Recently I received an email inquiring whether I am aware that an article published in the Winter 2003 issue of Common Knowledge was a hoax. The author of the email is a historian of the British intelligence services, and the supposed hoax concerns misinformation about an agent of MI6 around the time of World War II. My interlocutor finds it morally troubling that the misinformation deals to an extent with the Holocaust. In response, I wrote: Thanks for your message about Colin Richmond's “In Memory of Virtue,” the title of which, I think, should answer the question you raise. The piece concerns virtue, which Richmond takes to have died during the Second World War. The piece does not importantly concern his “cousin Claude” and MI-6. Richmond is a unique figure, in my experience, among historians. He goes back and forth between, on the one hand, the strictest imaginable empiricism (see, for example, his article “The Advent of the Tasburghs: A Documentary Study in the Adair Family Collection,”Common Knowledge 20.2:296ff., and my introduction to it, on 197–203) and, on the other hand, the fictionalization of history for a range of charitable purposes. Those who are accustomed to reading his work—among whom I hope that we can count the readership of Common Knowledge, where he has published dozens of pieces over the past quarter-century—may be expected to be able to tell his empirical from his fictional efforts. We have in press now an article of his on a visit of Jan van Eyck to London in 1428, the evidence for which I take to be mostly fictional—though not much is at stake, morally speaking, with that piece, if a few readers mistake his intent (which is humorous). If you would like to read pieces of his in which he makes explicit what he's up to, I suggest you try “Utopia” (in 22.1:5ff.), which is counterfactual (in the service of relief from bitter actuality), and “In Custody” (in 23.2:199ff.), in which he cites a fact about the life of Anthony Woodville in 1469 and then fills in all that we do not know about it with witty, educated speculation. Clearly, this is not history-writing that appeals to everyone (though, if you glance at the names on our editorial board you will find those of many of the most important and empirically-insistent historians of our day). Common Knowledge, alas, is not a journal that appeals to everyone, either.I offered my troubled correspondent an address at which Professor Richmond could be reached in England, but it turned out that the former had contacted the latter already (by phone, at dinnertime, on Easter Sunday) and that the message to me had been an afterthought—a means perhaps to discomfit Richmond, if indeed he thought he had hoodwinked me. I do not know which details of the essay are in question; I have not inquired because I know Richmond's oeuvre too well. Another piece of his, published here in 2004, concludes with a librarian in Poland (“Suddenly into the café burst the university librarian”) accusing him of perpetrating a scholarly hoax.1 The librarian has read an advance copy of “Leonard Coxe and Thomas More: The Implications of their Friendship for the Copernican Revolution,” a lecture that Richmond is to deliver the next day, from behind Copernicus's own desk, to an audience at Olsztyn Castle. According to the librarian, Richmond's text is “all lies.” “Not all lies,” Richmond “gently” explains, suppressing with tongue in cheek the italics that I have supplied. But “the poem,” the librarian returns, “is an invention.” The poem? Apparently Richmond's lecture attributes a poem called “Bona Bisonta” to Copernicus and the English humanist Leonard Coxe as coauthors. “I allowed myself,” Richmond writes, “a smile”—for the poem “is here, I said: it is in your library.” The “red-faced, spluttering, irate” librarian “had begun to calm down. But now he exploded again. I remained calm, sipping Okocim, while the others around the table clicked their tongues, uneasy at the turn things had taken and unable to know which side to take. Besides, I went on, isn't all history invention? My question set the cat among the pigeons. Earnest, even heated debate ensued,” during which Richmond persuaded his colleagues that “the historian's role was to invent.” Like a Schwitters collage (Schwitters shows up whenever Richmond feels frisky), historical writing is “the consequence of discoveries, the result of finding and using what others, unimaginative and uninventive, have no time for and throw away”2—a definition of historiography that seems a gloss on Hugh Kenner's of empiricism: “Empiricism is a game. Its central rule forbids you to understand what you are talking about.”3The red-faced librarian, meanwhile, has gone off to conduct empirical research: “At the conclusion of my lecture the following morning, the university librarian approached me apologetically. He had found ‘Bona Bisonta’ in a catalog of the late 1940s—those disorderly times, as he termed them: a catalog long since discarded and rarely looked into.”4 The “Bona Bisonta” is a 1,072-line poem, not by Copernicus and Coxe, but by Nicolaus Hussovianus, an aide to Bishop Erazm Ciołek, Polish delegate to the Vatican during the pontificate of Leo X. Written in elegiac Latin couplets and fully titled Carmen de statura, feritate ac venatione bisontis (A Poem about the Size, the Ferocity, and the Hunting of the Bison), it was published in Kraków in 1523 and dedicated to Poland's Queen Bona, Hussovianus's patroness, after his return from service in Rome.5 Thus Richmond pulls from his hat not a rabbit but a bison that he had stowed there when no one was looking. Earlier in the narrative, he has told of a journey that Copernicus made with Coxe to the New World—to Yucatán, of all places.6 This tale will seem tall—an invention, a lie—to anyone not aware that Copernicus is the name of the European Union's Earth-observation program. Moreover, Yucatan is an agency of the Worldcom PR group in charge of press relations for the Copernicus program in France.Hence the complaint of Richmond's critic, the historian of British intelligence, had no power to surprise or alarm me. Richmond fills empty spaces in the historical record with speculations meant to make us better—more virtuous—people. The story about Copernicus in Yucatán was told only so that Richmond could write: “Copernicus's upbringing in Torun was multicultural. Was he a German, a Pole, a Prussian, a Pomeranian, a Kashubian, a Jew? He didn't know and didn't care. When he came back from Yucatan he considered himself Mayan. He was the most confused and at the same time the most open-minded man in Europe.”7 “Multicultural” is a virtue when its product is “open-minded”—and “confused” is good too if its result is the Heliocentric Hypothesis. In Richmond's counterfactual piece “Utopia,” Richard III rules wisely for fifty years, eschewing foreign wars and devoting himself to good works. . . . He is killed by the Iroquois, whom he has been attempting to convert to Christianity. . . . A cult develops immediately, and the saintly Richard is canonized only a year after his death in 1536. The widespread popularity of the cult snuffs out the first feeble flickers of anti-Catholic feeling, and the English church is reformed by Thomas More, without there being any need for the stake. More also reforms Parliament . . . [and], with the backing of a complacent House of Commons (lawyers have been banned from standing as either borough or shire members) that readily votes the necessary funds (there being no foreign wars requiring taxation), creates a nationwide system of health care. . . . More dies in his beloved Chelsea in 1560. . . . Richard IV, king since 1535, . . . vows to continue the policies of the late chancellor, which he does by appointing Thomas More's daughter, Margaret Roper, to succeed him. In harmonious relation with its colonies in the Americas, England acts as a peacemaker in Europe . . . and enters modernity as an agricultural nation that has evaded and will continue to evade civil commotion, industrialization, and the least manifestation of capitalism.8In this instance, a virtuous life needs a virtuous state, and the two entail peacemaking, “good works,” moderation, tranquil reform, the exclusion of lawyers and merchants from public life and the inclusion of women, the preclusion (as inhumane) of market mechanisms and (except in sports and games) competition, free access to medical care for all, and—in the end—death at home, encircled by loved ones.Utopian counterfactual historiography seems to have the same purpose as the chastest kind of historical empiricism. Both aim to undermine the credibility of history that comes in preinterpreted forms. Contextualist historiography is a producer and taxonomist of those forms, and its confidence that in bits of the past we know what to expect is my own chief difficulty with accepting contextualism as currently practiced. The difference between contextualists and other historians who arrive on the scene with ready hypotheses and handy categories is that contextualists are never non-self-reflective or self-indulgent. They do expect what eventually they find, but, unlike the historians they brand “presentist” or “whiggish,” they do their best to evade projection. In this respect, contextualists are placed like analysts behind couches, on which, instead of individuals, sad and lying prone, there are stacks of open texts, awaiting annotation. Richmond's last piece of empirical history to appear in Common Knowledge was so great a success in evading biases and preempting foregone conclusions that I felt the need to comment in an introduction that some readers may protest he has left his job as a historian half-done. He suggests, in “The Advent of the Tasburghs,” his own readings of texts and circumstances largely in the form of questions, as if he were writing marginalia for his own later use while reading. . . . A sufficient quantity of [articles like “Advent”] could help in training new generations to teach and study history in less preinterpreted forms. . . . Charitable empiricism may be required in a situation like the one . . . obtaining in Jerusalem . . . , for students here, in my experience as a teacher, are short on historical imagination and curiosity. Instead of asking questions like, “What else could this set of facts and details tell us?,” they ask—I have faced this question, in just these words, on any number of occasions—“Is this everyone, or just you?” The wording, as I have come to understand it, implies the existence of a monolithic consensus with which the questioner identifies before knowing its full contents, and from which there are dissidents that the questioner has no need to mind. . . . What if [instead] the reviewer of a work of history or the teacher of a course on history were expected . . . to offer readers and students as extensive a range of interpretive frameworks as is conceivable in response to any historical claim or body of research?9I concluded my introduction by promising, “for a future issue of this journal,” a piece “whose aim will be to test consensual beliefs about the relationship of church and synagogue against . . . unimaginably charitable possibilities.”10I wrote that introductory essay and made that promise in the context of vandalism against monasteries, nunneries, and churches in Israel by ultra-Orthodox Jewish youths in 2012 and 2013—and there has been more of the same since that time. In an exchange of emails with Fouad Twal, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, he had suggested to me that the solution would be “better education.” But, as I wrote afterward in these pages, I did not assume Dr. Twal meant to imply that other Israelis “had educations more ‘refined and well formed’ than the vandals” themselves did:11Monks and priests in the Old City of Jerusalem are regularly spit at by ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students whose education is, by some measures, peerless. The trouble is that such students, among the many subjects that they are never taught, are not taught history at all, while Israeli public schools almost exclusively teach Jewish history, and even then Jewish history of just the last one hundred fifty years. When students are exposed to “general history,” as it is called in Israel, Jewish persecution by gentiles, throughout the world and at all times, is taken for granted as structurally given. History is presumed, in other words, to be a simple study, half the nouns used in teaching it being accusative and half nominative, with all the verbs being transitive and categorical. . . . A different kind of education, arising from a different kind of historical scholarship, is plainly required.12In this issue, historical scholarship of “a different kind” is on offer. My own offering, which advances, as promised, a range of alternative frameworks for understanding the relations of medieval Jews and Christians, is fortified by Peter Burke's essay, which precedes it, on “alternative modes of thought.” An article of Burke's published here almost twenty years ago and reprinted in this issue as a public service, commenced our intermittent, reform-minded discussion of contextualism that has culminated in the present symposium. Burke's “Context in Context,” which ought to be on the syllabus of graduate proseminars in a dozen disciplines, argues that, for all the “many insights” that contextualism has made available to humanists and social scientists, “there is a price to be paid” for overcommitment to its assumptions and practices.13 Burke was professor of cultural history at Cambridge, the world capital of contextualism, from 1979 to 2004, and presumably his expression of reservations about it has likewise come at a cost. Clearly, he obtained there his sense that contextualism is an ideology directed against others: “It is important,” he writes, “to ask to whom—or against whom—a given proposition about context was directed (scriptural fundamentalists, for example, believers in eternal wisdom, formalist art historians, enthusiasts for generalization in social science, and so on).”14 My assessment, set forth on various occasions in Common Knowledge, is that the principal adversaries of contextualism are comparison, broadmindedness, and charity, to each of which its exponents condescend. On my least charitable days, I would say that contextualism is the most intelligent, highly theorized, and sophisticated form of cynicism, which itself is the most difficult stance for modern intellectuals to evade, let alone challenge. The means that Burke recommends for doing so—the exit that he takes from the prison-house of context—is to place each recourse to contextualism “in its own contexts.”15Burke assembled, for “Context in Context,” a relatively neutral survey of the term's usage, typified by the anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard's statement, regarding the Azande people of central Africa, that in a “web of belief every strand depends upon every other strand, and a Zande cannot get out of its meshes because it is the only world he knows.”16 The contextualist holds that, whether one's frame of reference is diachronic or synchronic, there are many worlds but that none of us truly knows—can live in or belong to—more than one. In his new essay, when Burke turns again to Evans-Pritchard on the Azande, he does so with clearly normative aims: It is reasonable to ask whether all the Azande were unaware of other systems of belief. After all, when Evans-Pritchard encountered this people in 1926, for his first experience of fieldwork, some of the Azande also encountered him, and a few had the opportunity to know him quite well. In any case, he was not the first European that the Azande had encountered. Major P. M. Larken was a District Commissioner in Zandeland for more than twenty years, 1911–32. Missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, had been at work there for years, among them Monsignor C. R. Lagae, who published a book about them in the year that Evans-Pritchard arrived. Anthropologists make individuals more conscious of their beliefs by their inquiries, while missionaries offer the “heathen” an alternative belief system.17Whether anyone actually can convert from one “belief system” to another is not an issue that Burke treats here. But he does raise the closely related question of what counts as a belief system, and it is something less conscious and definite than, for example, a religion: It is of course difficult to accept that one's thinking, and that of one's community, takes place within the framework of a particular belief system, which from a historical or a sociological point of view is only one system among others. Each system includes assumptions, ideas that appear to inhabitants of the system to be no more than common sense, to be “natural” rather than a set of cultural conventions. From a comparative point of view, however, it is clear that these assumptions vary greatly from one system to another. In the famous phrase of Clifford Geertz, what we call “common sense” forms part of a cultural system.18In this sense, more than one religion may belong to a single “cultural system,” and there is no guarantee that those religions may not be hostile to one another or that the “common sense” that “forms part” of the system may not be at odds with one or more constituent religions or indeed with religion per se. In a homily on temptation, delivered a few weeks after his election in 2013, Pope Francis prayed: “May the Lord deliver us from the temptation of . . . ‘common sense.’ ”19 As Geertz argues, “Common sense is not what the mind cleared of cant spontaneously apprehends; it is what the mind filled with presuppositions . . . concludes.”20 Still, if, as Evans-Pritchard writes, “every strand depends upon every other strand” in a “web of belief,” then mutual criticism or disapprobation between one strand and another may suggest not conflict or incoherence but mutual dependence.In my contribution here, I examine such a case, while aware that the common sense of my own place and time would dismiss my premises, if I applied them to a comprehensive interpretation, as cant or wishful thinking. What I have, instead of premises and an interpretation, are questions, albeit leading questions, and my first aim in posing them is to supply contextualists of the rising generation with a figure of speech whose utility and power depend on an extinct technology. I remember palpably how it felt, while learning to use a manual typewriter in the early 1960s, when I discovered the “margin release” key. It was often necessary to release the margins, the limits one had set for oneself, on a keyboard unattached to a computer, and in times gone by I found the sensation of pressing that key elating. Colin Richmond is a master of the margin release, metaphorically speaking, and I suggest to all-digital scholars that they learn from reading him when to let themselves loose from restrictions that prevent a full investigation of their subject. Another master of this technology of scholarship is the art historian T. J. Clark, whose margins were clearly set by contextualist teachers and colleagues. He delights but also fears to make claims that might alarm historians who say that what can be thought or imagined is greatly limited by context and thus that, in a well-tilled field of history, one will find no genuine surprises. In a recent essay, on Hieronymus Bosch, Clark negotiates between the overwhelming originality of the artist and the margins set, by votaries of plausibility, on what may and may not be claimed about him. Clark refers to Bosch as a singularity in history, an invraisemblable. He might not have existed (the likelihood of his existing is infinitesimally small—always a reassurance, this), and had he not, everything about the history of the late 15th century would have been more plausible. . . . Certainly he thought about the subject [of the afterlife] in terms provided him by his time. A singularity is not a visitor from outer space. An improbability is not necessarily a heretic; and in any case, in Bosch's time heretics were mostly as orthodox and commonplace as their inquisitors.21Clark walks his claims back and forth in this way throughout the essay, so that reading it is like watching a man pacing a maternity ward. In the passage following, when he asserts that “we agree,” the rhetoric is covertly hypnotic—and when he admits that (“of course”) “the historians are right,” the damage to “the world as it is” has already been done: [Bosch] is, we agree, an event in human history. He shows us what the imagination is capable of—how far, extrapolating from the behaviours we have, the mind can go in positing other worlds. Historians, faced with this kind of phenomenon, are bound to want to place it in a “cultural” frame. The work they do (the habit of mind they exemplify) inevitably shifts attention away from the imagination, which has no history, to ideology, which has; ideology being the name we have for allowed, repeated, legitimate imaginings—ways of picturing things that do not destabilise the world as it is, or don't do so too much. And, of course, the historians are right. . . . All I would say by way of qualification is that ideology needs the imagination—including, occasionally, the kind of extremity of imagining we find in Bosch—to renew itself.22After reflecting on the “signature image” known as the “Tree Man”—in the drawing known by that name and, more famously, in the right-hand panel of the Garden of Earthly Delights triptych—Clark concludes that Bosch has given us a hell “not very different” in feeling from the world that the damned experienced when alive. The Tree Man, in both the drawing and the painting, “seems, as much as anything, to be looking back over his shoulder at himself—at his body become a bladder of wood. Maybe he's discomfited at the sight, but also a little impressed.”23 The drawing's landscape, “with its wide horizons, does seem to promise” what a specialist on the art of this time and place would expect: “a ‘statement’ on things—a world-picture, a verdict on the human comedy. You feel the ambition for totality. . . . But the contraption is anti-totality. It rocks, it teeters, any minute one of its boat supports might capsize.”24 The Christian afterlife has no business teetering. But then, Clark finds, in the painted image known as Scenes from the Passion of Christ and the Pelican with Her Young, that even the Saviour's sacrifice seems to thin and evaporate. It has become a Mystery Play, a projection, a transparency. The outside edge of its circle is drawn sharp as a knife. The two circles look back at us like the eye—the lens—of a terrible mechanism. Beyond them, darkness . . . and a scattering of spooks. Is this nihilism? It looks so to me; but profoundly a Christian nihilism, living on and within its parent culture, haunted by the idea of incarnation come to nothing, disbelieving as only a believer can; and therefore lacking (sadly for it, but to our eternal advantage) the consoling vehemence of the isms to come.25According to Clark, then, “historians” believe that all we can know about are ideologies, “ideology being the name we have for allowed, repeated, legitimate imaginings—ways of picturing things that do not destabilise the world as it is, or don't do so too much.” What happens when singular and illegitimate imaginings arise and destabilize the world immeasurably is the subject of “Auschwitz,” Colin Richmond's response, published here, to Burke's meditation on alternative ways of thinking. To what extent can one understand a mode of thought alternative to that of one's own time and place? Relying on Thomas Nagel's phenomenology of bat life, Richmond's answer is that understanding depends on the degree of shared experience between thinkers in different thought systems—on their degree of commensurability, in other words—but also on whether an alternative mode of thought counts as thinking at all. Richmond's conclusion is that “a human situation where there is but one mode of thought in evidence, and no evident ambivalence regarding it, is a situation in which . . . ‘man has mutated wrongly’. To arrive at a context lacking alternative modes of thought, great numbers will have died, violently and recently, as a direct upshot.” It is from that conclusion, with which I concur, that my own questions about the relationship of Jews and Christians have evolved.