Today's in-box contains contributions from both Elza Tiner and
James Cummings. Here I respond only to the former.
Elza Tiner has taken an imaginative tack in countering my
earlier comments. She points out a connection between the financers
and recorders of times past, who were in large measure responsible
for producing the records we now search as part of our scholarly
activity, and the modern funders and publishers I propose to exclude
from a theoretical discussion of the parameters of our discipline.
This is a nicely insightful yoking, and I commend it even as I
distrust its entailments. Let me offer only a single instance by
way of demur. In the 1590s Thomas Harridance, the parish clerk at
St Botolph's Aldgate, was instructed by his parson Robert Hayes (who
was following his own bishop's instructions) to keep the parish
registers in the usual way; minimal entries for christenings,
marriages, burials. Harridance complied, as indeed he should have;
but on his own, on the side, he kept a series of daybooks containing
much fuller information about the events recorded so barely in the
registers. From his daybooks we learn where people lived, what
their trades were, what the strange circumstances of their marrying
or their dying were, and so on. Harridance, in other words, had a
vision of the parameters of his vocation that differed from the one
given him by his superiors, his funders. I know of no scholar using
the records of this parish who doesn't find Harridance's daybooks
far more useful and informative than the registers he so correctly
kept.
So while Elza Tiner is quite right to remind us that funders
and publishers are our modern day equivalent of patrons, I don't
believe it follows that in our retrieval and employment of earlier
records we must adopt our own patrons' notions of how we ought to
conceive of such work. The role of the older patrons in enabling
the production and preservation of records doesn't seem to me
cognate with the role of publishers in our latter-day recovery and
use of those records. Our modern-day patrons will make it quite
clear to us which aspects of our work they will support; that's
their appropriate role as patrons. It's equally incumbent on us to
ask of ourselves (as Harridance presumably did) if the dimensions of
their supportiveness constitute an adequate or sufficient
description of the limits of our research field and its interests.
A final note. Inspired by James Cummings's questions, I think
Elza Tiner and I have between us sketched out a pair of defensible
but non-congruent positions on this issue. There's room in this
discussion for both our positions, and for others as well. Whether
the general subject could be, as she suggests, "a fascinating
book-length study" is beyond my ability to predict, but I have found
our exchanges most useful, and hope others will add their own
thoughts.
_______________________________________________________________________
William Ingram, English Dept, Univ of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI 48109-1045
e-mail: [log in to unmask] fax (departmental): 313 763 3128
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