Introduction

Recently I received an email inquiring whether I am aware that an article published in the Winter 2003 issue of Common Knowledge was a hoax. The author of the email is a historian of the British intelligence services, and the supposed hoax concerns misinformation about an agent of MI6 around the time of World War II. My interlocutor finds it morally troubling that the misinformation deals to an extent with the Holocaust. In response, I wrote: Thanks for your message about Colin Richmond's “In Memory of Virtue,” the title of which, I think, should answer the question you raise. The piece concerns virtue, which Richmond takes to have died during the Second World War. The piece does not importantly concern his “cousin Claude” and MI-6. Richmond is a unique figure, in my experience, among historians. He goes back and forth between, on the one hand, the strictest imaginable empiricism (see, for example, his article “The Advent of the Tasburghs: A Documentary Study in the Adair Family Collection,”Common Knowledge 20.2:296ff., and my introduction to it, on 197–203) and, on the other hand, the fictionalization of history for a range of charitable purposes. Those who are accustomed to reading his work—among whom I hope that we can count the readership of Common Knowledge, where he has published dozens of pieces over the past quarter-century—may be expected to be able to tell his empirical from his fictional efforts. We have in press now an article of his on a visit of Jan van Eyck to London in 1428, the evidence for which I take to be mostly fictional—though not much is at stake, morally speaking, with that piece, if a few readers mistake his intent (which is humorous). If you would like to read pieces of his in which he makes explicit what he's up to, I suggest you try “Utopia” (in 22.1:5ff.), which is counterfactual (in the service of relief from bitter actuality), and “In Custody” (in 23.2:199ff.), in which he cites a fact about the life of Anthony Woodville in 1469 and then fills in all that we do not know about it with witty, educated speculation. Clearly, this is not history-writing that appeals to everyone (though, if you glance at the names on our editorial board you will find those of many of the most important and empirically-insistent historians of our day). Common Knowledge, alas, is not a journal that appeals to everyone, either.I offered my troubled correspondent an address at which Professor Richmond could be reached in England, but it turned out that the former had contacted the latter already (by phone, at dinnertime, on Easter Sunday) and that the message to me had been an afterthought—a means perhaps to discomfit Richmond, if indeed he thought he had hoodwinked me. I do not know which details of the essay are in question; I have not inquired because I know Richmond's oeuvre too well. Another piece of his, published here in 2004, concludes with a librarian in Poland (“Suddenly into the café burst the university librarian”) accusing him of perpetrating a scholarly hoax.1 The librarian has read an advance copy of “Leonard Coxe and Thomas More: The Implications of their Friendship for the Copernican Revolution,” a lecture that Richmond is to deliver the next day, from behind Copernicus's own desk, to an audience at Olsztyn Castle. According to the librarian, Richmond's text is “all lies.” “Not all lies,” Richmond “gently” explains, suppressing with tongue in cheek the italics that I have supplied. But “the poem,” the librarian returns, “is an invention.” The poem? Apparently Richmond's lecture attributes a poem called “Bona Bisonta” to Copernicus and the English humanist Leonard Coxe as coauthors. “I allowed myself,” Richmond writes, “a smile”—for the poem “is here, I said: it is in your library.” The “red-faced, spluttering, irate” librarian “had begun to calm down. But now he exploded again. I remained calm, sipping Okocim, while the others around the table clicked their tongues, uneasy at the turn things had taken and unable to know which side to take. Besides, I went on, isn't all history invention? My question set the cat among the pigeons. Earnest, even heated debate ensued,” during which Richmond persuaded his colleagues that “the historian's role was to invent.” Like a Schwitters collage (Schwitters shows up whenever Richmond feels frisky), historical writing is “the consequence of discoveries, the result of finding and using what others, unimaginative and uninventive, have no time for and throw away”2—a definition of historiography that seems a gloss on Hugh Kenner's of empiricism: “Empiricism is a game. Its central rule forbids you to understand what you are talking about.”3The red-faced librarian, meanwhile, has gone off to conduct empirical research: “At the conclusion of my lecture the following morning, the university librarian approached me apologetically. He had found ‘Bona Bisonta’ in a catalog of the late 1940s—those disorderly times, as he termed them: a catalog long since discarded and rarely looked into.”4 The “Bona Bisonta” is a 1,072-line poem, not by Copernicus and Coxe, but by Nicolaus Hussovianus, an aide to Bishop Erazm Ciołek, Polish delegate to the Vatican during the pontificate of Leo X. Written in elegiac Latin couplets and fully titled Carmen de statura, feritate ac venatione bisontis (A Poem about the Size, the Ferocity, and the Hunting of the Bison), it was published in Kraków in 1523 and dedicated to Poland's Queen Bona, Hussovianus's patroness, after his return from service in Rome.5 Thus Richmond pulls from his hat not a rabbit but a bison that he had stowed there when no one was looking. Earlier in the narrative, he has told of a journey that Copernicus made with Coxe to the New World—to Yucatán, of all places.6 This tale will seem tall—an invention, a lie—to anyone not aware that Copernicus is the name of the European Union's Earth-observation program. Moreover, Yucatan is an agency of the Worldcom PR group in charge of press relations for the Copernicus program in France.Hence the complaint of Richmond's critic, the historian of British intelligence, had no power to surprise or alarm me. Richmond fills empty spaces in the historical record with speculations meant to make us better—more virtuous—people. The story about Copernicus in Yucatán was told only so that Richmond could write: “Copernicus's upbringing in Torun was multicultural. Was he a German, a Pole, a Prussian, a Pomeranian, a Kashubian, a Jew? He didn't know and didn't care. When he came back from Yucatan he considered himself Mayan. He was the most confused and at the same time the most open-minded man in Europe.”7 “Multicultural” is a virtue when its product is “open-minded”—and “confused” is good too if its result is the Heliocentric Hypothesis. In Richmond's counterfactual piece “Utopia,” Richard III rules wisely for fifty years, eschewing foreign wars and devoting himself to good works. . . . He is killed by the Iroquois, whom he has been attempting to convert to Christianity. . . . A cult develops immediately, and the saintly Richard is canonized only a year after his death in 1536. The widespread popularity of the cult snuffs out the first feeble flickers of anti-Catholic feeling, and the English church is reformed by Thomas More, without there being any need for the stake. More also reforms Parliament . . . [and], with the backing of a complacent House of Commons (lawyers have been banned from standing as either borough or shire members) that readily votes the necessary funds (there being no foreign wars requiring taxation), creates a nationwide system of health care. . . . More dies in his beloved Chelsea in 1560. . . . Richard IV, king since 1535, . . . vows to continue the policies of the late chancellor, which he does by appointing Thomas More's daughter, Margaret Roper, to succeed him. In harmonious relation with its colonies in the Americas, England acts as a peacemaker in Europe . . . and enters modernity as an agricultural nation that has evaded and will continue to evade civil commotion, industrialization, and the least manifestation of capitalism.8In this instance, a virtuous life needs a virtuous state, and the two entail peacemaking, “good works,” moderation, tranquil reform, the exclusion of lawyers and merchants from public life and the inclusion of women, the preclusion (as inhumane) of market mechanisms and (except in sports and games) competition, free access to medical care for all, and—in the end—death at home, encircled by loved ones.Utopian counterfactual historiography seems to have the same purpose as the chastest kind of historical empiricism. Both aim to undermine the credibility of history that comes in preinterpreted forms. Contextualist historiography is a producer and taxonomist of those forms, and its confidence that in bits of the past we know what to expect is my own chief difficulty with accepting contextualism as currently practiced. The difference between contextualists and other historians who arrive on the scene with ready hypotheses and handy categories is that contextualists are never non-self-reflective or self-indulgent. They do expect what eventually they find, but, unlike the historians they brand “presentist” or “whiggish,” they do their best to evade projection. In this respect, contextualists are placed like analysts behind couches, on which, instead of individuals, sad and lying prone, there are stacks of open texts, awaiting annotation. Richmond's last piece of empirical history to appear in Common Knowledge was so great a success in evading biases and preempting foregone conclusions that I felt the need to comment in an introduction that some readers may protest he has left his job as a historian half-done. He suggests, in “The Advent of the Tasburghs,” his own readings of texts and circumstances largely in the form of questions, as if he were writing marginalia for his own later use while reading. . . . A sufficient quantity of [articles like “Advent”] could help in training new generations to teach and study history in less preinterpreted forms. . . . Charitable empiricism may be required in a situation like the one . . . obtaining in Jerusalem . . . , for students here, in my experience as a teacher, are short on historical imagination and curiosity. Instead of asking questions like, “What else could this set of facts and details tell us?,” they ask—I have faced this question, in just these words, on any number of occasions—“Is this everyone, or just you?” The wording, as I have come to understand it, implies the existence of a monolithic consensus with which the questioner identifies before knowing its full contents, and from which there are dissidents that the questioner has no need to mind. . . . What if [instead] the reviewer of a work of history or the teacher of a course on history were expected . . . to offer readers and students as extensive a range of interpretive frameworks as is conceivable in response to any historical claim or body of research?9I concluded my introduction by promising, “for a future issue of this journal,” a piece “whose aim will be to test consensual beliefs about the relationship of church and synagogue against . . . unimaginably charitable possibilities.”10I wrote that introductory essay and made that promise in the context of vandalism against monasteries, nunneries, and churches in Israel by ultra-Orthodox Jewish youths in 2012 and 2013—and there has been more of the same since that time. In an exchange of emails with Fouad Twal, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, he had suggested to me that the solution would be “better education.” But, as I wrote afterward in these pages, I did not assume Dr. Twal meant to imply that other Israelis “had educations more ‘refined and well formed’ than the vandals” themselves did:11Monks and priests in the Old City of Jerusalem are regularly spit at by ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students whose education is, by some measures, peerless. The trouble is that such students, among the many subjects that they are never taught, are not taught history at all, while Israeli public schools almost exclusively teach Jewish history, and even then Jewish history of just the last one hundred fifty years. When students are exposed to “general history,” as it is called in Israel, Jewish persecution by gentiles, throughout the world and at all times, is taken for granted as structurally given. History is presumed, in other words, to be a simple study, half the nouns used in teaching it being accusative and half nominative, with all the verbs being transitive and categorical. . . . A different kind of education, arising from a different kind of historical scholarship, is plainly required.12In this issue, historical scholarship of “a different kind” is on offer. My own offering, which advances, as promised, a range of alternative frameworks for understanding the relations of medieval Jews and Christians, is fortified by Peter Burke's essay, which precedes it, on “alternative modes of thought.” An article of Burke's published here almost twenty years ago and reprinted in this issue as a public service, commenced our intermittent, reform-minded discussion of contextualism that has culminated in the present symposium. Burke's “Context in Context,” which ought to be on the syllabus of graduate proseminars in a dozen disciplines, argues that, for all the “many insights” that contextualism has made available to humanists and social is a to be for to its and was of history at the world of from to 2004, and his of about it has come at a Clearly, he there his that contextualism is an against is he writes, to against about context was for example, in for in social and so My set forth on in Common Knowledge, is that the of contextualism are and to of which its my least charitable I would that contextualism is the most and form of which is the most for to The means that for that he takes from the of to to contextualism its own for “Context in Context,” a of the by the the of central that in a of other and a out of its because it is the only world he The that, whether of is or there are many but that of us in or than In his new essay, when to on the he does so with is to whether all the were of other of all, when this in for his first experience of some of the also and a few had the to know him well. In any he was not the first European that the had was a in for more than twenty years, and had been at work there for years, among who published a about in the year that make more of their beliefs by their while offer the an alternative anyone can convert from one to is not an issue that But he does the question of what as a and it is less and for example, a is of course to that and that of takes the of a which from a historical or a of is only one system among system that appear to of the system to be no more than to be than a set of a of it is that these from one system to In the of what we of a this more than one may to a and there is no that those may not be to one or that the that of the system may not be at with one or more or indeed with In a on a few after his in the deliver us from the of . . . is not what the of it is what the with . . . as writes, other in a of then or between one and may suggest not or but my here, I such a while aware that the of my own and time would my if I to a as or What I instead of and an are questions, questions, and my first aim in is to contextualists of the with a of whose and power on an I it while to use a in the when I the was necessary to the the one had set for on a to a and in gone by I found the of that Colin Richmond is a of the speaking, and I suggest to that they from reading him when to themselves from that a full of their Another of this of scholarship is the historian whose were set by and He but also to make that alarm historians who that what can be thought or is by context and that, in a of history, one will find no In a essay, on between the of the and the by of on what may and may not be about him. to as a in history, an He not have of his is a and had he about the history of the late would have been more . . . he thought about the the in him by his time. A is not a from An is not a and in any in time were mostly as and as their his back and forth in this throughout the essay, so that reading it is like a man a In the when he that the is when he that “the historians are the to “the world as it has already been is, we an in He shows us what the imagination is from the we the can in other faced with this kind of are to to it in a The work they do of they from the which has no history, to which being the name we have for of things that do not the world as it is, or do so too of the historians are . . . I would by of is that needs the the kind of of we find in on the as the the by that name and, more in the of the of concludes that has us a in from the world that the when The in the and the as much as to be back over his at his body a of he's at the but also a The its does seem to what a on the of this time and would “a on a on the the for . . . But the is it any one of its The has no But in the as from the of and the with that even the seems to and has a a a The of its is as a The two back at us like the a . . . and a of this so to but a on and its by the of come to as only a and for it, but to our the of the to to that all we can know about are being the name we have for of things that do not the world as it is, or do so too What when and and the world is the of Colin Richmond's response, published here, to Burke's on alternative of what extent can one understand a of thought alternative to that of own time and on Thomas of Richmond's answer is that understanding on the of experience between in different thought their of in other also on whether an alternative of thought as at Richmond's conclusion is that “a situation where there is but one of thought in and no it, is a situation in which . . . has arrive at a context alternative modes of great will have and as a is from that with which I that my own questions about the relationship of Jews and have

Art · Audience measurement · Hoax · Literature · Media studies · Misinformation · Political science · Sociology · Virtue · History · Law · Medicine · Philosophy, History, and Historiography

• The Counterfeiters

  William Kinsley, Hugh Kenner et al.•Eighteenth-Century Studies•1971

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• The Advent of the Tasburghs

  Colin Richmond•Common Knowledge•2014

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• Utopia

  Colin Richmond•Common Knowledge•2016

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• Profiles in Sanity

  Colin Richmond•Common Knowledge•2004

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• In Custody

  Colin Richmond•Common Knowledge•2017

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• In This Issue

  Jeffrey M Perl, Jeffrey Perl•Common Knowledge•2014

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• Context in Context

  Peter Burke•Common Knowledge•2002

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