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Half of the Story
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13642 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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8 / 1988 |
3,046 Words |
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Robert Royal
Robert Royal is a vice president at the Center for Ethics and
Public Policy. |
A HISTORY OF PRIVATE LIFE:
Revelations of the Medieval World
George Duby, Editor
Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988
650 pp., $39.50
In his romance Cligès, the medieval French poet Chrétien de Troyes describes in a humble metaphor someone whose inner life was as upright and true as his manners: "He had the wood as well as the bark." This ancient bon mot points to a question of interest in every age: the relationship of appearance to reality. Historians in particular used to occupy themselves investigating the ways in which publicly professed ideals were respected or denied by private behavior.
Large-scale public subjects have traditionally stood at the center of history writing. Even before Aristotle called man the "political animal" and defined the effort to order rationally human life in the polis as the highest merely human endeavor (the relationship to a higher being was something that transcended the political), history was mostly a question of governments, politics, wars, social movements, and other events larger than, but cognizant of, the individual.
Several new currents in historiography have come together in this century, however, and threaten to sink history as traditionally written beneath the results of "scientific" contributions of anthropology, archaeology, statistics, psychology, and other disciplines. Traditional history meant the narration of the events that affected people living in a given period,
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