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PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. THE present edition contains a considerable amount of fresh matter from Salimbenes chronicle, omitted from the first mainly for the insufficient reason that I had already published it elsewhere. The notes and appendices have been even more extended, especially on points where different critics seemed to think the eridence inadequate. Apart from the more obvious advantages of a second edition, an author must always welcome the further opportunity of explaining himself especially when he has struck for a definite cause and proroked hard knocks in return. To most of my reviewers I owe hearty thanks, and certainly not least to a Guardiaiz critic, whose evident disagreement with me on important points did not prevent him from giving me credit for an honest attempt to describe the facts as they appeared to one pair of eyes. In that recogtition an author finds his real reward after all, even Goethe was content to say, I can promise to be sincere, but not to be impartial. Genuine impartiality is one of the rarest of rirtues, though there have always been plenty of authors who shirk thorny cjuestions, or who concede points to the weaker side with the cheap generosity mhich impels a jury to find for a needy plaintiff against a rich man. Never, perhaps, was this kind of impartiality so common as at present, when to quote a recent witty writer the fashion is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an agnostic conscience you get the medieval picturesqueness of the one mitlt the modern conveniences of the other. Even the Editors of the Cambridge Modern History, fearing more the Goethes hIaxims and Reflections, translated by T. Bailey Sanndera,suspicion of partiality than the certainty of an crror, hare allowed two contributors to cotradict each other almost categorically, within a fen. pages, on one of the most important points in the first rolunle Direct references to autllorities are forbidden by the plau of the History there is, of course, nothing to warn the ordinary reader how far one of the tvo contributors surpasses the other in originality ancl depth of research and it is practically left to him to accept whichever of the two statements fits in best with his precouceired opinious. He cannot imagine a great co-operative work on Natural Science written nowadays on these principles and this alone rould go far to accoint for the present unjust neglect of history b - readers of an esact turn of inind. Yet there is a further reason also for to shirk disputed questions is to neglect matters of the deepest interest and the elaborate dulness of many official histories is a libel on the many-coloured web of human life. Eleven years ago, finding it impossible to get from the accredited test-books satisfactory information on points which I had long studied in a desultory may, I began systematic work for myself within a narrow area, and soon found how little the original documents are really stndied, and how nucll one historian is content to take at second-hand from another. In cases like this, anything that can be done to sweep away ancient cobwebs is a real gain. I knew that I should make mistakes, as even officialism is far from infallible, and we hare recently seen a reviewer fill three and a half quarto columns with the slips nlade by one of our most dignified professors in n single octavo rolnrne...
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Review:
"Salimbene, the thirteenth-century friar, presents to the modern reader an extraordinarily vivid vision of his world, full of variety, the bizarre, and exasperating confusion which we associate with the underside of the Middle Ages. . . . A work authentically medieval in spirit."—John Baldwin, Johns Hopkins University
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- PublisherTrollope Pr
- Publication date2008
- ISBN 10 1443773417
- ISBN 13 9781443773416
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages464
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