It makes it an easier tale to tell for historians - I think that's one of the reasons they ignore 'the street' or the role of religion. There's also a tendecy to blame negative events on the power of an individual who somehow bewitches or forces a nation to behave in such and such a way. I think those on the French right who want to have the Revolution as a 'founding myth' but want to forget/deny general responsibility for the bloodshed like to say it was all Robespierre's doing. Sibylla-oo linked to a recent Zizek lecture where he made that point about medieval persecutions, which were often (I'm reading Norman Cohn's books on them at the moment) ground up and spontaneous, not commanded from on high (the Pope or whatever): in fact, bishops often intervened to try and stop the massacres of European Jews and the lynching of witches in the early medieval period.
On that last point, I was wondering to what degree things like the Law of Suspects gave free reign for people to act, at a local level, to have neighbours they'd had long feuds with arrested on the pretext of being royalists or whatever. The late medieval witch persecutions seem to be due to a relaxation in the law that makes it easier for people to bring legal cases and attack neighbours they don't like by calling them witches, then sitting back while the state does the rest. Keith Thomas, the historian of medieval/16th/17thc witchcraft, thinks many of the trials in England were purely down to longstanding village tensions - a similar thing to Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, then. The depressing thing about the work of Cohn and Thomas is the way it shows a repeated pattern of such behaviour for hundreds if not thousands of years: it seems to be inbuilt into the species - but historians find it easier to blame an individual!
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-08-26 02:37 pm (UTC)On that last point, I was wondering to what degree things like the Law of Suspects gave free reign for people to act, at a local level, to have neighbours they'd had long feuds with arrested on the pretext of being royalists or whatever. The late medieval witch persecutions seem to be due to a relaxation in the law that makes it easier for people to bring legal cases and attack neighbours they don't like by calling them witches, then sitting back while the state does the rest. Keith Thomas, the historian of medieval/16th/17thc witchcraft, thinks many of the trials in England were purely down to longstanding village tensions - a similar thing to Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, then. The depressing thing about the work of Cohn and Thomas is the way it shows a repeated pattern of such behaviour for hundreds if not thousands of years: it seems to be inbuilt into the species - but historians find it easier to blame an individual!