#Artistic licence meaning in english how to

The first and better is that the study of history teaches a critical faculty, allows one to assess the possibility that the sources are lying or misinformed, and if you’re lucky also provides you with informative and interesting parallels to your own experience while you’re at it. At least so “they” say.Īgainst this there are two defences.

Modern history might have something to teach you about the world now but the Middle Ages are pretty much about how it got that way, if that, and things were just too different then for it be relevant. The first one is that which we all fear: that actually, in a market-dominated age, you can’t justify the study of the past, especially the medieval past. Well, I have heard various answers and liked none of them. In other words, how do we answer the question, what have the historians ever done for us?

#Artistic licence meaning in english how to

I mean, that’s what the post is really about, but because we all really know that-viz, that it floats our personal intellectual boats to find stuff out that was once known and is now recoverable only by an exercise of skill that makes us feel smug as well as enlightened-the question is more how to justify doing that to the general public, especially when the question of HE funding and their tax bill comes to the fore. This happens a fair bit, but I have just seen it happen again: someone is asking, from the inside, what the point in being a historian is.