One of the recurring themes in my scholarly life is “lots of little details.” That’s true of many things in life, of course, but this morning I’m struck with its scholarly application. I’m prone to taking account of a lot of bits-of-evidence, the small details that by themselves are trivial but in the big picture add up to something significant. Assuming I’m lucky, of course.
Historians often inherit sources shaped by earlier editors’ priorities, so part of my work has been learning how to ask new questions of familiar materials. Many of our sources with “lots of details” come from the nineteenth century -- Ludwig Rapp and his mastery of parish clerical details in Topographisch-historische Beschreibung is one of my current faves! Wow, what a collector of detail! So truly, local archives and chronicle accounts were edited by folks excited for what the data can show – about war, about politics, about economics. Their questions, however, did not always extend to other kinds of questions, like those about relationships, and households, and famine, and fear.
Thus, even in a place like Bregenz, where the surviving sources were so negatively impacted by war, and invasion, and the predations of time, I love that there are still questions I can ask, and answers in the little details that come from careful consideration of the sources with new questions in mind. I’ve turned up “new” sources on Thalbach, for instance, not by finding actual new documents, but by reading the extant documents for details that didn’t matter to the indexers of past times – payments to and charity for the devout women of the town. Sometimes the clue is as small as a repeated instruction to light a candle at a grave — something no nineteenth-century editor thought worth indexing, but wonderfully delicious for my argument.
And now, I’m plowing my way through prayerbooks, looking for ways in which spirituality is manifest not as treatise but as practice. We have given preference to the authorial voice, particularly those by named authors and/or those approved by the church, for instance. But what is interesting to me is how those sermon-shaped ideas became fixed in these women’s lives – not so much what they *heard* but what they *did* with that spiritual guidance provided to them.
So yes, I’m reading 15th century prayerbooks for fun and enlightenment. I think these sources can tell us something important – not so much about what these women actually believed, but about what they did as a matter of practice. Actions speak louder than words; prayers, repeated, and copied, and collected, and shared, tell us a lot about how belief became present as part of daily life.
That’s an awful lot of words, of course. Words words words. Oodles and scads of words. 397 folios of words in one case. 120 pages of words in another.
But little by little by little, and sooner or later it all gets done.
Or, as we also say, “every day a little progress.”
That, in the end, is often how historical knowledge grows: not from dramatic discoveries, but from patient attention to what earlier readers overlooked. And spreadsheets. But that’s another post.
WORKS CITED
Image from Vorarlberger Landesbibliothek, Hs 17: a late 16th-century Thalbach prayerbook, fol. 216, "O junckfrow maria ain künigin der himel," marked with a tab in its left-hand margin.
Ludwig Rapp, Topographisch-historische Beschreibung des Generalvikariates Vorarlberg, 5 vols (Brixen: Weger, 1894-1924). I especially love volumes 2 & 3, the Bregenz volumes.
