On Feb 22, 2008, at 12:52 PM, Exstock wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "Dawn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Some of those books really are not that bad.
...
Although most of the books listed date from the 40's to the 70's
and have been out of print for decades, they still show up and can
be useful sources.
Along those lines, as I am busy spending scads of time looking for
wills & inventories on Google books, I'd like to make sure that
people don't get confused and think that everything written on
historical matters during the era of Bad Costuming Books is
worthless. People in the 19th century seemed to have a positive
mania for transcribing very useful historical documents.
They did indeed, and it's a great help. I would never say *all*
Victorian sources were bad; it's more complicated than that. Although
any Victorian source needs to be checked out -- and we should be
doing that anyway.
I think the problem is mainly that Victorian writers on the Middle
Ages and Renaissance were very, very confident. They were *certain*
that they could look at a fragmentary, incomplete artifact and
"restore" it to what it looked like when it was new. They also seem
to have been fairly relaxed about generalzing from very few
examples. Modern researchers are much more cautious, and try to
question their own biases and to not make any assumptions beforehand.
I'd still say "not reliable" is a good starting assumption when
looking at Victorian sources, but that doesn't make them useless.
____________________________________________________________
O Chris Laning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - Davis, California
+ http://paternoster-row.org - http://paternosters.blogspot.com
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