CLA260H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Joanna Southcott, Loom, E. P. Thompson
Document Summary
Some views on history, its definition and its worth: (see monday"s handout for the opening of herodotus" work). I heard of them from eye-witnesses whose reports i have checked with as much thoroughness as possible. Not that even so the truth was easy to discover: different eye- witnesses give different accounts of the same events, speaking out of partiality for one side of the other or else from imperfect memories. And it may well be that my history will seem less easy to read because of the absence in it of a romantic (muth des) element. My work is not just a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever. And in fact that is why the writing of poetry is a more philosophical activity, and one to be taken more seriously, than the writing of history; for poetry tells us rather the universals, history the particulars.
