History–Ian Moore

I thoroughly enjoyed the discussion of history the other day, mostly because of how heavily it focused on the fact that so much of history is based upon interpretation–not simply the interpretation of individuals, but the interpretations of an entire culture when considering a specific event (the example I’ll use for that is the entry in the Anglo-Saxon chronicles about there being a red moon). History is often fascinating to be because there are so many differing views on what exactly happened at a given time and place. One man’s saint is another’s sinner and so forth. Yet I never considered before the discussion how a different time period affected the manner in which a culture might view a battle or a leader or an event such as an eclipse. I suppose this should have occurred to me earlier–of course a Medieval society would view the natural world with more importance than a twentieth century one–but still the revelation was fascinating. For example, it never entered my mind that people living in the Middle Ages were just as knowledgeable about the world (in their own way) as we are now. Sure they didn’t have Facebook or Twitter, but as those Anglo-Saxon chronicles dictate, they were clearly keeping track of events going on, and ascribing meaning to them. Also, the very act of giving meaning to a certain event–not the event having inherent meaning–really interested me. I should have thought more in depth about such a concept, but the idea that an event–say, battle, argument, marriage, purchase of property–doesn’t have any significance on its own, that a culture subscribes significance to it, is really interesting. This makes sense, of course–a marriage in of itself might have no historical significance, but years later, if the divorce caused a falling out between two major noble houses, this marriage could be looked at as the starting point of a much greater conflict. Fascinating, I think.