Due to the recent fracas over a certain front-page story, I am restoring this diary, with some changes of wording that I hope will make clear it is intended to be about general cases and not any specific instances.
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We've been hearing a lot lately about the importance of researching and double-checking one's sources. As a person with an SCA background (Society for Creative Anachronism - focused on European history to 1650 AD), I'm basically in favor of that. One thing they drum into your head right away is the importance of being able to document everything.
Let's take a totally frivolous example (loosely borrowed and adapted from "Ruritanian Purple Feathers and Other Problems of Documentation", by Audelindis de Rheims (writer) & Caterina da Monticello (artist), published in Tournaments Illuminated #77, Winter 1986). Suppose you want to dress as a medieval Ruritanian peasant, and all you have to go on is some general ideas about peasant dress and an oral tradition from your grandmother, that she said she got from her Ruritanian grandmother, that medieval Ruritanian peasants wore purple flowers in their hats. This is unsupported tertiary documentation, at best, and will do for a costume party - but in the SCA it would very likely get the authenticity police on your case if you had nothing better.
So you go to the library, and you look for information on European peasant/folk dress of the Middle Ages, and maybe you find a very general costuming book that says, in passing, that medieval Ruritanian peasants wore purple flowers in their hats on St. Elstrid's day. That at least proves your grandmother wasn't totally making stuff up. But it's still unsupported secondary documentation, and may not be enough to shut up the authenticity police.
So maybe your author included a few footnotes, and the comment on Ruritanian purple flowers includes a citation of Ye Travells of Lord Griswolde of Monkeschase, 1673. So now you need to go and hunt up that book.
Fortunately for you, Lord Griswolde's Travells was reprinted by a university press in the 19th century and you're able to track down a copy. After rummaging through it, you find, "And on St. Elstrid's Day I espied the peasants of Eskilax wearing purple flowers in their hats and was told that such was done anciently in the days of Duke Mort the Sane.” And there's a scholarly footnote telling you that "Mort the Sane" was Grand Duke of Lower Ruritania from 1195 to 1220 and again in the month of June 1232.
Well, now you're on the right track, but this is still not conclusive - it's a late 17th century Englishman's report of what some other seventeenth-century person (presumably but not necessarily Ruritanian, or reliable) said was a Ruritanian medieval tradition. At least we know the purple flowers were worn in the late 17th century. But were they really worn before that?
If you keep looking and are extremely lucky, you may come across something like Ruritanian Dress from 1100 to the Present, by someone who spent some years in Ruritania as a girl and whose enthusiasm for the subject outpaces her ability to organize her information. But she includes a quotation from an obscure (but documentable) French troubadour, Jean de Plumedematante (1180?-1250) who traveled extensively in Ruritania after being exiled from the English court in 1199 by Eleanor of Aquitaine for bad scansion. The quote is in an obscure dialect of Occitanian French, but the book's auther also includes her own translation. The line is from his extremely long poem ‘Wandering Ruritania Desolately and Why it Makes Me Think of My Lady.’ The line is (translated) "The purple of their flower'd hats all on the green on St. Elstrid’s Day did remind me of her eyes... "
Now we've got an actual cited primary source. You still can't be sure they didn't wear the flowers all summer, or that it wasn't a passing fad that was revived in the 1670's, but it will probably shut up that snippy member of the authenticity police who's been bugging you about those purple flowers.
But you'd still like to know more, so you continue to research and eventually turn up a reasonably recent scholarly tome about Ruritanian Dress in Transition, 1180-1443, extensively illustrated and footnoted, including both the Griswolde and Plumedematante references; two early thirteenth century manuscript illuminations from the Life of St. Elstrid showing gamboling peasants wearing purple flowers in their hats; a quotation from the laws of Duke Mort III, called the Sane, requiring the wearing of purple flowers on St Elstrid’s Day; quotations from church records on the purchase and distribution of said flowers and, finally, several references covering the centuries between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries proving that the custom continued.
So now you know, yes, Ruritanian peasants did indeed wear purple flowers in their hats on St. Elstrid's Day from the late 12th century on down past the 17th. (And you have some idea what else they wore, thanks to those illuminations.) Your family tradition has been thoroughly verified and substantiated - at least on this point. (For anything else, it's back to the beginning and start all over again.)
But let's also take the opposite case. Suppose your authoritative scholarly tome instead cites a sumptuary law passed by Duke Mort III in 1217 banning the wearing of purple flowers by anyone not a member of the nobility, on St Elstrid's day or at any other time, and records of fines imposed for violations of the ban down to about, say, 1640, with a quoted law by some later Duke repealing the ban. Well, then you know that Ruritanian peasants weren't supposed to wear those stupid purple flowers during that time frame. Your family tradition may be good back to about 1650, but not necessarily reliable from 1218 to 1641.
Mistress Audelindis (mundanely known as Linda R. Fox) concludes with some general questions relating to evaluation of sources.
The most important is: Does your source list its sources? Not just generally in the back, either, but does it list a source for each fact it gives you? If it doesn’t the book is nearly useless. For all you know the author has invented “facts”, or has made errors of interpretation or is copying from someone else who is mistaken. Does the author take you back to a primary source?
The next thing to ask about your source is when was it published? A book written fifty years ago in most medieval and Renaissance studies is usually going to be just as untrustworthy as a fifty-year-old... medical [text]book. Study has progressed and ideas have changed in that time just as much as in any other area. However, don’t use the publication date as your sole criterion, since much good research was done before 1950 and much garbage has been published since. (Be very suspicious of even very recently published general surveys such as [general-purpose costume books].)
Thirdly, ask yourself, is the author trying to sell a theory? A theory isn’t a fact, no matter how much its author wants to believe that it is. Authors who start out with a theory will often ignore inconvenient facts and twist others to fit their own ideas. Facts should come first and theories later, if ever.
(My emphasis added, because this point is often crucial.)
PS: Anyone finding excessive snark in this diary is encouraged to take it up with Mistress Audelindis, who came up with most of the original examples. (Snark about the "authenticity police" is entirely mine, based on personal encounters with some of them.)
