It's not always about you
History has lots of nooks and crannies, and you don't have to see yourself in every one of them
Today I read this great post by fellow medievalist historian Jon Dell Isola. It’s worth your 6 minutes if you want a little insight into how we look at the past and ourselves — essentially the stuff I engage in every single day.
My tagline here and elsewhere is “Vikings, History, and Ourselves…” I chose this for a few reasons, but the main one came from my curiosity/frustration over how much people seem to need to see and write themselves into the past. Oftentimes it’s not simply to try and understand past peoples and why they did what they did, which is a noble endeavor in my mind, but rather to validate who they are now. This is a problem because, honey, it’s not always about you.
For example: I wrote about this with regard to our strange pop culture obsession in recent years with their needing to be shieldmaidens or “warrior women” in the past (and yes, my handle shieldmaidenpdx is 100% a tongue-in-cheek riff on this…).
And I still face this issue in my research today. Oftentimes when I’ve written things about the elite, martialized warrior culture of the Viking Age, I’ve had people ask repeatedly, “Are you only talking about men? Where are the women?” My response is usually something along the lines of, “I’m not writing about women right now. I’m writing about elite warriors who the overwhelming preponderance of evidence I’ve just discussed tells us were men. When I’m talking about women, I’ll let you know.” It prompts a caveat and/or explanation that Dell Isola spells out so well in his piece, and that I’d really rather not have to give, namely that it doesn’t mean I don’t care about women in the past or won’t ever include them. It just means they’re not the topic of discussion in this particular moment. And that’s okay.
But the list goes on, and Dell Isola does a great job of explaining the issues caused by a very strange mix — algorithms which narrow our view, whereas a historian’s bandwidth is supposed to encompass everything, and then throw in the average person’s interest in needing the past to be about them and their desires and oof! You’ve got an almost untenable cocktail.
Dell Isola also offers some great suggestions for how to proceed or at least gain a sense of perspective. I’ll add to them my usual call for humility. Whether looking at the past or basically anything else, it never hurts to remember it’s now always about us.