Rewriting Histories, Rewriting Historians

The standard study of the history of the university during the medieval era remains Hastings Rashdall’s monumental text The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, originally published in the 1890s. Historians of higher education who want to discuss the history of the liberal arts, or the origins of university structure and organization, or long trends and traditions (or the lack thereof) in higher education often resort to Rashdall – and with good reason.  Rashdall’s work is magisterial in every sense of the word, a tour de force of painstaking and deep archival research over a sweeping field of inquiry, a cosmic chaos of knowledge presented to the reader by a historian who writes with the absolute assurance of one who has mastered his subject.  It is high History with a capital H, and it is essential history – Rashdall’s signal work is still in print today.

Well, sort of.

Oxford University Press publishes a revised and updated version of Rashdall’s study, in three volumes. This revision was undertaken after Rashdall’s death by two Oxford historians, F.M. Powicke and A. B. Emden, and was first published in 1936.

In an introduction to their revised edition, the collaborating editor/authors make the following observations:

In addition to the work of coping with the literary output of forty years [that is, the literature on the subject that has appeared since Rashdall’s work was first published], we had to face the perplexities involved in the treatment of Rashdall’s text.  His book is not a ‘classic’ like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empireor Macaulay’s History of England, whose every word and comma must be preserved.  Rashdall was a vigorous and often a delightful writer, but he did not possess the infallible composure which is characteristic of a fine or distinictive literary style.  Sometimes he wrote hurriedly and carelessly; occasionally he made grammatical slips; and, although he arranged the contents of his book with obvious care, he had little sense of form.  He frequently repeated himself or tucked away a significant observation, as it occurred to him, in a place which was not the most relevant to its significance.  On the other hand, Rashdall was incapable of writing anything dry or impersonal.  He put himself into his books, and he liked to expatiate and to indulge in a genial jibe.  He lived in a time, and was trained in a university, in which the study of history was an expression of interest in the ‘humanities,’ and, while it had begun to take account of scientific method, had not yet become professional.

This is a fascinating bit of text, both for what it claims and what it disclaims.  Right out of the gate, the collaborating editors deny that Rashdall’s text is too good, much less too great, to be altered.  It is not a classic – or, as they have it, a “classic,” in scare-quotes.  They do not discuss what the criteria of selection are for determining what makes a work of history a classic, but both examples they cite were popular with a wide readership.  Broad familiarity with and approval of those works as written would have rendered ludicrous the prospect of someone rewriting them.  Readers came to those works, it is supposed, not simply to read “history” but to read Gibbon and Macaulay on “history.”  Less so, it seems, with Rashdall – though apparently the third volume of his work, a deep dive into the founding of Oxford and Cambridge, was widely read.

Immediately after disclaiming classic status for this work, the editors then manage to cast serious doubts on the work’s overall quality as they judge it.  The style isn’t fine or distinctive, sometimes the historian wrote in a hurry, his grammar was sketchy, the whole mass of the book is a hot mess of disorderly argumentation, and he buries crucial insights in obscure footnotes. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

“On the other hand,” the editors continue…

On the other hand, what?

The style isn’t fine, but it’s personal; Rashdall had a distinctive and unmistakable voice, very much his own. He practiced history not as an austere and objective science, but as a humanistic inquiry concerned with morality, with meaning, with ideals and principles.

So, what to do with a historical work that was at that point outdated in some respects, replete with infelicities or even inaccuracies, and so thoroughly characterized by a personal and engaged style of narration that to edit for an “objective” or scientific style would have amounted to having to write the whole book anew?

Here’s how they handled it:

…Rashdall’s text has in general been preserved, but has not been regarded as sacrosanct.  We have not hesitated to correct it and to delete erroneous or misleading passages.  Here and there, particularly in the first volume, we have substituted new sentences for the old, and, more rarely, we have interpolated new matter.  To have called attention to these numerous changes, however trivial or brief, would have been pedantic and might have irritated the reader, but the more significant alterations and additions have been enclosed with square brackets.  Similarly, in the footnotes editorial additions and comments have been enclosed in square brackets, but deletions and minor corrections have been made silently.

This strikes me as a rather remarkable and, I would assume, an obsolete approach to the task of revising a major work of scholarship.  And make no mistake, Rashdall’s text remains a major work of scholarship – though one wonders if it would or could have remained so without this revision.  Part of what makes the history “major” is that it is simply massive in terms of size and scope and sources – a truly monumental text, not so much for its wisdom as simply for its extensive coverage and its evidentiary weight, however mishandled or mismanaged in places.  These co-editors – co-authors, in places – recognized what an impossible task it would have been to write a “new” history of the university in Europe in the Middle Ages drawing upon all that Rashdall had to hand plus forty more years of scholarship, but recognized as well that Rashdall’s work had become (if it had not always been) an inadequate and in places a deeply inaccurate account.

So they took it down to the studs, tore out the defective materials, and explained their larger emendations but decided not to bother the reader with “minor” changes, like skilled contractors seeking owner input on major architectural decisions but determining for themselves what would count as major.  And, I suppose, that’s what you expect experts to be able to do.

But, more generally, you don’t really expect major works of history to undergo a significant rewrite, even if only in spots, by anyone other than their original authors.  If a work of history needs that much rewriting, then it’s time for someone else to look at the materials the author examined as well as whatever other materials may be to hand and write a fresh account of the subject. But to write a “fresh account” that engages anew with any historical problem or question is not the work of an afternoon or a summer or a year.  One must commit a significant chunk of one’s life to writing a work of history – several years, maybe even a decade or more.  And if the new account didn’t turn out to be that much better or more original or more comprehensive than Rashdall’s narrative, it might seem like valuable time wasted.  I mean, Rashdall himself spent twelve years on his history of the medieval university – no wonder he was so unmistakably present within its pages.

Though it’s doubtless the case that the sheer mass of archival sources Rashdall presented in his text all but guaranteed that his work would remain in print simply for the sake of the footnotes, it may also be that the very quirk and “flaw” of Rashdall’s distinctive style gave his work staying power.  Perhaps it was precisely because his work was not written in the spirit of history as “science,” because its editors found it so jarring or unreadable in places, that we still find it readable at all.