2 - The origins of the ars historica: a question mal posée?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2013
Summary
The English mathematician, magus, and antiquary John Dee did many things in a distinctive way. Most distinctive of all, of course, and most effectively ridiculed by Meric Casaubon and many others, was his habit of talking with angels. Dee did this with the help of scryers like Edward Kelly – a gentleman of ill repute who not only saw the celestial beings appear in the show stone that Dee rested on a great seal of wax, but asked one of them, Madini, to lend him a hundred pounds. But when Dee set himself to read works of history, as he often did, he strictly followed standard practices. The Latin prose narratives of Troy's fall by Dares and Dictys – supposedly eyewitness accounts, the former written by a Trojan, but actually late works that circulated in Latin – fascinated Dee as they did many others. Nonetheless, he took care to establish their credibility. Dictys remarked that he could describe what Ulysses did at Troy “very precisely” because he himself had been present. Dee made an immediate inference: autopsy guaranteed authority. “The truth of this account,” he wrote in the margin, “is certain.” Dictys named heroes by their fathers' names as well as their own. Dee firmly believed, as so many of his countrymen did, that the British were descended from the Trojan Brutus. He used a second widely held principle to confirm the authority of his text. Each people had a fairly stable national character or “genius.” Scholars, accordingly, could use modern evidence to confirm and elucidate ancient accounts of a given people: “Note in this passage,” Dee remarked, “the British custom of naming by citing the patronymic or matronymic or both.”
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- What Was History?The Art of History in Early Modern Europe, pp. 62 - 122Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012