Anecdotes are irresistible; personal and active, they add life and color to a narrative. Although the dangers embedded in using anecdotes are obvious, life narratives without anecdotal material can be short, not so sweet, and without much human interest. As W. H. Auden said of biography, “a shilling life will give you all the facts,” but nothing but the facts can be remarkably uninformative, especially when records are sparse and documents questionable.

A historian who is trying to piece together a credible representation of the past and proposes to include anecdotal information is faced with a daunting task, however: to “unpack” each anecdote, judge the information it yields, dismiss what is clearly impossible or improbable, and attempt to fit what is believable or probable into the emerging pattern that will in the end constitute “evidence.”

A great deal has been written in recent years about anecdotes and their use, especially by literary historians of the New Historicist school. For Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, the anecdote, like a literary work, is a text: “both are fictions in the sense of things made, both are shaped by the imagination and by the available resources of narration and description,” but they are “ineradicably” dissimilar because “they make sharply different claims upon the actual.”