Beloit College Magazine
Beloit College Magazine
Spring 2001 Contents
Departments
Features
- Do You Do What You Say You Do?
- Renewed Spirit Marks Inauguration Day
- On the Trail of Roy Chapman Andrews
- A Hands-on Approach to History
- Chalk One Up for Student-Faculty Research
- The Writing is On the Wall
- A Touch of Gold
- A Beloit and the Peace Corps: Adventures in Service
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- By James Goodale
Formerly of the history department.
When a student of mine, Sarah Ruja’02, informed me last fall that she was conducting research on original sheets from a late-medieval chronicle, I immediately dropped everything and raced across campus to see the material for myself. There, in the basement of the Wright Museum of Art, I found Sarah working with some of the most beautiful pages I had ever seen in person. Instantly, I recalled the moment in my life when I knew I had to be an historian.
It was the winter of 1984, and I was a college senior worrying about what I would be doing in five short months. During a mid-term break, a friend and I flew to Mexico City for a change of scenery which we hoped would do us good. One day, while walking around the city, I stumbled upon the compound where Leon Trotsky had spent his final years. I vaguely remembered Trotsky’s name from a Soviet history course I had taken years earlier, so I ventured in.
To my surprise, there were no guards, no ropes bracketing off rooms, no “Do Not Touch”
signs anywhere. The only person I bumped into was the gardener, who told me that I could
walk freely around the house. I found my way to the main room which was outfitted with
bookcases stacked to the ceiling. Cautiously, I took a volume from a shelf, and began
flipping through. “Must remember to mention this to Lenin,” was written clearly in English
in the margin. Soon, I was tearing through as many of the English-language books as I could
find, my heart racing as I came upon more annotations. Ironically, the trip to “take my
mind off things” had worked in reverse; standing outside, on a dusty street in Mexico City,
I knew what I wanted to do, as far as my career was concerned.
There is a certain joy to working with primary sources, a joy that we in the history department strive to introduce and foster among our students. As a scholar who works on European material of the 15th- and 16th-centuries, I am often frustrated that I am limited to offering my students photographs or photocopies of primary texts. So with great cheer, I observed Sarah scrutinizing sheets from the Nuremberg Chronicle. As we discussed the document, I was thrilled to hear that she was feeling the same sort of exhilaration I had experienced 16 years earlier.
Historical Record-Keeping
How a society practices history is culturally determined, and one
can learn a great deal about the concerns, fears, and desires of a particular society by
focusing on how and why it chose to record history—both in terms of the subject matter
selected and the form chosen for historical writing. So, what is a “chronicle”? In Europe’s
late Middle Ages, the chronicle was the standard form of historical representation.
Chronicles were works that focused on broad subjects within a specific geographical area,
and inside a social arena.
Scholars today consider chronicles as an inferior form of written history. Contemporary historians try to fashion—through an imaginative process—a narrative structure that links recorded events in a coherent manner. In doing so, they attempt to create a discourse in which facts, analyses, and conclusions are synthesized, debated, and resolved in a way that the text reads like a good story.
In contrast, the authors of chronicles were not much concerned with narrative-based representations of history; while they respected the chronological order of events, their works ultimately lack coherent meaning. Chronicles have neither “plot” nor “resolution,” and no moral lesson to be learned, either. “Key” events, dating either from the Creation or from the Incarnation, are recorded in a deliberately subjective style, and the work of history ends or (more accurately) simply stops at the point in time when the chronicler takes pen in hand.
A Valuable Teaching Tool
The complete Nuremberg Chronicle (also known as Weltchronik or Liber Chronicarum) outlines the rise and fall of noble families from Bavaria (specifically the city of Nuremberg) and details conflicts that played out. Published in 1493, the chronicle was one of the first popular books that featured secular stories. The five unbound pages owned by the Wright Museum of Art include Latin script and wonderfully detailed woodcut print illustrations. Although not colored, the individual pages are visually arresting. Even though the Nuremberg Chronicle itself is not a reliable record of past events, Beloit’s pages are unique and valuable artifacts.
Why? Because contemporary students benefit immeasurably from having actual pages from an
historical document in front of them, offering glimpses into a world and ways of seeing
long since discarded. Measured by today’s standards, it seems odd that chronicles appealed
to late-medieval and early-modern Europeans. However, examining the complex motives of
early historians provides a wonderful entry-point for further exploration of such
societies.
This term, students in my “Popular Culture in Early-Modern Europe” and “European Reformations” classes will view the words and illustrations from the late-15th-century Nuremberg Chronicle. Analyzing the text and viewing the images on these documents will provide an excellent supplement to their regular readings and assignments, helping the students better understand the radical difference between our conceptions of social reality and those held by late-medieval and early-modern Europeans.
And I hope a few of tomorrow’s students will feel the same exhilaration that Sarah, I, and the chroniclers themselves felt as we considered our own primary sources.
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Up Close and Personal: Tackling Primary Sources
Understanding how to work with primary documents is a major focus of an intensive writing workshop offered this semester by two history department faculty members—Assistant Professor Julia Sneeringer and Associate Professor Linda Sturtz. Several students are working on projects dealing with College history:
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Email:
Nicollette Meister - Collections Manager, College Museums
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