Jacques le Goff on history

The extraordinary French historian Jacques le Goff has died at the age of 90 (which age no longer seems as old as it did only a decade or so ago).

I have nothing original to say about his life and work, so I will leave that task to those who know him and it better. You can see an obituary at Medievalists.net. href="https://www.medievalists.net/2014/04/jacques-le-goff-passes-away-age-90/"

. The obituary includes a quotation from Le Goff on what historians (should) do. This is not particularly original but makes some good points very briefly. I occasionally want to point people with naive views of history to something better, and sure enough, here it is.

“History is not given, history is constructed by the historian. But the historian cannot do just anything. He must make his construction with the aid of materials, documents. I have personally adopted Michel Foucault’s position that documents are not innocent. Documents have been made to impress, to form thinking, they are what you might call monument/documents.

We must maintain toward these monument/documents a critical spirit; but if this critical spirit leads to a purely deconstructive “shredding” of what is being set out before us, we lose ourselves in an intellectual anarchy from which nothing good can emerge.

So I think that not only is it necessary that we be moored to documents, I think we must also remind ourselves that historical truth is not one. It is not clear. We no longer believe, like Ranke, that we can recount things such as they really happened, such as they were. But if we don’t believe that there is a historical truth, even if we approach it only through interpretations and approximations, then history, which has made a meritorious effort to be scientific… then we historians may just as well resign ourselves to writing historical novels.”

– Jacques le Goff, in an interview with Historical Reflections from 1993.