理查德·弗莱彻在历史学家中是罕见的。A medievalist, Fletcher published books on Anglo-Saxon England and Moorish and Christian Spain prior to the actual beginnings of theReconquista在11世纪(通常追溯到8世纪)。Another of his impressive scholarly accomplishments wasThe Barbarian Conversion(1999), which looked at Christian missions into the dark heart of Europe between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Reformation, with an eye to happenings in the Eastern Roman Empire, the Middle East, and North Africa. It is not hard to imagine Fletcher thought himself picking up where Edward Gibbon left off, only with a much less jaundiced eye towards events and persons who didn't obviously exude the material greatness and organizational effectiveness of the Antonine Dynasty.

It is my experience that history books can all be arranged on along a single axis stretching from a purely objective perspective on the historical subject matter to an investigative perspective that gives readers a glimpse of the difficulties historians encounter trying to interpret their sources. Most historians fit into the former category. They may talk a good talk about the multiplicity of perspectives from which the sources can be studied; but they rarely reflect on the limitations imposed on historians by the limited availability of materials. History textbooks assigned in undergraduate classes, as well as most survey texts, fit into this category. They tell what happened when, and why things happened the way they did. Narrative threads are woven together presenting 'the present state of the field of study'. Specialized historical studies also follow this general pattern. In their introductory chapter, the historian usually tells you what other historians have written, what new evidence they have found, and how it confirms what we have already discovered or how it should radically change how the field of study is understood.

Fletcher'sBloodfeud: Murder and Revenge in Anglo-Saxon England(2002) is one of those rare histories that let's you follow a historian reading texts, trying to discern where all the pieces fall. The roughly half-century stretch of time from the establishment of Anglo-Saxon rule in 577 until the Norman Conquest in 1066 comprises England's participation in the Dark Ages. The earlier in the period one finds oneself, the more scarce the evidence becomes. Though in the last leg of the period, from the Danish Conquest in 1016 to ts conclusion in 1066, much is left to be desired.

The northern-most English province Northumbria was ruled by Earl Uthred, celebrated with the title 'the Bold'. In 1016, Uthred came to pay his respects in the court of the Danish king over England, Canute (or Cnut), at a place called Wiheal. The location of the meeting, Fletcher indicates, is part of the mystery. We don't presently know where it is. Uthred and forty of his clients and retainers died that day. His death set into motion 'a bloodfeud that lasted for three generations and almost sixty years'.

Bloodfeud patiently sifts through what evidence remains in an effort to discern the motivations behind the different persons involved. Sometimes all that we have to go on are single sentences carelessly dropped intoThe Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a document contemporary to the period in question. Often we are drawing imaginative inferences from what we known generally about what life was like from more general studies of comparable materials drawn from elsewhere, what sort of commonly accepted rules bloodfeuds were prosecuted under, and so on.

Fletcher's gift was to convey the difficult constrains any historian, especially those who work from such a great distance in time, must work under. The gift is rare. The problem I want to think through is why the gift is rare.

我马上想到了几个原因。首先，大多数人都没有受过历史学家的训练。那些通过阅读调查文本或专门研究来关注人类过去的人更有可能吸收历史学家的结论，而不是通过历史学家的经验得出这些结论。这件事就发生在当时;或者这个发生是因为那个发生了;而不是我们对这一点或那一点的不确定性。第二，在人类历史上任何一个地点和时间发表的大量材料都有可能支持关于有多少证据可用的错误假设。读者不必考虑这样一个事实，即古代文本中的单行文字可以产生指数级增长的评论，没有任何评论可以绕过一个简单的问题，即缺乏额外的证据来证实这个或那个解释。第三，大多数人，如果他们对过去感兴趣的话，更有可能对最近的过去感兴趣。正是在最近，特别是就在最近，我们遇到了大量的物证。

Put together, these give rise to what I will call an 'empirical fetishism'. For every question, there should in principle be an answer. If there isn't an answer, we allow ourselves to hypothesize about a 'best fit' answer. Empirical fetishism means that our knowledge of the world ought to be a seamless whole. We don't like holes in our seamless whole, so we fill them. Fletcher points out that the village of Wighill has been suggested for the location of Earl Uthred's murder at Wiheal, along with a number of other candidate whose name begins with W. Wikipedia names Wighill as the location of his murder, in fact, but without any comment on the interpretive dilemmas of identifying this particular place with that particular name in that hoary tome. History it seems, like nature, also abhors a vacuum.

Let's not make fun of Wikipedia on this point. They are only doing what most everybody else does in their situation: drawing conclusions, filling in blanks. Because of the impossibility of constructing a consistent account of the whole body of our knowledge about the world and its past. empirical fetishism itself gives rise to perspectivism. Everyone has their own perspective on things. You can think about things in as many ways as you want, of course. The interpretation of the human past, even the immediate past, but especially the distant past, however, often leaves a person with nothing to have a perspective on. That sort of empirical sensitivity is why we need more historians like Richard Fletcher, as it's very easy to assume a perspective on things can replace due attention to the things themselves.