Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Conventions, abbreviations and symbols
- General prologue: time travel and signal processing
- 1 The past, the present and the historian
- 2 Written records: evidence and argument
- 3 Relatedness, ancestry and comparison
- 4 Convergence and contact
- 5 The nature of reconstruction
- 6 Time and change: the shape(s) of history
- 7 Explanation and ontology
- References
- Index of names
- Subject index
1 - The past, the present and the historian
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Conventions, abbreviations and symbols
- General prologue: time travel and signal processing
- 1 The past, the present and the historian
- 2 Written records: evidence and argument
- 3 Relatedness, ancestry and comparison
- 4 Convergence and contact
- 5 The nature of reconstruction
- 6 Time and change: the shape(s) of history
- 7 Explanation and ontology
- References
- Index of names
- Subject index
Summary
Remembrance and Reflection how ally'd;
What thin partitions Sense from Thought divide
(Alexander Pope, An essay on man, I.225–6)The historian as mythmaker
I use the word myth here in a non-pejorative, or at least neutral, way. For the late Romans and most of the postclassical world, Greek múthos and its derivatives have had senses like ‘fabulous’, ‘naive’, ‘erroneous’ (late L mȳthos= fibula). There is an older interpretation too: myth is vera narration, universal truth in allegorical disguise. I have in mind something less tendentious, more modern: a myth in the widest sense is a story or image that structures some epistemic field (knowledge, thought, belief) in a particular culture.
Myths come in many forms. Some are large-scale origin-stories, like (neo-)Darwinism or ‘scientific creationism’. Others are shorter, more local: acne may be caused by youthful onanism, or infection of the sebaceous glands; thunder by electrical discharge or the borborygmus of Zeus. There are non-narrative or static myths as well, powerful images of things now existing or that once existed: the abyss over which the Spirit of God broods dovelike in Genesis 1, or the singularity preceding the Big Bang.
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- Information
- Historical Linguistics and Language Change , pp. 4 - 43Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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