Download PDF | (East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450-1450, 34) David Kalhous - _Legenda Christiani_ and Modern Historiography-Brill Academic Publishers (2015).
167 Pages
Acknowledgements
Here I would like to express my gratitude especially to Pavlina Rychterova (now Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften), who came up with the idea of using my knowledge of the St.-Wenceslas legends and their bibliography to provide an interested reader with an introduction to this complex problem, which often served as sort of barometer of broader shifts in the historiograpy of the Czech lands.
I also owe many thanks to Florin Curta (University of Florida) not only for his willingness to accept my manuscript in his important series about Central and East European medieval history, but especially for the unselfishness with which he carefully proofread the first draft of my text. The same for Florin’s student Matthew Koval (University of Florida), who again spent a lot of time proofreading and commenting on my text. Without their help my text would have lost much of its clarity and strength of argument. The book was written with the support of these projects: Magnae Moraviae Fontes historici N. $. 1 (GA ER P405/12/0625) and Podpora internacionalizace a excelence publikacni Cinnosti (Faculty of Arts, Masaryk university Brno).
David Kalhous
Points of View? Introduction
There are many different possible ways to write about historiography. We can focus on a specific region or historical period and enumerate the historians, their biographies and bibliographies. It is also possible to pay attention to the processes behind the formation of professional institutions. Or we can track the development of historical methods and how they have changed over the centuries. Biographies of famous historians belong to the historiography as well. In the last thirty years, inspired by Hayden White, we started to analyse the literary structure of historical monographs, as the history of our own discipline is an important part of the discourse that defines what we exactly do — is it science with strictly defined methods, or is history more akin to literature?
Finally, we can also follow the historiographical debate around one specific topic and examine how the solutions changed through succeeding decades. In this monograph, I would like to reevaluate an important historiographical debate about the authenticity of the so-called Legenda Christiani that began in the 18th century and never ended, although the consensus today is to accept its aunthenticity. Discussing a 200-year dispute enables us, of course, to see changing historiographical methods. However, as historiography can be defined as a communication game — struggle for prestige and power within the community of historians, it also allows us to understand this historiographical problem as a symbolic centre, as it was defined by Milos Havelka inspired by Ernst Cassirer.! Although this debate was never an integral part of nationalistic discourse, there were still traces of metahistorical preconditions that impacted the results of every analysis.
The problem of the Legenda Christiani could be understood as a part of a system-network called “historiography” that is defined as a group of certain problems and their solutions that historians acknowledge as relevant topics that is possible to analyze within the historiographic field. That community, however, is firmly linked to other social systems, the influence of which on the situation inside the community, while essential, changes with time. Likewise, historiographic production is particularly sensitive to the language system, for the discipline does not necessarily rely on a specialized language and, employs a quite limited set of lexemes, and in fact encourages the use of more natural language.
Historiography never ceases to be part of different social systems and historians use the languages of these systems to express their ideas and arguments and also to convince other professionals of the validity of their arguments. This allows me to apply linguistic theory, Bourdieu’s concept of “literary field” — the concept of discourse as a theoretical framework, and also the vocabulary of the theory of games. Using the terminology of Imre Lakatos, we can not only analyse this historiographical debate “internally”, as intellectual history, but also “externally”, i.e. as social practice.” First we need to take into consideration the problem of the correspondence between “language” and “mind.’?
Here, Donald Davidson's “radical interpretation” is very applicable to the nature of historiographic production. Davidson regards human communication acts as necessarily rational to the extent that rationality forms the basis for the interpretation of language, and thus of communication as well.t Recurring communication acts, and thus the stability of the language system and of its semantic elements, are predicated only on the above-mentioned premise.® The “issue” of stability is one of dynamic development, since a system is stable as long as the individual phenomenon of the given language recurs with sufficient frequency. The given language is, in fact, a system allowing communication that forms and structures our perception of the world outside culture no less than it creates culture itself.
The measure of its success is the degree to which the richness and complexity of both grammar and lexicon match the complexity of the world outside the language and the need to grasp the world’s complexity. It is precisely that measure which can explain the requirement of a minimal degree of language rationality. But while simple constructions and concrete terms can be easily verified by experiment in terms of their function and rationality, it is more difficult to test the rationality of those abstract terms which are fundamental for social sciences.
In this case, the stability of a word or of grammatical relations, as well as of broader language structures cannot be regarded as absolute. On the contrary, they may be viewed as a measure of their own inertia that is as the equivalent of the energy necessary for changing those structures. With sufficient knowledge of their frequency, one can in principle explain the fuzzy character of words. In other words, the fuzzy character of words depends upon their frequency and is limited by the significance of the carried meaning in relation to other words. Words which are nearly meaningless constitute therefore the most stable aspect of language: frequent recurrence guarantees the preservation of unusual forms, which in turns protects those words against change.
Moreover, their function in the language system delivers their meaning quite clearly. On the contrary, the special terminology of various scientific disciplines lacks the advantage of high frequency rates and must therefore rely on skillful expressions which often leaves us in a vicious circle. Therefore language itself is a changeable structure and it can be understood only as a changeable system emerging through communication and interaction of single speakers. From their point of view, language is also a communication game within which one can accept certain rules (the behavior of the majority) or, in turn, reject or change them, thus running a higher risk of misunderstanding.
The fuzzy character of terminology may also explain the difficulties emerging in the humanities. In those disciplines, the two-valued logic, which is based on the law of the excluded middle and allows for negative proofs, there is no success warranty in communication. The law of the excluded middle is not valid in fuzzy logic.
For a better understanding of words (or of the process of how we understand them), it is useful to think about them in terms of “conceptual metaphors” in the sense George Lakoff, Mark Johnson or Hans Blumenberg present them.’ Within their concept, words are not “innocent,” strictly defined beings, but treacherous creatures that (mis)lead our thinking about certain problem and lead us, for example, to understand the argumentation as a kind of war.
The significance of language in the historiographic production is not based only on how stable terminology can be. In fact, the issue is far more apparent in the construction of the historiographic text. Literary analysis, and especially the study of syntax, are therefore of great significance for the understanding of the language of historians and of their rhetorical strategies.®
The dynamic stability not just of language as a complex system, but also the stability of partial discourses is also one of the key factors in the existence of different kinds of human communities — whether national, political, social or professional. (The persistence of communication in a certain form thus could be more important than the content of what is discussed.)9 From this perspective the problem of the authenticity of Legenda Christiani could be understood as part of a system called “community of historians’, where the legend itself is the main text to which this group is refering. That community, however, is firmly linked to other social systems, the influence of which on the situation inside the community, while essential, is only indirect, e.g. due to provided research ressources. Also the extent of public support is conditioned by the cultural norms that regulate the complexity of the culture as a system.
Second, of the same importance is Bourdieu’s conception of the formation of a “literary field’, i.e. a differentiated social field that is autonomous in the sense that it follows its own logic — the competition for cultural legitimation.!
Through this competition, a “field” gains its internal hierarchical structure. The independence of a “historiographical field” can be in our case measured by the influence the society in general had on the community of professional historians and their debates. If the society only provides the community with ressources, passively accepts the results of the historical research and agrees with the internal criteria historians use to “measure” the quality of their monographs and studies, we can speak about “independent” historiography.
The process of the formation of a “historiographical field” is closely connected with professionalisation of historiography, where the state shielded the professional qualifications of historians, holders of university degrees. The independence of historians and their community became part of their identity. At some point in this process, as the volume of communication reached a critical level, formal institutions, communication channels, and specialized fora were established.!? Their goal was to provide some basic rules of the profession and, on that basis, to decide who belonged to the community and who did not and also how the field should be structured. (Although there was always a goal to formulate those rules as an abstract system, Bourdieu’s concept of concrete “pratiques” seems to be more appropriate.) This cognitive process included the “discovery” of the old manuscripts containing texts unknown before.
The Legenda Christiani is undoubtedly one of the sources to which historians paid much attention. It is interesting not just as a source, but also as a subject of dispute. It helps us observe the atmosphere of contemporary society in the background of the dispute, especially in regards to historiography. In addition, the way in which scholars argue provide us with useful insight into their strategies within the field.
Managing the profession may then be conceptualized as the acceptance of a minimum number of solutions, as professional habit!* by those seeking for acknowledgment as a historian, and as the ability of a to-be-professional to alter at least one of them. (Conversely, a hierarchy of scholars at any given time is based on the quantity of the solutions each one of them is able to alter.) As the community grows, it finds itself in a precarious situation for its complexity will diminish as a growing number of solutions receive general acceptance. This also leads to specialization, i.e. to the establishment of semi-autonomous fields within the field. Nevertheless, the cooperative strategy, ie. strategy where we tend to accept the conclusions of someone else and use it to build our own hypothesis, which appears as important at the beginning for the need to accept a minimal set of solutions, is just one of many possible strategies to get a position within the hierarchized field. Every historian can opt for the critical strategy, i.e. strategy where we prefer to deconstruct the assumptions and arguments of primary and secondary sources, aiming at obtaining a larger prize at a higher risk.!4 Moreover, that particular strategy appears as legitimate, because to change just one solution is the minimal condition for acceptance in any given community of scholars. Only the relation between the current status of the researcher and the current number of solutions should determine the degree of success of that strategy. In reality, many other factors contribute to the success of the researcher. Accessibility, and therefore comprehensibility, allows Umberto Eco’s “Model Reader of the first level” to follow the ideas of any given researcher. Furthermore, those attributes allow every other profes-sional historian to understand the researcher’s work and thus enable its reception by other historians who may not be as familiar with the problem at stake and who will therefore rely on authority alone when evaluating the validity of the solution offered. In other words, complexity of the system is in a dynamic balance when the number of solutions under discussion decreases, while at the same time new issues are introduced or the old one reintroduced.
Therefore, the third important concept that needs to be taken into consideration is discourse, or more precisely discourse strategies. Being part of historiographical discourse means to participate in the cumulated prestige of the historiographical community and can be recognized as an important factor in the professional identity of any historian.!° To gain the “victory” (or temporary prevailance) in discussion brings one a more important position within the community. In this regard, historical criticism should not be regarded only as a reflection of the contact between the individual, contemporary culture and the past but (rather) as an endeavor to communicate within the community of historians often with a subconscious aim to put through one’s own opinions. In other words, historical criticism (and a sharp pen) may be viewed as a certain communication strategy.!”
Another important attribute of a newly created historiographical field is the creation of different genres written about history — on one side, professionals writing for professionals, on the other side professionals writing for people interested in history, but often without specicialized education. A good signal of these processes being in motion is certainly the series called “Czech History” inspired by “Jahrbiicher des Deutschen Reiches” that was intended as a new synthesis of Czech history that should have replaced Palacky’s “History of the Czech nation in Bohemia and Moravia’. The difference between these texts was as significant as were their possible audiences.
Moreover, with historiography, one can apply algebra and game theory to build quite an elaborate model of historiographic production. However, measuring the degree of success for that production and validating the solutions offered is always a matter concerning systems outside the “context” of the historiographic production. The understanding of past communication acts, such as historical sources, requires an essentially larger number of premises: the validity of parallels; the assumption that human society is homogeneous; the essential difference between human groups; the consistency of the source's author;!® the validity of the grammar in use, etc. Whether or not the understanding of those past communication acts is correct cannot be verified by experiment. While in the process of learning a foreign language or in the interpretation of a physical phenomenon, one can always adjust or correct the interpretation by means of other perceptions, this is impossible in historiography. In other words, the decision the “community” makes on the validity of any category of the statements plays a comparatively greater role. The “community” must necessarily rely in this process on a certain number of solutions. Transferred into the language of historiography, history and memory are rarely, if ever, crystal-clear.
The following book is not a result of archival study. On the contrary, the works of the protagonists of the dispute have been used as a primary source. In the following pages, we will focus not only on particular arguments, but also on certain common themes which may be viewed as typical of a certain stage of the discussion. These allow us to find a relationship between the ways in which the historiographic issues of a given period of time were treated. For this purpose, the importance and frequency of various arguments will be considered, including the indicia allowing us to measure the “distance” between the historiography and the rest of the society in a given period of time.
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