Reading Primary Sources

The Interpretation of Texts from Nineteenth and Twentieth Century History

Miriam Dobson, Benjamin Ziemann, Miriam Dobson, Benjamin Ziemann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415429573, 9780415429566
• eBook ISBN: 9781134086764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

How does the historian approach primary sources? How do interpretations differ? How can they be used to write history?

Reading Primary Sources goes a long way to providing answers for these questions. In the first part of this unique volume, the chapters give an overview of both traditional and new methodological approaches to the use of sources, analyzing the way that these have changed over time. The second part gives an overview of twelve different types of written sources, including letters, opinion polls, surveillance reports, diaries, novels, newspapers, and dreams, taking into account the huge expansion in the range of written primary sources used by historians over the last thirty years. This book is an up-to-date introduction into the historical context of these different genres, the ways they should be read, the possible insights and results these sources offer and the pitfalls of their interpretation. All of the chapters push the reader beyond a conventional understanding of source texts as mere "reflections" of a given reality, instead fostering an understanding of how each of the various genres has to be seen as a medium in its own right.

Taking examples of sources from around the globe, and also including a student-friendly further reading section, this is the perfect companion for every student of history who wants to engage with 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 with 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 much 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 the following 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 imported from other disciplines which developed the need to verify and secure information much earlier than did historiography. Historians of the early modern period 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.

The humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries began to consider the established picture of the classical authors of antiquity as distorted. 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. As a consequence, humanists understood antiquity as a lost world that had to be recovered from its remnants. 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. The humanists 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.⁷ Although their inquiries were aimed at resurrecting an idealized picture of antiquity which, in itself, was not submitted to historical scrutiny, humanists 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 were introduced into the study of history they were adopted in theology. Clerics of the seventeenth century published collections of records and documents concerning the history of the church and began to take an historical interest in Christian traditions. The critical reading of sources 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 on events 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 critics like Guillaume Budé and Jean Bodin were convinced 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 humanist tradition 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 followed an already established path which had been prepared by classical philology, the historians of the late enlightenment and recent historians of antiquity like 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 to his book. He aptly demonstrated 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 already contained many of the elements that were later conceptualized by Droysen as ‘Verstehen’ (understanding). In Ranke’s conception, however, understanding was closely tied to his philosophical, religious and aesthetic convictions.¹⁸

Ranke’s outlook on history was originally shaped by philosophical and religious studies during his student years. He was imbued with concerns that arose from his reading of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher (among others), who contributed to the philosophical underpinnings of Idealism and Romanticism.¹⁹ Ranke translated romantic concepts into the epistemology of history and, thereby, combined the empirical techniques of source-reading with an idealist point of view. According to the beliefs diffused by the romantic school, the mundane structures of the human mind were not capable of knowing the core of reality, since reality was thought of as being constituted by the eternal creativity of God. As a consequence, rather than apprehending it in a straightforward manner, the historian could deduce the divine origin of the past only when he established a common thread between historical phenomena. Thus for Ranke particular facts by themselves did not constitute historical knowledge because their hidden nature was only revealed in their relationship to others.

The attempt to find the overall connection between events was meant to provide access to the inner essence of history. In Ranke’s opinion, the historian would decipher the historical truth hidden within sources only when he recognized that facts which appeared to be unconnected were in reality harmoniously connected elements of general spiritual tendencies. He conceived the general content of the past as the work of spiritual forces which could be discovered indirectly by inferring from singular elements of historical reality to their common deeper ground. This conception presupposed the unique mental capacity of the historian. Ranke believed that one could develop mental capacities within oneself which reflected the spiritual essence behind historical events. He declared:

Since the character of all unity is spiritual, it can only be known by spiritual perception. This is based on the correspondence of the rules according to which the observing spirit proceeds, with those rules according to which the perceived object shows itself.²⁰

The concordance between knowing subject (the scholar) and the object to be known (the subject of study) was based on the idea of developing an approach specifically designed for historical studies. In order to discover the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I Reading primary sources: contexts and approaches
• PART II Varieties of primary sources and their interpretation
• Glossary