Bloch chips off the old history

Whereas Prescott gave us a historical view from the top down, with a great man like Cortes, Bloch offers a perspective of history from a middle to upper-crust perspective.  A wider, if not wide, array of societal positions.  According to Koziol, the author of the forward, “Bloch believed that the practice of history had to become more scientific.   … [And] a scientific history would be a history of social and material forces rather than of great events and great men” (Kindle, 141-146).  I am not an expert of this time period, but I think Bloch did a fine job of conveying that the turn of the first millennium and a few centuries after were a more vibrant period than had been previously recognized.  People didn’t wait until the traditional understanding of the beginning of the Renaissance in order to have culture and form modern relationships among each other, with local officials, and with something we would come to call “the state.”  By looking at a variety of sources, in particular the stories, poems, and folklore that isn’t as neatly recorded in traditionally accepted documents of the time, Bloch cast a somewhat wider data net in order to present a vivid picture of some exciting times in western history.  

With Prescott and in reading The History of the Conquest of Mexico, we learned about an historical approach to an important moment in world history, and we learned something about the conquest of Mexico.  But with Bloch, I feel like we are reading more of actual history - it feels more scholarly and less opinionated than Prescott’s book did.  Bloch is taking the science part seriously.  However, in defense of Prescott, Conquest was a much more fun book to read.  Overall, I love the diversity of academic approaches to history we have encountered so far, and I have also enjoyed the different writing styles of the authors.