Untold Stories
Throughout this course and among other history classes, we often find that the information we are receiving is from the point of view of the men of power at one point in time or another.
In a book I read for another class, The Sephardic Frontier by Jonathan Ray, he tells us that there is an omission of records involving the Jewish population in Medieval Iberia when scholarly interest of this period increased (Ray, 2). In my opinion, this is due to a combination of antisemitism and a Christian perspective being the focused lens on history, especially during the Renaissance. Even in Kumar's From Clay Tablets to Web, it is mentioned that monasteries played a huge role in the documenting of information and access to education in the 4th century (Kumar, 46). This means that the church had control over who had access to education and what information would be documented and preserved.
I read some accounts of the Battle of Tours (723 CE) with three different perspectives: one was a Christian man living under Muslim rule in Toledo, one was a Muslim account from an Egyptian jurist, and one was Edward Gibben, a British man, 1000 years later. While each account had some similarities (they all recognized who died), they were drastically different in the method of telling the tale and showed obvious favours and biases. Of course this is the nature of humanity, but I can't help but wonder who is on the other side of each story that never got a chance to have their experiences documented.
The preservation of information in particular is of interest to me, because who is it that decided what was important enough to keep? I guess it was whoever was in power (whether secular or nonsecular) that had a role in what was protected. It just seems unfair to me that written language became such a privilege - the ability to pass on stories in a new media.
Related Links¶
Ray, Jonathan. (2006). The Sephardic Frontier. Cornell University Press.
Shiv Kumar, SK. 2013 From Clay Tablets to Web: Journey of Library Catalogue. DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology 33(1): 45–54. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14429/djlit.33.1.3729.