The Past: A Different Universe

AQQ

"The past isn't simply another country, it's an entirely different universe."

Mark Gregory Pegg, A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. xii.

He continues with the following observation:

"History is more art than science, striving for the precision of the imagination. Only through imaginative rigor does the imaginative sympathy occur. That is why historical prose must experiment with narrative styles and structures. The past is hard enough to write without thinking there is only one way to write about it."

(Ibid., xiii.)

I would say, rather, that history is both art and science. The part Pegg calls "rigor" is simply science, or knowledge. That is hard enough to accomplish, but to imaginatively re-create the past as a structure built up from the materials created by historical method is indeed the difficult part, and requires the greatest artistic effort of which the writer is capable. Only a great artist can write a great historical work.

Jas. Duvall, M. A.
Big Bone University

Nec ossa solum, sed etiam sanguinem.

2008