(Early) Modern life is rubbish

The eternal doctorate rolls on this week. I went to my first proper Digital Humanities seminar today, where the slightly eclectic set of us working in the area (some of us here) are due to meet and talk about our research over the next few years. And we did today. One of us talked through the context and database structure of her prosopography about the high officials of the court of John III of Portugal (I didn't know either: 1521-1557). And it was profoundly disorientating. It has of course many of the basic elements that I recognise from what I am doing, as you would expect. King's is a major centre for prosopography and she has drawn heavily on the Prosopography of Anglo Saxon England (PASE). However, as she went through the nature of her sources, I was struck by just how different the material is. I've just been considering the problems of hagiographic material in my prosopography and what to do with information that is undated, fantastical and may in some cases refer to a saint who never existed in reality. Whereas Andreia's data - much of it official documents - is dated, sometimes by the day, countersigned, usually located and collected in helpful archives as well as being readable to the modern Portuguese speaker.

I did quite a bit of early modern history throughout my academic career, some quite recently (2006), so I shouldn't be too surprised at this. Yet I am, which I suppose shows the extent of my engagement with the early modern papers I did for finals. However, leaving aside my failings, I think this cleavage between the (early) modern and medieval / ancient periods in history is quite profound, and there are two key issues, one apiece for specialists and one for laymen:


Firstly, the volume of data abruptly changes. No historian of any period before the early modern era has too much data anymore. Although when Theodor Mommsen (a Nobel laureate, who knew?) was working on the PIR in the nineteenth century, he was forced by technological and time constraints to restrict his data collection to the elite, this has pretty much been abandoned since at least the 1980s for us. But not in the early modern era, where a project such as this is restricted to an elite because there are too many sources and there just isn't time to read everything. This has obvious knock on effects on how we read this material, but now is not the time to do that, though I think it explains why I was never any good at modern history.

Secondly, the expectations of reliability and immediacy change (albeit gradually). And this is where non-specialists get turned over. I get the impression that those people who have never gone back to medieval sources (obviously, this is most people) don't really understand what evidence looks like for the period. It's been very noticeable in relation to the church over the last few years, with all this Da Vinci code nonsense. Most people don't understand what well attested looks like. On numerous occasions I have had to explain that that gaps in the Christian record are minor and entirely normal, yet they baulk at gaps in the post-Easter record of fifteen years before any attestation (Paul), and thirty plus before the first narrative account (Mark). Yet, this is normal and in many cases the gap is much greater: the first life of the prophet Muhammad is ninth century.


There is probably a moral here, but I'm sure what it is. It certainly doesn't make me more cheerful about ambiguity and lack of data in the modern world; on the contrary. But it is a lot more fun to study, even if you do have to explain things very slowly to people - too much information is cheating.