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Read Ebook: Introduction to the Study of History by Langlois Charles Victor Seignobos Charles Berry George Godfrey Translator
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Ebook has 785 lines and 99285 words, and 16 pages
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TO THE READER v
Existing works on Historical Methods--Droysen, Freeman, Daunou, &c. 3
Reasons why the study of method is useful 7
Need of warning to students 11
The general public 13
Distribution of the work between the two authors 13
BOOK I
PRELIMINARY STUDIES
THE SEARCH FOR DOCUMENTS
Documents: their nature, use, necessity 17
The difficulties of Heuristic--Ancient times--H. H. Bancroft--State of things at the Renaissance 19
Growth of libraries--Collectors--Effects of revolutionary confiscation in promoting the concentration and the accessibility of documents 20
Possible future progress--Need for the cataloguing and indexing of documents 27
Students and bibliographical knowledge--Effect of present conditions in deterring men from historical work 32
The remedies--Official cataloguing of libraries--Activity of learned societies--of governments 34
Different kinds of bibliographical works needed by students 37
Different degrees of difficulty of Heuristic in different parts of History--to be kept in view when choosing a subject of research 38
Documents are raw material, and need a preliminary elaboration 42
Obsolete views on the historian's apprenticeship--Mably, Daunou 43
Commonplace and exaggeration on this subject--Freeman--Various futilities 45
The scientific conception of the historian's apprenticeship--Palaeography--Epigraphy--Philology--Diplomatic 48
History of Literature--Archaeology 51
This scientific conception is of recent growth--The ?cole des Chartes--Modern manuals of Palaeography, Epigraphy, &c.--List of the chief of them 55
BOOK II
GENERAL CONDITIONS OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE
Direct and indirect knowledge of facts 63
History not a science of direct observation--Its data obtained by chains of reasoning 64
Complexity of Historical Criticism 67
Necessity of Criticism--The human mind naturally uncritical 68
TEXTUAL CRITICISM
Errors in the reproduction of documents: their frequency under the most favourable conditions--Mistakes of copyists--"Sound" and "corrupt" texts 71
Necessity of emendation--The method subject to fixed rules 73
Methods of textual criticism: original preserved; a single copy preserved, conjectural emendation; several copies preserved, comparison of errors, families of manuscripts 75
Different degrees of difficulty of textual criticism: its results negative--The "emendation game"--What still remains to be done 83
Interpolations and continuations--Evidence of style 92
Plagiarism and borrowings by authors from each other--The filiation of statements--The investigation of sources 93
Importance of investigations of authorship--The extreme of distrust to be avoided--Criticism only a means to an end 98
CRITICAL CLASSIFICATION OF SOURCES
Importance of classification--The first impulse wrong--The note-book system not the best--Nor the ledger-system--Nor the "system" of trusting the memory 101
The system of slips the best--Its drawbacks--Means of obviating them--The advantage of good "private librarianship" 103
CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP AND SCHOLARS
Different opinions on the importance and dignity of external criticism--It is justified by its necessity--But is only preliminary to the higher part of historical work 112
Distinction between "historians" and "critical scholars" --Expediency, within limits, of the division of labour in this respect--The exceptional skill acquired by specialists--Difference of work the corollary of difference of natural aptitudes 115
The natural aptitudes required for external criticism--Fondness for the work, which is distasteful to the creative genius--The puzzle-solving instinct--Accuracy and its opposite--"Froude's Disease"--Patience, order, perseverance 121
The mental defects produced by devotion to external criticism--Its paralysing effect on the over-scrupulous--Hypercriticism--Dilettantism 128
The "organisation of scientific labour" 135
The harshness of judgment attributed to scholars, not always rightly--Much of it a proper jealousy for historic truth--Bad work nowadays soon detected 136
INTERPRETATIVE CRITICISM
Internal criticism deals with the mental operations which begin with the observation of a fact and end with the writing of words in a document--It is divided into two stages: the first concerned with what the author meant, the second with the value of his statements 141
Necessity of separating the two operations--Danger of reading opinions into a text 143
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