Get the latest tech news

The Rise of Post-Literate History

The English historian J.A. Froude was famously gloomy about the ultimate prospects for his chosen branch of literature.

As these two extracts suggest, Riley-Smith was a sounder and more scrupulous historian than Runciman; he was careful, precise, analytical, but he wrote with considerably less élan than his predecessor, for whom the Crusades were essentially a series of barbarian invasions—the sacking of the refined and cosmopolitan East by the uncouth and venal younger sons of minor French lords. The exigencies of modern academic publishing, declining levels of general culture among historians themselves, and, in some cases, what occasionally looks less like sloppiness or indifference and more like a positive hostility toward good writing among peer reviewers, above all the atrophying of readers’ own attention spans—for all these reasons, it seems to me unlikely that we will ever see a classic on the order of Runciman capture the public imagination. His career—as far as I am aware, he has no plans to publish a book on Nazi Germany—suggests that we are no longer faced with a gap between specialist knowledge and what remains of the reading public, to be spanned by belletristic popularizers; but one between historians who write without any hope of reception, much less wealth or literary fame, and a very different, more or less post-literate audience who would prefer that whatever historical edification they might receive come via podcast or even tweet.

Get the Android app