenth and Twentieth Century History

Miriam Dobson, Benjamin Ziemann, Miriam Dobson, Benjamin Ziemann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429687303
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Now in its second edition, Reading Primary Sources explores the varied traditions in source criticism and, through specific examples, illustrates how primary sources can be read and used in historical research.

Part I of this two-part volume begins by establishing the reader's understanding of source criticism with an overview of both traditional and new methodological approaches to the use of primary documents. Taking into account the huge expansion in the range of primary sources used by historians, Part II includes chapters on surveillance reports, testimony and court files, in addition to more traditional genres such as letters, memoranda, diaries, novels, newspapers, political speeches and autobiography. For the new edition, each chapter now includes a checklist that suggests an easy-to-follow sequence of steps for interpreting a specific source genre, enabling students to understand how the sources should be read, what they have to offer, and the pitfalls of their interpretation. In addition to new discussions about the availability of digitised source materials, a new chapter on social surveys unlocks the potential of these widely used primary sources.

Taking examples of sources from many European countries and the United States, and providing up-to-date information on the most widely used textual sources, this book is the perfect companion for every student of history who wants to engage with primary sources.

Part I

Reading primary sources: Contexts and approaches

1 Understanding history

Hermeneutics and source criticism in historical scholarship

Philipp Müller

In his private correspondence the German historian Johann Gustav Droysen did not hesitate to call a spade a spade. Reflecting on the achievements of Leopold Ranke, who was already considered one of the most important founders of modern historical scholarship Droysen declared: ‘Unfortunately … because of Ranke and his school we have become lost in what is called source criticism whose entire feat consists in asking whether a poor devil of an annalist has copied from another.’¹ Because of Ranke’s influence, Droysen felt he had a hard time convincing his fellow historians that the decisive part in studying history was not the verification but the interpretation of the sources. In his letter he continued: ‘It has caused some shaking of heads when I happily contended that the historian’s task was understanding or, if one prefers, interpreting.’² By emphasizing the significance of interpretation Droysen did not intend to neglect the merits of critical source reading. As a matter of fact, his ‘Historik’, a series of lectures where he explained the scholarly principles of history, includes one of the most detailed accounts of the methods to establish the credibility of historical documents that was ever written. But at the same time, Droysen believed that history had to go beyond the mere collection of true facts about the past and, in his eyes, this was exactly where his predecessors had failed to develop a proper explanation of scholarly procedures. He especially held Ranke responsible for a simplified image of history that did not recognize that one could only gain historical knowledge through interpreting historical records. As far as Droysen was concerned, Ranke’s search in the dust of the archives was only the first step to be taken in order to reconstruct the past.³

This picture in which Droysen advances a more sophisticated outlook on history while Ranke personifies the daily drudge of historical research by providing the tools of source criticism, however, neither does justice to the tradition of classical scholarship and its techniques of textual criticism, nor does it correspond to the actual practice of Ranke’s historical writing.⁴ Even if Ranke has often been credited for having invented the critical methods of professional historical research, his originality in that respect has been greatly exaggerated.⁵ What really distinguishes both Ranke and Droysen is their treatment of historical facts as evidence of an object that could only be grasped by a specific mental act which has become known as ‘Verstehen’ (understanding). Rather than just representing another technical issue, understanding history took shape in the theory of hermeneutics and became the core procedure of the historian’s work not only in Germany but also in European and North American historiography. In this chapter, Ranke (1795–1886), Droysen (1808–1884) and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), three main proponents of hermeneutics in historical scholarship, will be discussed in order to give a picture of the development of its basic structures in the nineteenth century.⁶ Although their efforts differed considerably, each one of them contributed to the emergence of a modern approach to interpreting historical sources with lasting effects far into the 1960s and beyond.

Humanism and textual criticism

In order to fully appreciate the idea of understanding and its meaning, it is first necessary to outline the development of critical source reading before the nineteenth century. The techniques of historical criticism were elaborated in a broad field of early-modern knowledge. Historians were not the pioneers in this process because in the early-modern period they were more interested in moral and rhetorical questions than in knowledge of the past for its own sake. Classical philology, biblical criticism and modern jurisprudence, on the other hand, were drawn into a sense of scholarship that forced them to base their knowledge on reliable sources.

With the Italian Renaissance, antiquity became a new source of cultural capital. Anything that was thought to belong to the age of the Roman Empire or the Greek city-state (polis) was now considered to be worthy of conservation. In step with the humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries emerged the scholarly tradition of antiquarianism that studied and collected written and material remains of the classical world. Until then, the tradition of the classics had been based on generations of handwritten copies which had altered the texts either because their content did not correspond with the religious and moral beliefs of the copyists or because of mistakes in the process of reproduction. At the same time, linguistic change made it hard to reconstruct the meaning of Roman and Greek institutions and customs described by the ancient authors. As a consequence, antiquarians understood antiquity as a lost world that had to be recovered from its remnants. They started to search for old manuscripts all over Europe in order to retrieve the original form of Latin and Greek texts by comparing different copies to each other. They stressed that it was important to master the old languages as an instrument to differentiate between original sections and later changes and they used coins, ruins, inscriptions and other remains to explain arcane references in classic texts.⁷ Although their inquiries were aimed at resurrecting an idealized picture of antiquity which, in itself, was not submitted to historical scrutiny, antiquarians developed a new sense of tradition that worked its way through to sources without accepting the form and content of the documents they found as given.

Even before these forms of criticism became an essential element of the study of history, they had been adopted in the religious disputes of the seventeenth century. Theological conflicts not only between Protestants and Catholics but also within the different confessions called the authority of the Christian tradition into question. In order to show the superiority of their convictions, clerics either attempted to show that the other side based its faith on distorted parts of the Bible and scriptures of the Church Fathers or they tried to make sure that their own claims were authorized by passages immune to philological criticism. As a consequence, the critical reading of sources intensified and led to new conclusions concerning the transmission of the texts of the Bible. For example, in his ‘Histoire critique du vieux testament’ of 1678, Richard Simon, a French clergyman, identified different layers of language in the Old Testament. He pointed out that the sections which recounted the history of the flight of the people of Israel from Egypt did not show a coherent structure. Arguing that the text included knowledge of events which occurred after Moses’ death, Simon rejected the traditional view which still took Moses to be the author. He concluded that instead of an original account, the Bible contained only a mangled version that was composed long after the events had taken place and was produced by writers from different times and backgrounds.⁸

In addition to philology and theology, textual criticism also made its way into jurisprudence before it came to be regarded as a distinctive feature of historical scholarship. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the status of the traditional corpus of Roman law as a collection of texts that should govern contemporary jurisdiction was challenged. French and German critics like Guillaume Budé, Jean Bodin and Hermann Conring historicized the contemporary legal framework in order to establish a new basis for the modern state. They held that the original Roman law within the ‘Corpus iuris’ was buried under medieval glosses and commentaries which had misunderstood the meaning of ancient notions because they had not bothered to study the change of judicial institutions and terms.⁹ Again, the antiquarian techniques of textual criticism emphasized the significance of primary sources and encouraged systematic vigilance for possible distortion. In order to detect mistakes of tradition, different versions of texts had to be compared to each other, the verisimilitude of the textual content had to be examined and the style and language checked.¹⁰

In Germany, historians adopted the practices of textual criticism in the late eighteenth century. Scholars like Johann Christoph Gatterer and August Ludwig Schlözer conceived of history as an immanent process that reflected the course and development of mankind. Academic historical studies increasingly began to define themselves as a scientific discipline that was concerned with true knowledge of the past that could be gained by reconstructing and studying primary sources. Especially at the reform-minded universities of Göttingen and Halle, the methods of source criticism were spelled out in systematic guidelines for historical research and became a cornerstone of academic training.¹¹ As a consequence, professional historiography changed its character: rather than simply rewriting the accounts of their predecessors, historians were now supposed to produce historical knowledge that was justified by verified information. While philology had used textual criticism to restore the original wording of documents, history used the techniques of restoration of texts to establish reliable knowledge of the past itself.¹²

Therefore, when Ranke famously proclaimed, that he wanted to show history ‘as it actually was’, basing his historiography on the strict practice of textual criticism, he was not a methodological revolutionary in source reading.¹³ Rather, he was following an already established path which had been prepared by classical philology, the historians of the late Enlightenment and recent historians of antiquity, such as Barthold Georg Niebuhr.¹⁴ Ranke was familiar with the practices of textual criticism because he was trained as a classical philologist. When he wrote the Histories of the Romanic and Germanic Peoples in 1824, he included a critique of Renaissance historians in the appendix. He argued that much of the historiography on early-modern Europe had been led astray because it relied on traditional authorities instead of primary sources.¹⁵ Although this was considered an astonishing piece of work at the time – and earned Ranke an associate professorship at the University of Berlin in 1825 – his real historiographical achievements lie elsewhere. For Ranke, source criticism in itself could not reveal the meaning of history: this could be achieved only when the historian went beyond the collection of true facts about the past. In this respect, Ranke’s conception of historical studies relied on a form of understanding which was not taken into consideration by critics like Droysen.

Ranke and the claim to be objective

The historians of the Enlightenment had not only transformed history into a discipline that based its claims on empirical evidence, but had also reflected on the connections between the sources and historical knowledge. In this respect, Gatterer and Schlözer developed an approach that has been summarized as ‘pragmatic’ historiography. They thought that professional historians should comprehend the historical development as an effect that had to be explained by identifying appropriate causes. The course of historical events was supposed to show a system of causal connections that allowed the historian to form an account according to the notion of rational progress.¹⁶ But in the early nineteenth century, widespread doubts concerning the ability of the human mind to discover the essence of reality made this conception increasingly unacceptable. Ranke held that subsuming particular facts under a general rule of rational progress did not lead to historical knowledge, but was rather mere philosophical speculation.¹⁷ He agreed with the Enlightenment historians that history rested on a unified structure, but insisted that this structure could not be reconstructed by notions of progress and reason. As he explained in one of his lectures in the early 1830s, the historian had to develop a sense that was able to see a whole emerging from the particular elements of past reality without reducing it to formulas of abstract reasoning. The solution Ranke found alre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface to the second edition
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I: Reading primary sources: Contexts and approaches
• PART II: Varieties of primary sources and their interpretation
• Glossary
• Index