Saye No More

Abstract

What makes a historian master of his craft is the discipline of checking findings, to see whether he has said more than his source warrants. A historian with a turn of phrase, when released from this discipline, risks acquiring a dangerously Icarian freedom to make statements which are unscholarly because unverifiable. [C. S. R. Russell]In December 1990 I published an essay critical of the work of Dr. John Adamson. I cited numerous examples of what I consider systematic misuse of evidence, including selective quotation and misquotation, tendentious interpretation, and the citation of sources that either have no bearing on the point being substantiated or are so tangential to it that no reasonable researcher would consider the cited material to constitute evidence within the canons of accepted scholarly practice. I came to these conclusions after a long period of checking citations. What I found was that the evidence for these questionable practices was embedded in Adamson's work and concealed from the view of his readers. Because he uniformly preferred to cite from manuscripts and disdained cross-reference to readily available printed editions, only someone whose familiarity with the materials nearly rivaled his own could be aware of the problem. Dozens of manuscript citations were offered as evidence for self-confident assertions, but time after time no quotations were provided in either text or footnote to make the assertions concrete. When sources were quoted, the quotations were largely run into Adamson's sentences rather than appearing in their own contexts.