A Methodology Inquiry

In their article ‘Farming in Mediterranean France and Rural Settlements’, historians Aline Durand and Philippe Leveau, use an interesting methodology. They use pollen analysis to describe the changes in climate, and then move on to suggest that an interdisciplinary alliance between palynology (study of pollen) and history. I want to look at interdisciplinary alliances a bit more closely.

There seems to be two basic types of alliances between history and other disciplines: natural and unnatural.

History is the study of human civilization since the inception of writing. The focus is largely on literate societies (with a few exceptions) that live in the past. Other disciplines like archaeology, cultural anthropology and to some extent philosophy have similar agendas. Each studies the evolution of human culture and ideas. The methodologies are readily implementable (philosophy is trickier, please look at the first chapter of The Future of History, by Breisach). These constitute ‘natural’ alliances.

There has been, in the past, interesting alliances. For instance, Michael McCormick has used medicine to argue that the pathogen that caused the plague in the middle of the sixth-century was Y. Pestis (the same pathogen that causes the bubonic plague). Horden and Purcell have also looked at climate change and physical geography to look at the unity of the Mediterranean world.

These alliances appear to me as being unnatural alliances. There is an element of subjectivity to historical debates. As my professor Ian Wood told me, ‘we look at history through the spectrum of our education’; in other words, both the literary material AND the analysis is subjective. History is an interpretation of the past, a logical inference made by a single person about a particular event. The perspective the historian chooses; the methodology is logically arbitrary: it makes sense to a person (the historian) and to a culture (his society). In that regard, there appears to be a fundamentally different perspective between history and geology for instance.

That is not to say that, as historians, we should not use scientific data and methods. McCormick, for instance, makes a persuasive case for the use of medical methodology in medicine. But, when using disciplines that are fundamentally different from history, the historian must be careful in that he may not be qualified to answer the questions that can be interpreted from this new data.

On methodology, there are so many books, it is difficult to start:

1) The Future of History- Breisachvery abstract, close to philosophy2) Histories: French construction of the past

important historical tradition, but there are many other traditions that are worthwhile. Good place to start.

3) Toward a Molecular History of the Justinianic Pandemic- Michael McCormick- In Plague and the End of Antiquity by Lester K. Little

very good, but still contested results.

4) The Corrupting Sea- Horden and Purcell

seminal work, but very very very long.