ABSTRACT
This is what the great historian Marc Bloch writes in The Historian’s Craft. Historical research proceeds, first, by delineating the terrain on which the inquiry will take place; next, the sources need to be identified. If we intend to examine the evolution of wheat prices in a 17th century Italian village, we will need to identify and select documents that provide information on that – for instance, town accounts and correspondence between traders and farmers, preferably from that area. Throughout the process of identifying and selecting the sources, we should keep an open mind, for ‘[i]t would be sheer fantasy to imagine that for each historical problem there is a unique type of document with a specific sort of use’ (1953: 67). We will have to locate these sources, find out whether they are accessible, try to get into contact with them, and study them. In addition, we should collect relevant literature on that or related topics, so as to check and develop a preferred methodology for that piece of research. The contact with the documents, and their study, is in itself a seriously complex affair. Among historians it has given prominence to the sub-discipline of historical criticism, the careful and methodical scrutiny of documents in an attempt to separate facts from gossip, true and correct accounts from errors, and original (that is, truthful) versions from copies and forgeries. Bloch spends a long chapter on historical criticism, because historical analysis can only proceed on the basis of sources that have withstood the test of such criticism. The sources must first be there, they must be thoroughly verified, and only then can the historian embark on more ambitious and adventurous enterprises.
