United States | News & Politics

https://redsails.org/what-is-history/

The picture of medieval man as devoutly religious, whether true or not, is indestructible, because nearly all the known facts about him were preselected for us by people who believed it, and wanted others to believe it, and a mass of other facts, in which we might possibly have found evidence to the contrary, has been lost beyond recall. The dead hand of vanished generations of historians, scribes, and chroniclers has determined beyond the possibility of appeal the pattern of the past. ‘The history we read,’ writes Professor Barraclough, himself trained as a medievalist, ‘though based on facts, is, strictly speaking, not factual at all, but a series of accepted judgements.’