Weiss on-line

One hears that there as many resources available on-line for the louche and the aficinados of the demi-monde as there were courtesans in Renaissance Venice. Now there is one more site for Weiss. Pardon the pun, out of which I should have grown by now, but it still amuses. Me, at least.

The Weiss in question is Robert(o), and more specifically his Humanism in England during the Fifteenth Century. Habitués of these postings may recall that my summer has been spent writing addenda to his work, which remains the main guide to its subject. The first instalment of the new, fourth, edition is now available at the Medium Ævum website. Others will follow in the coming weeks and, eventually, it will not be just the text, with addenda, that is available but also a new appendix of unpublished texts and an introduction by myself.

The instalments each appear in two pdf formats, one closer to a printed version and one with the new addenda inserted as marginal glosses  (how unhumanist!). I would be interested to hear views on both of these. My fellow editor, Anthony Lappin, prefers a style that moves us away from the printed version and, as I’ll mention in a moment, it has its real advantages, but I also have a sense that we need to keep in mind the concept of the old-style hard-copy book. That is partly because there will be those who prefer to print off and read than to view on screen; indeed, I could name those scholars in this subject area who would do just that. But there is also a wider point: scholarship still conceptualises itself in paginated, paper format and to deny that is to leave the on-line world as a ghetto blocked off from the greater universe of scholarship. We have to take the older styles of learning with us if what we do is to be of relevance.

But there are advantages to a version designed to be viewed rather than held. I have consciously attempted to include in the addenda references to works now available on-line, so that the extra information links this work with the wider web of knowledge that subtly criss-crosses the ether. The technology is not ideal: even with Firefox, a click on a link takes you from the pdf to the next site within the same pane; I refrain from using the obvious pun, this time. My advice is to have open the pdf in two tabs (or windows if you are bounded by timid Explorer), so that one can trawl beyond the text, while the other can by your port and portal. The result, we hope, is that the effect of attaching together text with other on-line resources is like providing the thin but perceptible bonds that tie together the figures in the Allegory of Good Government in the Palazzo Publico of Siena: it helps to found a well-ordered settlement — far from the sites of vice — in the new republic of letters.  This is a community with no illiberal limits on immigration, so come and join us.

When two lives collide: an anti-heroic view of humanism

As will already be apparent to the careful reader, I try to keep my lives separate: my involvement, at a minor level, in politics and the civic life of Oxford taxes a different node of my mind from those cells taken up with thinking about the Renaissance. Between politics and research, an invisible wall has been constructed. I believe that is the way it should be. As a result, I am finding a recent turn my writing has taken to be unsettling.

That the practice of politics and the process of intellectual study should be kept separate seems to be a widely-shared attitude. I remember a conversation with the late Conrad Russell, ‘revisionist’  historian of the seventeenth century and Liberal peer, when I asked him whether his political outlook informed his historical thinking. ‘I hope not’ was his response. The reasons are manifest: the pursuit of knowledge, with the assumption that you are striving for ‘truth’, inhabits a different universe from the political life where the emotive and the tribal are among its essential elements. This is not to say that a scholar should not be engagé — on the contrary, my own view is that there is a duty on them, as on others, to move beyond their own activities and be involved in the political community. It may even be that their own research can inform their politics, though it is notable how often that is not the case: a Marxist may tend to be a Marxist in both voting and writing, but for others there can often be an apparent mismatch between the ideas in their publications and their espoused political loyalties. Perhaps Russell himself can stand as an example of that, for his ‘revisionism’, with its emphasis on the contingent  in the development of the conflict which became the Civil Wars was hardly indulgent of the historical mythologies on which some liberal writings have been based.

My quandary is that I find myself preparing a paper for next week in which the position presented happens to sit well with my own political outlook. It is to do with the concept of the ‘hero’. As a Liberal, I have an innate and firm suspicion of ‘heroes’; I have a belief that those who are placed in positions of power are no better than others, and should not be expected to be. Tales of ‘heroes’ too often tend to imagine that a few have particular virtues, beyond those attainable by most men or women. On the contrary, those we elevate to heroic status are as flawed as any of us: we are no worse, and no less able to achieve. What has been developing in my own research is a critique of a tradition of writing on Renaissance humanism which, as I now see it, describes the humanists and their activities in heroic terms. Without giving you the whole of my forthcoming paper, the sort of writing I have in mind is that which, for instance, narrates tales of humanists finding classical texts as a process of selfless striving and determination against all vicissitudes which culminates in a success for the good of civilisation. The humanists themselves might have liked to have had their activities written in these terms but they, at least, would have been able to detect what was rhetorical embellishment in the tales.

What I find myself doing is puncturing such narratives by emphasising the unheroic, the very human, nature of these characters and their activities — how they were distracted by their sex lives, or how they made claims which were intentionally false. I have no desire to put such scholars — much more skilled than myself — on trial but rather to save them from the mythologies that have de-humanised them.

I am comfortable with the direction my writing is taken but I do wonder how far it is informed by my ideological beliefs. Is, in fact, the idea of the scholar who can rise above the other elements of their life itself a construction of a hero, a myth that I should jettison as well?

Can we trust Wikipedia?

The wickedness of Wikipedia is a common theme — the worry that students garner their information from the on-line encyclopedia, at the expense of ‘real’ work, undertaken surrounded by piles of printed tomes. We have all heard the urban myths of lecturers going on the internet to add intentionally false entries to Wikipedia so that they can catch their students if they plagiarise. Wikipedia is far from perfect, but should every good scholar ignore it completely?

First of all, let us not become protective of print encyclopedias, which often fall far below the level of extensive, unquestionable knowledge that we naively expect of them. I should know, I have edited an encyclopedia of the Renaissance. I would rate only two printed volumes: the Thames & Hudson Dictionary of the Italian Renaissance, edited by J. R. Hale, and the more recent and wide-ranging Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance by Gordon Campbell. To warn students off a true-ready reliance on what they read in print, I am fond of quoting an example from another encyclopedia of the Renaissance, one which sits quietly on the open shelves of the Bodleian and which states: ‘Petrarch was the first man to use the Latin term humanismus.’ As there is no such word in Latin, as it is a German term invented in the early nineteenth century, and as Petrarch did not employ any word or phrase cognate with humanismus, this is utter nonsense. Piffle. Twaddle. Moonshine. Balderdash. Codswallop. And claptrap. In short, hard copy does not equal hard facts.

What, of course, printed reference works do claim is some sort of academic recommendation, supplemented by the reputation of a worthy publisher: thus, the lists of advisors that appear at the front of any volume (completed with university affiliations), a page or so after the imprimatur of the publisher. These may encourage confidence where none should exist, but they do at least demonstrate a link, however tenuous, with academia. Wikipedia lacks such a patena of respectability, presenting itself instead as the standard-bearer of on-line democracy, encouraging anybody to contribute. In those areas of life which attract attention on the internet, this can create clashes, ‘vandalism’ and repeated re-writings without necessarily any improvement in veracity — but, then, we are not interested in articles on Britney Spears or which is the best George Clooney film (Michael Clayton, by the way). Most of the articles of interest to a student of the Renaissance are not battlefields in the same way: a reader is more likely to be caught out by accidental error than caught in the crossfire between contributors reflected in an entry.

Wikipedia has developed its own rules of engagement for contributors, centring on providing a NPOV (a Neutral Point of View). But there is a curious result from this: Wikipedia is consciously, achingly non-hierarchical but it can certainly be deferential. For example, the discussion board for contributors about Machiavelli has one of them objecting to a sentence in the entry because it makes assertions ‘Without reference to a reliable academic source‘ [their italics]. As another contributor points out, there is much about Machiavelli which is controversial within academia, but there does seem to be a tendency in Wikiworld to seek external justification for what is said by reference to the supposedly impartial truth found in the writings of academics. It leaves little room to realise that even the driest historical monograph can hide bias, blindspots and mistakes behind its dour binding.

There is an added issue with Wikipedia which is worth mentioning: it is not one but several encyclopedias. It exists in all the major European languages, including Latin, but the text in each language can be separate from that in others. Sometimes, an article is simply translated but often that is not the case. This can create some oddities: the character Burckhardt celebrated as the archetypal Renaissance man, Leon Battista Alberti, has a stub of an entry in Latin with an external link — to his works in Italian; the corresponding Italian entry does not provide that link; and neither of these lead the reader to those Latin texts which are available on-line at the Biblioteca Italiana site. In other cases, if one only looked at the English entry, you would come away with only very limited information: for another humanist of the early quattrocento, Guarino da Verona, the most detailed articles are those in Italian and German. More generally, the rule for the reader should be that if you are interested in a subject, check the article in the range of languages listed in the left-hand bar of Wikipedia: even if you can not fully grasp the text, the links provided could lead you to more information than you could gain by only reading one version.

My own impression, having spent some time looking over a range of Renaissance articles on Wikipedia, is that the limitation most often is not as much inaccurate  as incomplete information. In the entries for Alberti, the English version has a list of works which is highly truncated — a reader would be in a dangerous land if they assumed that the article provided a sufficient base of knowledge. There may be a seemingly counter-intuitive principle in play: the more obscure a character, the more likely it is that the Wikipedia entry (if there is one) will present useful information. In some cases, of course, Wikipedia simply will not have any entry: I have recently sent off an article on an interesting humanist, Antonio Beccaria, who spent some years in England; he does not appear on the website. On the other hand, I have also written about the even less well-known Tito Livio Frulovisi, who does have a fairly good article — because (I admit it, gentle reader) I put it there. For the more recherché, if somebody has bothered to post an article, they are likely to have put some effort into doing it.

The inverse of this is that the better-known characters can not be as well served. So, Machiavelli himself has, in English, a long entry with a useful listing of his works. But the text makes some significant errors. For instance, looking at it this morning, I noticed it states that he considered The Prince his magnum opus. I can see how the contributor made this assumption — the famous letter to Vettori in which he describes his method of composition gives a sense of Machiavelli’s depth of engagement in the project at the time of writing — but it hardly fits with the fortunes of the text in his own lifetime: it circulated in manuscript, but, like the Discourses was only printed after his death. The only text that Machiavelli actively promoted himself by having it printed was one which we study much less nowadays, his Art of War. That work, and his History of Florence, hardly get a mention in this English Wikipedia article. A fuller treatment of his life, with some useful quotations, appears in Italian, though again attention is directed to a minority of his works.

If the guideline is, the bigger the name, the lower the value of the article, there’s another that can be added: names are better than things. Wikipedia is weaker talking about concepts than about characters. Take ‘civic humanism’, Hans Baron’s master-concept used to describe a tradition of Florentine republican justification: it does not appear in an article on its own, but instead the reader is re-directed to ‘classical republicanism’. This does not give much room to highlight the controversy which surrounds ‘civic humanism’. The wider concept of Renaissance humanism comes off even worse: the entry is hardly worth reading.

Yet, we should return to the comparison with print encyclopedias. Wikipedia’s sins are, in many ways, unoriginal: its weaknesses are the ones you could also find in most older encyclopedias. They too are often weakest on concepts, and least satisfying when they are talking about the most famous — and, so, most controversial — characters. What, of course, they often have lacked is the ability to develop. The future of reference works, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica knows, is on-line, where information can be added and corrected. A comparison between Britannica and Wikipedia suggests that, for our area, each has some advantages over the other: of the characters we have talked about, Machiavelli has a judicious article in Britannica, but most other humanists receive only a insubstantial summary. Even a significant figure like Leonardo Bruni is treated in this way, while Wikipedia gives more information (though it is, at present, skewed towards only a few of his works). In Britannica, the lesser humanists I mention are featured not at all. Where, of course, Wikipedia has a singular advantage is that it has the ability not just to be corrected: you can do the correcting.

So, if I should end by answering the question I set myself: of course we should not trust Wikipedia, just as we would not trust any other work or source. As historians, we trust nobody. But that does not mean we don’t use them and learn from them. The advice to students must be: read but read carefully. The advice to academics should be: if you don’t like something, change it. Admittedly, some entries might be beyond redemption but that is the case for a very few dealing poorly with concepts. Most are capable of improvement — and it is our job to do it. So, as I said, this morning the Machiavelli article talks erroneously of The Prince being his magnum opus. By this evening, I will make sure it does not anymore.