12-27-2011, 11:40 AM
What a great idea for a topic!
I would guess that he would be interested by several different aspects of modern scholarship.
1. The use of archaeology, as so many have mentioned.
2. The use of other disciplines, such as statistics and mathematics in population studies, for example.
3. New technologies, like carbon-14 dating or satellite imagery.
4. Different “schools” of thought and different approaches to literary sources. For instance, there is a hypercritical school that distrusts anything written down.
5. Scholarship brought to bear upon literary sources themselves. Gibbon might have been surprised to learn that much of the Historia Augusta, that he uses so trustingly, has been shown to be fabricated.
Quote:If we were to sit down with a well educated gentleman of 1760 say - what would he be surprised to hear from scholars today, and what would he just take as common knowledge?
I would guess that he would be interested by several different aspects of modern scholarship.
1. The use of archaeology, as so many have mentioned.
2. The use of other disciplines, such as statistics and mathematics in population studies, for example.
3. New technologies, like carbon-14 dating or satellite imagery.
4. Different “schools” of thought and different approaches to literary sources. For instance, there is a hypercritical school that distrusts anything written down.
5. Scholarship brought to bear upon literary sources themselves. Gibbon might have been surprised to learn that much of the Historia Augusta, that he uses so trustingly, has been shown to be fabricated.
David J. Cord
www.davidcord.com
www.davidcord.com
