The Historian's Craft Sparknotes

Since its publication in 1953, The Historian’s Craft, by French historian and quintessential modernist Marc Bloch, has served as a significant methodological guide for professional and budding historians alike. Although certain of his approaches to the writing of history are at variance with those of more modern scholar Hayden White, Bloch’s guidelines will be usefully applied to my thesis project; in particular, his suggestions that one should contextualize past events, freely discuss historical methodology, and make appropriate terminological choices will heavily inform my writing. Throughout The Historian’s Craft, Bloch stresses the importance of situating past events and phenomena within their broader historical and social contexts.

In my thesis project of the historical perceptions of the Beguines, I wish to follow Bloch’s suggestion and devote significant attention to the context of this unique group of laywomen. My intended contextual framework is thirteenth-century Europe, and it is here that I will diverge slightly from Bloch’s methodological guidelines. Bloch cautions against the often artificial periodizing of human activity into centuries, because he believes that “human time will never conform to the implacable uniformity or fixed divisions of clock time.” I do not intend my focus on the thirteenth century to be rigid to the point of inaccuracy; however, it seems an appropriate contextual framework for my project, despite the potential shortcomings of periodizing in this manner, because the self-perceptions of the Beguines emerged as somewhat homogeneous during this century. Because the Beguine order has both a diverse population and a long history, I must be cautious of overgeneralizing the women’s self-perceptions, as they were undoubtedly highly varied, which I will attempt to achieve through the narrowing of my focus to one century alone. To accurately situate the Beguine order within its thirteenth-century context per the guidelines of Bloch, I

Without them, historical theses can be admired or resented, but they cannot be verified or disproved.” Because one’s source material can be verified through this use of citations, it forces a historian to be both honest and accurate with what he or she is writing. Although Bloch is somewhat inconsistent in his use of footnotes, he argues that a historian has “no right to make any assertion which cannot be verified and [he or she] who in using a document indicates the source as briefly as possible (that is, the means of finding it again) is only obeying a universal rule of honesty.” The appropriate use of footnotes protects a historian from dishonesty and inaccuracy, and allows him or her to slot his or her work in amongst broader historical conversations. Needless to say, I intend to be rigorous in my use of