Despite being a partially trained academic historian, I also do not look down my nose at "popular" history* but revel in it. I feel very passionately that history belongs to everyone. I understand the worries of scholars who spend their professional lives teasing out the nuance and complexity of history, who use larger philosophical questions about meaning and the nature of language to go about the work of writing history. It's painful to see something you care about and examine carefully so oversimplified and accidentally or willfully misunderstood. Add to this concern the very nature of history and its role in human society, which is as a commodity - the powerful control history and use it to their advantage. Nearly everyone seeks in it justification for present action, inaction or thought. History is a tiny manipulation away from propaganda and this is something to be aware of. Nevertheless, history simply does not belong in an ivory tower. It doesn't need protecting. It needs to get out and breathe. And that means that sometimes inaccuracies will arise...and they will proliferate as people decide that they like the sound of the inaccuracy better than the truth. I don't relish when this happens, but I figure humans are imprecise creatures and we kind of do this with everything else anyway. And meanwhile there will always be scholars more concerned with truth and subtlety than what sounds good and seems obvious.
Okay, so now that I've said that, I will begin my rant about an exceedingly common historical error that really chaps my hide: that people in the Middle Ages thought the world was flat. The Middle Ages is such a popular whipping boy for our technologically-minded age and we are so very convinced of our own ascendancy. It probably just sounds right to us that medieval people would have thought the earth was flat. This is, in fact, a really good example of how we use history to tell us something about our present rather than to truly understand the past. We like thinking about how "backward" the Middle Ages were because we get to feel smug and comfortable about how much we think we know (to chuckle about this, picture asking someone in a thousand years how much we know in the 21st century). I believe a lot of people imagine the Middle Ages as some crazy anomaly sandwiched in between the classical age and the Renaissance. Some people still call it the "Dark Ages" for crying out loud (different rant, but equally as annoying as this flat earth idea). Inherent in our treatment of the Middle Ages is our belief that we are much smarter than those silly people.
Well, we're not. Medieval scholars thought just as complexly about the subjects that engaged their minds as we do. I believe simply that different questions captivated them than captivate us. In fact, anybody in a position to be informed on the matter in the Middle Ages would have told you that the earth was spherical. It's just that fewer people were in a position to be informed - for that is true of the Middle Ages, literacy was rare and education was prized for only a few in society. I suppose there were peasants somewhere who, if they even bothered to think of it, would have imagined the world as flat. And yet that doesn't make the entire culture a society of dimwits.
And just incidentally, this flat earth fallacy extends right up to the Early Modern period and Columbus' "discovery" of the Americas. Nobody ever told Columbus he might sail off the end of the earth. For crying out loud, Columbus called the indigenous Americans "Indians" because he thought he was in India. He sailed west hoping to end up east. He sure as hell knew the world was a sphere...he just seriously misjudged how large that sphere was.
And you know, while I'm at it I'll dismiss two more annoying common misunderstandings about the Middle Ages: (1) rampant and persecutory witch hunting belonged to post-Reformation, post-Renaissance Europe and not to the Middle Ages (think of our own famous witch hunt - what happened at Salem occured in the 1600s, gang), and (2) the nastiest of all the inquisitions was the Spanish Inquisition and guess what? It was led by two secular leaders, not the Catholic Church, and these same leaders, Columbus' pals Isabelle and Ferdinand, also lived in post-medieval Europe. If the Spanish Inquisition had been led by the medieval Catholic Church, its inquisitors would have shown more restraint and sought reconciliation with the church, only recommending torture or execution in extreme cases, which is how the inquisitions were run in the Middle Ages. To be sure, I do not advocate for a kinder gentler image of what any of the inquisitions were. They still entailed torture and coerced conformity, certainly, but when you think of widespread inquisitorial persecution and aggressive zealotry, trust me, you're probably thinking of the Early Modern period and not the Middle Ages.
Okay, okay, unless you're thinking of the Crusades. That was certainly a medieval debacle of persecution and zealotry, but again, it was started by the church and only really turned horrific in the hands of secular leaders. My point stands, that what we think we know about the Middle Ages has more to do with how we like to view ourselves in contrast to it, than it has to do with what that time period was really like. Sure, the medieval church sought and sometimes coerced conformity. It also mediated between bellicose secular rulers and advocated for peaceful resolutions. Then again it also sent an army of marauders into the cradle of civilization to "reconquer" Jerusalem, which had never belonged to Europe or Catholicism in the first place. And the church was only one medieval institution at work, if a very important one. There was a whole society of folks out there doing the muckity muck of living and dying who didn't get to write about it. What about their experiences? Can we judge an entire time period based on events we don't like and ideas we misunderstand? Well, yes, as it turns out, we do it all the time. I hope someday our own time period is some other culture's whipping boy. Cosmic (karmic?) justice is rather more beautiful than our measley human justice. Meantime, I can blog about it.
*Most scholars would consider "popular" history anything that concerns itself with being entertaining as well as, or even at the expense of being, accurate. New Orleans, for instance, abounds in popular history - plantation tours, cemetery tours, horse-drawn carriage tours (these guys are notorious for making up the "history" they purvey to tourists), and the like.
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