Thoughts on Lockhart
Whenever I would read a seminal work of historical scholarship as an undergraduate, I would instantly want to be a historian of whatever field or era the study was about. It had been a long time since I’d had that feeling until I read James Lockhart’s Of Things of the Indies. If I’d read this eight or nine years ago, I might have decided to be a historian of early Latin America.
Rather than try to compose a single commentary on a collection of many articles, I will instead offer some thoughts on those articles that made a strong impression on me.
“A Historian and the Disciplines”
In this article, Lockhart discusses something that I’ve been pondering for a while – why are the humanities arranged into disciplines? I realize, of course, that the answer has to do with the growth of the university and the development of scholarship as institutions, and even more importantly, that the business of academia is so entrenched in these disciplines that they will not ever go away. Still, Lockhart’s point that he had little to do with most of his peers in the history department that employed him while he had a great deal of contact with anthropologists and linguists should at least demonstrate the importance of creating inter-disciplinary bodies to bring together scholars in different disciplines working in the same field.
“A Double Tradition: Editing Book Twelve of the Florentine Codex” and “Between the Lines” — the Paleography Articles
In these two articles, Lockhart brings his audience with him as he delves into the nuances of studying the written word in the pre-modern world. “Between the Lines” is particularly fascinating as the presentation of a three case studies on how to study a manuscript in early Spanish Peru. Lockhart’s explication of these manuscripts is a fine demonstration of the historian’s craft, further enhanced by use of a description of the paleography courses he taught to his graduate students as a means of setting the stage. The lesson is that it isn’t just the meaning of the words that matters, but how words are recorded, and deciphering the messages encoded in the act of writing is a tricky business. “A Double Tradition” is a wonderful comedy of errors involving the process of moving thoughts across languages, through alphabets (so to speak), between genres, and onto the page. Lockhart makes it clear that deciphering all of this is important to the social history of early Spanish Mexico, but is in itself a daunting task. In both of these articles, then, Lockhart exposes his audience to the mechanics of doing history, not as a leisurely, gentlemanly affair, but as a real labor.
“The Social History of Early Latin America”
This article is a really lucid and really useful introduction to the foundational studies on the social history of the period under consideration. Here, Lockhart has crafted a survey that both introduces us to the important historiography of the topic and serves as an example of how to construct an engaging historiographical article. Interestingly, Lockhart opens with an attempt to define “social history,” but in the end gives up on it. This opening may offer us the opportunity to craft our own definition of social history, which no doubt will be useful if we are going to be discussing it over the next few weeks.
