I don't think it's quite true that we can't know anything at all about what a term like "bride price" signified in earlier times in relation to to women's position in society. We can infer some things from other facts that are known about that society, for example whether or not women could own property, etc. I agree that we can't understand everything about a long-gone society or its terminology and culturally-held assumptions, but if there are any records at all we can certainly connect some of the dots, and make educated guesses, historical scholars do that all the time, citing their sources, and leaving their hypotheses open to later reinterpretation.
Thanks for the comment, Ingrid. Indeed, historians can form hypotheses from even the tiniest bits of evidence. Testing those hypotheses isn't possible, of course, until one can assemble several pieces of independent evidence, and even then, we can, at best, make an interpretation seem more probable. History is a forensic discipline, and even when we leave out the ideological lenses with which so many historians regard the past, its conclusions are never entirely certain.
The novelist has a different problem. Anything included in a novel takes on a character of certainty within the context of the story. That's why, when so many readers seem to be looking to novels to teach them history, it is salutary to remind people of the difficulty of understanding even the technical definition of terms from the past, let alone how those institutions seemed to the people who lived with them and who had, of course, no notion of how we live today and could not possibly envy us or how we live.
Fascinating read, thanks.
I don't think it's quite true that we can't know anything at all about what a term like "bride price" signified in earlier times in relation to to women's position in society. We can infer some things from other facts that are known about that society, for example whether or not women could own property, etc. I agree that we can't understand everything about a long-gone society or its terminology and culturally-held assumptions, but if there are any records at all we can certainly connect some of the dots, and make educated guesses, historical scholars do that all the time, citing their sources, and leaving their hypotheses open to later reinterpretation.
Thanks for the comment, Ingrid. Indeed, historians can form hypotheses from even the tiniest bits of evidence. Testing those hypotheses isn't possible, of course, until one can assemble several pieces of independent evidence, and even then, we can, at best, make an interpretation seem more probable. History is a forensic discipline, and even when we leave out the ideological lenses with which so many historians regard the past, its conclusions are never entirely certain.
The novelist has a different problem. Anything included in a novel takes on a character of certainty within the context of the story. That's why, when so many readers seem to be looking to novels to teach them history, it is salutary to remind people of the difficulty of understanding even the technical definition of terms from the past, let alone how those institutions seemed to the people who lived with them and who had, of course, no notion of how we live today and could not possibly envy us or how we live.