Richard III in Leicester: a note of scepticism
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Version 0 of 1. The fact that Richard III's remains have, it seems, been discovered, is a cause for good cheer and some splendid jokes on Twitter, largely to do with delayed exits and overdue tickets from multi-storey car parks. So forgive me for injecting a note of scepticism. I'm not saying it's not good fun, and indeed mildly interesting, that the remains of the last Plantagenet king have apparently been found. (We should note that the bone evidence is clearly circumstantial – a skeleton with curvature of the spine and battle injuries does not a king make, though I can't claim to know enough about DNA evidence to understand what the margin of error is here, particularly before the findings have been published in a peer-reviewed journal rather than just announced in a press conference.) I'm just suggesting that it's rather a limited avenue of historical research that seems to have much to do with the dread word "impact" – in which academics are supposed to show that their work has "real-world" effects, whatever that might mean, though often interpreted to include public recognition and media coverage. The affair as a whole – notwithstanding the undoubted integrity, skill and commitment of the individuals at work – seems to me to have been managed in a way that is more about fulfilling the dead-eyed needs of the Research Excellence Framework (the highly contentious new scheme for assessing university research) than with pursuing a genuinely intellectual field of enquiry. According to Neville Morley, professor of ancient history at the University of Bristol, who has written about the Richard III discovery on his blog, this sort of approach is only a short step from seeing archaeology as a hunt for the personal effects of famous people (and objects are interesting only if some sort of link to a famous person can be invented) to seeing it as an Indiana Jones-style hunt for mystical treasures. Of course it must be so much better to be the Man Who Found Richard III's Lunchbox than to be the Man Who Discovered Interesting Things About Late Medieval Spinal Injuries: heroic, romantic and interesting, rather than actually useful in the cause of developing knowledge and understanding. As he says, the discovery won't actually change approaches to studying Richard's reign in important ways. Even if we allowed that there has been no circular reasoning (the curvature of the skeleton's spine was adduced as evidence that it was Richard III) it would only go to show that what we thought was true about Richard's appearance was, in fact, the case. Watching the press conference on TV, I'm afraid (even though it was designed for attendance for people just like me) give me the chills. Yes, it raises awareness of the University of Leicester. Yes, it shows people the work of archaeologists and other experts, and draw interested people in to the discipline (not least potential students). Yes, no doubt it will help the department secure funding (which is surely what all the jamboree was about, in the end). All of that is fine. But it's not really history, not in any meaningful sense. |