How do I treat history books which are 'outdated'? I was going through La Société Féodale (Bloch, Marc 1940), and I got scared by this foreword from a recent 2010 edition.
Archaeology especially has continued to transform our understanding of early medieval migrations, settlement patterns, ethnicity, disease, diet, gender, commerce and power. However, as a result of all this work Bloch’s own history has been superseded.
... this makes reading Feudal Society today problematic, for it no longer stands as an accurate account of the period ... No one would use the kinds of phrases that remind us that Bloch’s assumptions were still those of Europe’s long nineteenth century: “true savages,” “untutored minds,” “the most vital elements in the nation.” One should not read Feudal Society and think that its depictions represent our current understanding of western European culture between the ninth and twelfth centuries.
...It is remarkable that Bloch got so much right. And it is remarkable that historians still work so much according to scholarly principles he helped established. Yet to read Bloch because he was at the origins of much current historical practice is still to do him a disservice, because Bloch himself abhorred what he called “the Idol of Origins.” He might be flattered that we still read him, but he might also be dismayed.
Why, then, should we still read Feudal Society? Perhaps we should broaden the question: why do we read any old historians? Why do we read Thucydides, Tacitus, Bede, Gibbon, or Toqueville? We read them because they were great stylists who can teach us how to write; because they were powerful minds whose histories are really vehicles for debates about the nature of government, power, reason, or the logic of history itself; because they were such good writers possessed of such powerful minds that even though their histories are now known to be false, partisan or seriously incomplete, they still seem utterly convincing and coherent; the only histories that could possibly be written.
Emphasis mine.
I'm just a layperson who found it in the bibliography of a pop history blog (bibliography is below the blue subscribe button). The blogger who cited it is a historian, and so is the guy who wrote the book, so it at least passes the first stage of the BS test.
However, I recognize the lack of my own competence and intuition in history, and I recognize that a book which is appropriate for an historian may do more harm in the way I am using it, which is as a textbook survey to get a better understanding of the topic.
While there was a post a while back on how to evaluate if a source is credible, I'd like to know if and how laymen should read flawed sources.
Is the foreword just being melodramatic, and I could probably muddle my way through the book with my regular BS detector? Should I even bother with outdated sources at all and only stick to more recent books? Is there a way historians use when dealing with books which have some truths and some falsehoods?
Apologies to the mods, I posted this earlier without skimming the wiki, so I deleted it, went through the wiki, and after not finding anything that answered my question or was in the topic I was interested in, which was freeholder farmers in feudal Europe, I decided to post this question again.
Congratulations to an excellent question!
Historical science as a whole does have the major problem that our sources are limited and tradition is nearly never complete. And, in contrast to Natural sciences, Historians and archaeologists cannot prove their results like for example a chemist can do. When the chemist puts together the same two liquids under the same circumstances with the same measures a hundred times he will receive the exact same result in all 100 testings.
Historical research does not work this way. We need to interpret the sources we have, so we have Humans dealing with Humans. It is inevitable that we shape our argumentation through the lens of how we see the world. And as the world constantly changes, so does historical research. If you add archaeological research into the picture, it is likely to change because more excavations can add more data, so that dating of sites, distribution of certain types or cultures, connections between different influence spheres need to be changed because more data is available.
The foreword you stumbled upon might help you to sort better what you read in this book, and it will help you to understand how historical science and this author saw the world in the 1940s. This can be really fascinating in comparison to more modern approaches, but then you will need the more modern texts as well, so you can draw some conclusions for yourself.
And there lies hidden the answer you are looking for: When I am doing research to a topic I am unfamiliar with, I am looking for an overview. When I find I book that sounds interesting, I take a look at the imprint to find out how old this book is and how likely it is to show the current state of research. If I decide to give it a try, during reading checking if the author also discusses alternative views and has a thorough argumentation and explains why he dismisses other argumentation. Then I do have the chance of checking out the sources for myself and think of other writers covering the same topic from another point of view. It takes some practice.