The Enlightenment: sometimes an oxymoron

[ahorbinski]

Sarah Monette, who holds a Ph.D. in English literature from UW-Madison, recently posted a review of Richard Godbeer's The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England that thoroughly dissects one of the most common pitfalls of historiography, in my opinion: namely, the failure of the historian to take the worldview of her subjects on its own terms--not to share that worldview, which is impossible and would defeat the scholarly endeavor, but simply to grant it basic respect:

Now, I am not saying that historians of seventeenth-century New England have to believe in divination or witchcraft or any other point of their subjects' cosmology. But I am saying that they have to approach that cosmology, and all those beliefs, with respect and without trying to explain them away for post-Enlightenment readers. Because in so doing, all the historian accomplishes is to put another layer of obscuration and confusion over his or her analytical lens. And implicitly encourages the belief that his or her pre-Enlightenment subjects were a bunch of gullible fools. Which they were not.

Dipesh Chakrabarty talks about the failure to grapple with religious experience and non-human agencies as a consequence of historiography's origins in modernity, which is certainly true as far as it goes, but this is also on a certain level a fundamental pitfall of the human condition--certainly Herodotus assumes the basic superiority of his worldview over his non-Greek subjects', though he rarely insists on it explicitly. Along with certain other common pitfalls, it's one to perennially be on guard against.