{"id":31487,"date":"2015-05-29T03:00:50","date_gmt":"2015-05-29T07:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=31487"},"modified":"2015-05-27T21:26:56","modified_gmt":"2015-05-28T01:26:56","slug":"the-historians-blindfolds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/05\/29\/the-historians-blindfolds\/","title":{"rendered":"“The historian\u2019s blindfolds”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sarah Hoyt<\/a> coined the term “the historian\u2019s blindfolds” to describe historical situations where “the ‘everyone knows’ [happenings don’t] get recorded, and the ‘never happens’ or ‘happens so rarely it\u2019s big and sensational’ gets recorded ALL the time”:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve \u2013 for instance \u2013 for the last several years been very suspicious of Dickens, because my other sources for the time (not just primary sources, but those writing often in a family\/biography) context paint quite a different picture.<\/p>\n

I mean, yes, there were horrible conditions at the time, but they were horrible conditions by our perspective, and we live in an era of superabundance. And the underclass lived very disordered lives. Well, I read student doc. Our underclass just uses different substances and is better fed. Go to Student Doc \u201cThings I learn from my patients\u201d (it\u2019s not coming up for me, hence not linked. Also, prepare to lose hours there. [This might the site<\/a>]) BUT as \u201cbad\u201d as the industrial revolution might have been, it attracted droves of farmers from the countryside. And having seen it happen in real time in India and China, I\u2019m no longer able to believe the propaganda that they were \u201cforced\u201d off their lands.<\/p>\n

Farming looks like a lovely, bucolic occupation to those who have never done any, but the farming they did at the time involved no tractors, no milking machines. It was inadequate tools and inadequate strength beating inadequate livelihood out of inadequate (in most places) soil. Yeah, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the girls wove wreaths for Michaelmas, and everyone danced around the Maypole, but in between there was a very harsh reality that made the rather horrible conditions in the early mills seem like heaven and depopulated the countryside and packed the cities \u2013 as we see now in China and India.<\/p>\n

So, our first problem with finding out if there really was a \u201cfirst night\u201d right for the seigneur is to figure out the difference between the accounts and the truth. There is no direct evidence, but remember all the recording of the times was done by church men who might very well not know what was going on. Sometimes, granted, it was willful not know. The village priest determinedly didn\u2019t know of certain things that went on around May Day and I\u2019m fairly sure would continue not knowing if he walked in on it and saw it. Because he wasn\u2019t stupid and stuff that\u2019s been going on for two thousand years and yet is of a nature not to be co-opted into the church celebration of this or that saint (St. Anthony and St. John with bonfires and wild herbs and jumping over the fires, and trekking to the city and across the city to see the sunrise on the sea, for instance, for Summer solstice. Yeah. Perfectly normal Catholic tradition) couldn\u2019t be stopped cold, but knowing about it would mar his ability to preach against certain things which he must preach against. (\u201cIt was a morning in May\u2014\u201d And for the record this particularly guppie always thought going amaying is about gathering the flowers to put in every entrance to the house to word off evil spirits. But I am an ODD and often unable to see what\u2019s right before my eyes because I was told it was different.)<\/p>\n

The problem of the \u201cfirst night\u201d is compound by several issues: we\u2019re talking a span of about 2000 years. It\u2019s about sex and everyone lies about sex, or shuts up about it, which can be the same. We have fundamental disagreements on the basic nature of men and women. And that\u2019s what I\u2019m going to go with. Because that\u2019s the interesting part.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sarah Hoyt coined the term “the historian\u2019s blindfolds” to describe historical situations where “the ‘everyone knows’ [happenings don’t] get recorded, and the ‘never happens’ or ‘happens so rarely it\u2019s big and sensational’ gets recorded ALL the time”: I\u2019ve \u2013 for instance \u2013 for the last several years been very suspicious of Dickens, because my other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,7,11],"tags":[360,262,924,859,255],"class_list":["post-31487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-history","category-religion","tag-christianity","tag-culture","tag-farming","tag-manufacturing","tag-sexuality"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8bR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31487"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31488,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31487\/revisions\/31488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}