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I have devoted almost forty years to reading medieval sources—printed or in manuscript, well-known or unpublished, usually in Latin but sometimes in medieval French or Italian. After all this time, I have an idea of how they work.
Or at least some idea. The sheer volume of published sources thwarts any attempt at exhaustive reading. For unpublished sources, the difficulty of deciphering old handwriting inevitably slows down the process. No matter how hard we try, the meaning of the text is never entirely freed from the veil of old languages. In the end, we really only sift through what remains of these sources.
The filter of our interests combines with the chance nature of what has been preserved. I don’t know which of these two kinds of selection is the more random. The rigor of our research results from the methods we employ, not from the themes we choose to study. Critical reading of the sources, gone over with the fine-tooth comb of scholarly erudition, is our only guarantee. To quote Paul Ricoeur, “We have nothing better than testimony, and criticism of testimony, to substantiate the historian’s representation of the past.”1
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