Source Criticism and Evidence
The methodical evaluation of historical sources for authenticity, provenance, and reliability, and the rules by which traces of the past are treated as evidence.
Definition
Source criticism is the disciplined assessment of the authenticity, origin, and reliability of historical sources, and the determination of what they can legitimately serve as evidence for.
Scope
This topic covers the techniques of source criticism: external criticism establishing a source's authenticity, date, and origin, and internal criticism assessing the credibility and meaning of its content. It includes the detection of forgeries, the interpretation of bias and purpose, and the evidentiary or 'conjectural' paradigm by which historians infer the past from small clues.
Core questions
- How is a source's authenticity, date, and authorship established?
- How does the historian assess the credibility, bias, and purpose of a source's content?
- How are forgeries and interpolations detected?
- What kinds of inference allow historians to read large conclusions from small traces?
Key theories
- External and internal criticism
- Classical method distinguishes external criticism, which authenticates the source as an object, from internal criticism, which weighs the reliability and meaning of what the source says.
- The evidential paradigm
- Ginzburg described a conjectural mode of knowledge in which experts infer hidden realities from marginal, involuntary clues, likening the historian's craft to medical diagnosis and detective work.
History
The critical evaluation of sources was professionalized in the nineteenth century by the German philological seminar and codified in Langlois and Seignobos's 1898 manual. Bloch deepened it into a reflective craft, and Ginzburg later articulated the evidential paradigm linking historical inference to a broader conjectural mode of knowledge.
Debates
- Positivist rules versus interpretive judgment
- Some treat source criticism as a set of rigorous, near-mechanical rules, while others stress that authenticating and interpreting sources ultimately depends on contextual judgment and inference.
Key figures
- Leopold von Ranke
- Charles-Victor Langlois
- Charles Seignobos
- Marc Bloch
- Carlo Ginzburg
Related topics
Seminal works
- howelprevenier2001
- ginzburg1980
- langloisseignobos1898
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between external and internal criticism?
- External criticism establishes that a source is genuine and determines its date, origin, and authorship; internal criticism evaluates the reliability, bias, and meaning of the source's content.
- What is Ginzburg's 'evidential paradigm'?
- It is the idea that historians, like physicians and detectives, reconstruct hidden realities from small, often involuntary clues — a conjectural form of knowledge distinct from generalizing science.