Finding the Past, by Gillian Polack

 

I’m thinking about historical sources. Not just any historical sources, but ones that give us access to everyday lives. There are sources everywhere, but some sources are special. Let me start with the Middle Ages, and then end up in this precise moment in time. Before I can time-travel, however, I need to explain why the sets of sources I will introduce are so very special and why they’re amazingly useful to writers of historical fiction.

Writing is filtered. Every single type of writing we use to find out about the past has particular limits. Customs records tell us what was imported into, say, an English port in 1150, but not who sold it after that, what their lives were like, or what happened to the final imported good. It helps when we combine sources.

Let me begin with cinnamon, imported into that English port in 1150. It began its life in what is now Indonesia. It travelled as far as Egypt, where a Jewish merchant sold it to an English customer. The Egyptian woman who sold it had no idea that the customer was English. She called him a ‘Frankish knight’ (who I will henceforth refer to as ‘Frank’) and was really annoyed that he didn’t know old spice* from new. He overpaid and she didn’t respect him and life was normal. These things are recorded (though not the date, nor that the customer was English) in material from the Cairo Genizah.

A genizah is a safe storage place for documents that should not be destroyed, mostly religious, and mostly using Hebrew script. The Cairo Genizah is one of the most famous surviving, The holdings of the Cairo Genizah are amazing and strange and you can read about them in the famous many-volume study by S.D. Goitein (the easiest place for historical fiction writers to begin) or online (the best place for a quick overview). The 400,000 pages, with dates ranging over 1300 years are a marvellous selection of random documents. From them we know more about how the cinnamon was handled in Fustat (including that the sellers there had no respect for Europeans, who they called ‘Franks’) than we know about any other stage of its journey.

Customs and tariffs are another handy set of sources. They are consistent about imported spices that attract tariffs, but don’t tell us how fresh they are, nor what herbs and spices are grown locally. They contain much useful material, but it’s quite specific in nature.

Recipes tell us a little about what happened to that cinnamon, since it was bought by a knight and he would have lived among more literate people than, say, a peasant. Frank may have donated it to the Church, in which case we know how incense was used, through Church records and other sources. It may have been for gifts or for his own household. 1150 is at least within a generation of the first written cookbooks in Old French. We can see some of the uses of that cinnamon in cooking from the earliest twelfth century cookbooks. We’re reliant on random mentions in sermon literature and related materials for anything else.

Add all these sources together and we can trace that cinnamon.

Not everything is equally traceable. Cinnamon was a luxury spice, so it attracts more records than many other things. Wine also attracts records (including a poem in Old French), as does wool.

If we want detail and exciting information about the past, however, some sources are better than others. One of my favourite sources for England last century is that from the Mass Observation project. But that’s a story for another day. Let’s return to the Middle Ages.

One set of sources (also begun in the Middle Ages but not yet closed) has more information about the everyday than the Cairo Genizah: the records of the Inquisition.

The Inquisition’s archives start with the Albigensian Crusade, and their consistent use by historians begins with the French Annales school of history in the twentieth century. The work I always recommend to introduce the extent of material the Inquisition archive holds is E Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou. Le Roy Ladurie used the work of the Inquisition to find out how people lived. That’s the good part. The bad part is that the reason we have such detailed information about lives is because the Church was trying to stamp out heresy: they’re archives resulting from persecution.

In the thirteenth century the heresy was that of the Cathars. After 1492, it was “New Christians:” converts who were still too Jewish. If someone was proven to be a heretic and unable to return to a fold or found to be ‘Judaicised’ beyond redemption, they were burned alive. The price paid for these records is awful. Two scholars re-created the food history of the once-Jews in Spain, and also told us the fate of the person whose food was documented by the Inquisition. Th Inquisition records are a major historical source, and also a terrible one. They record peoples’ lives, and also peoples’ deaths.

I promised we’d end in contemporary Australia, and there is a reason for this. Right now, Australia is creating an archive similar in levels of detail to that of the Inquisition (though covering a very short time) through its Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.

An Australian Royal Commission is the highest level of inquiry, and it, like the Inquisition, asks many questions to find out what is happening in an area of immense importance and urgency. The trigger for this Royal Commission was the shootings at Bondi, although much of the work of the Royal Commission is on events and issues in the lead-up and after the shooting. Because of the broad focus and detailed question, the Royal Commission is developing deep documentation of the lives of Jewish Australia and their haters and the workings of government at all levels. It is unintentionally creating an immense archive of how Australians see themselves and others and what their lives are like.

Normally I see these things hundreds of years later, but in this case, I’m in the middle of it. I submitted material and every week of the hearings I learn about my own life. It’s quite intense.

This Royal Commission demonstrates just how much work and how many people it takes to create the Cairo Genizah, the Inquisition trial records, or Mass Observation. Even in the age of computers, 20,000 public submissions and week-long testimony into a given subject (all transcribed) is an immense amount of information that has the potential to create some amazing historical fiction… when it is in our own past. Right now, its creation allows us to peek into this kind of vast and detailed records, and helps us interpret them.

Let me give an example. I interpret police records quite differently to even two weeks ago. Before this week, I had to trust narratives about police work, often fictional. This week’s testimony by very senior officers (which is not fully webbed yet, so the link I gave you last paragraph leads you to another week, dealing with universities) showed me how they operate and what frustrates them and how they work alongside other public bodies. My greatest moment of insight was when they tried to explain that they wanted to deal with antisemitism. Their frustration was so clear.

My biggest reminder from these last few weeks, as an historian, is that the past always contains human beings. If we don’t see those humans and can’t hear at least a little of what they’re saying, we need to look further or more deeply.

*This is not a pun, but ought to be.

THE GLOVE DELUSION By Eleanor Updale

How television gives a false impression of archival work, why it matters, and the worrying medical parallels.


In my last post, I was ranting on about the use of the present tense in historical discourse. I was particularly critical of broadcasters, and here I go again. This time I'm on about gloves.

If you watch 'Who Do You Think You Are', or even more serious history-based programmes on BBC 4, you will be familiar with the scene:
The presenter is found, awed and whispering, in an apparently deserted library. The eminent archivist solemnly presents an ancient book or velum roll, and the celebrity reverently pulls on a pair of white cotton gloves to protect the precious artifact from contact with his foul and dangerous skin.
Cut to a close-up. The begloved finger is drawn across the line of text the producer wants to highlight.
Back to the wide shot. The orgasmic celeb gasps: ' Wonderful. Thrilling. What a privilege!'

Well, working in archives is wonderful, thrilling, and an immense privilege, and in the UK we are blessed with some of the best collections in the world, still (so far) maintained at public expense, and therefore rightly available for us all to access. We must protect them. But we need to make sure that the measures we take do more good than harm.

Now before I start on about gloves, let me make it clear that I welcome the many modern developments that are helping conservation -- digital imaging being perhaps the most important. There is no substitute for seeing the real thing (it's a practical, as well as an emotional necessity: only then, for example, can you tell a crucial comma from dirt on the camera) but even the grandest historian doesn't need to consult that original every time. Indeed having a digital image of a document on which you are working over a long period not only preserves the original from your repeated attention, it can save your bacon: illegible handwriting can be decipherable when blown up on a computer screen; documents held on different continents can be compared side-by-side; precious texts can be consulted in bed (or even, if you don't drop your ipad, in the bath). As a protective measure, digitising has wonderful side-effects.

But that other recent craze - using white gloves - can bring disaster. Although they may be required when handling some objects which are particularly vulnerable to fingermarks or human sweat, the idea peddled by the film-makers that they are an essential tool when consulting written archives is crackers.

Go and get a book now (any book) and put on some gloves. Try turning the pages. I bet you that within minutes you will have made at least a small tear in the edge of one of the leaves. Gloves are the enemies of dexterity. You wouldn't put them on to do cooking or sewing -- for obvious reasons. They impede the function of the human hand, which is so well designed to manipulate delicate things, and to sense when a light touch is required. If you want to do something carefully, do it with bare hands.

Ah, I hear you say, but what about dirt and sweat? Leave aside the view that some surfaces actually benefit from the oil in human skin, the best protection against those dangers is washing (and drying) your hands. Clean dry hands are the perfect tools for turning pages or unrolling scrolls. If your hands are made dirty by the document itself (if you're lucky you may be consulting something few people have seen for centuries, and those things can be pretty dusty) you can wash again. How many changes of gloves would you need to keep that white cotton clean? Cotton picks up dust and grit in no time. It spreads it across the the paper.

Most historians, using their own hands, would never dream of handling anything other than the extreme edges of a document. They certainly wouldn't run their bare fingers along the text. It just feels wrong. The delusion that a glove is something clean breaks down that psychological barrier. Hence the amateur genealogists on telly pointing their way though letters and registers like five-year-olds learning to read.

And here's another thing. If you go back far enough (perhaps to the beginning of the last century, before the wars brought first the necessity and then the skinflint habit of printing on inferior paper) the pages of most old books are actually pretty tough. Anyone who's had a paperback published will already know the embarrassment of being asked to sign a fairly new book that's going yellow at the edges and falls apart in your hands. Seventeenth century books are much more robust (they're often better printed too - particularly the pictures - but that's another story). Most of them can still stand up to being used for what they were meant for: reading.

The good news is that the mania for gloves is not universal. The British Library even has a video explaining why they are not always a good idea: a necessary corrective to the glove propaganda put out by the documentaries. Nevertheless, friends have told me that some archives, particularly small local ones, are beginning to fall for the glove delusion, perhaps because the public expect to be asked to wear gloves after what they have seen on TV.

Incidentally, The only time I have ever been offered gloves was when an assistant in an archive noticed that a box of velum court records was particularly dirty. She asked me whether I'd like some gloves to keep myself clean. In other words, the gloves were to protect me, and not the documents.

And that brings me to the medical link with all this. When I am not hanging out with historians, I spend a lot of time with doctors. As we all know, since the rise of concern about HIV and hospital infections such as MRSA there has been a huge interest in hygiene. This has led to far more use of gloves. I'm not saying that they are unnecessary, but a very wise medic pointed out to me recently that their main purpose is to protect the doctor, not the patient. Even though we may feel safer in the hands of gloved-up nurse, doctor, or dentist, we may be falling into the same psychological trap as the archival researchers.

The problem starts with the box the gloves are kept in. Watch next time you are in a hospital. How many people wash their hands before they plunge them in to pull out a glove? What happens to the germs on that that hand? They go on to the surface of next glove in the box -- the surface that is going to be in contact with the next patient. I talked about this with my dentist (as he scratched his nose with his gloved hand). He was graphic in his description of the possibilities for germ transmission . It's not that the gloves are useless, and they genuinely do protect the professionals from our body fluids, but they also make them feel as clean on the outside of the glove as they are on the inside, and that simply isn't the case. The same goes for everyone involved in cleaning and maintenance in medical settings. Unless they change their gloves between tasks, there is no reason to think that you are any better protected from other patients' germs than you would be if the staff had bare hands.

Now. here's a digression:
Why do gynaecologists wear bow ties (as opposed to long dangly ones)?
The answer is nothing to do with trying to look distinguished.


Gloves do have some uses, of course - even in a medical setting:

I can see this one ending up on Dragon's Den. But in the archival context we should always ask ourselves why we are wearing them, and own up if we they make us dangerously clumsy.

So if anyone ever insists on you using gloves in an archive, use your common sense. Ask the archivist why you should wear them (there may be a good reason relating to the particular material you are consulting) but if you find that they prevent you handling the document with appropriate care, say so, and ask for help. Libraries are full of aids to make the physical process of consulting original material less risky. There are special stands, weights, cushions and acid-free place markers. It's quite rare to be told that they are available, where they are, or how to use them. Find out. It will prolong the life of irreplaceable documents, and make the joy of working in an archive less anxiety-laden, and even more intense.

www.eleanorupdale.com
Most of my historical novels have a medical theme. The Montmorency books feature a doctor who stumbles into ethical traps, and Johnny Swanson, set in 1929, is in part about the fight against tuberculosis.