A Culture
of Fact, England, 1550-1720
by Barbara J.
Shapiro
Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2000,
284 pp., Trade,
ISBN: 0-8014-8849-4.
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium
stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be
Over the past
decades, critical observers and suspicious
citizens have learned to mistrust reports
about the facts of military campaigns, corporate
(ir)responsibility, royal mishap and scientific
success. The media, we have gradually come
to understand, are as easily creating 'facts'
as they are hiding others from public view.
Misters Bush and Blair 'know for a fact'
that the former Iraqi regime was producing
and hiding weapons of mass destruction,
and it is a well known 'fact' that man never
walked on the moon. Yes, Elvis lives, as
a matter of fact, I have met him at a recovery
center in the South of France where lady
Di has gone in hiding too.
Facts are no longer facts, it appears, but
how have they ever become facts in the first
place? What does this overworked four-letter
word - derived from the latin 'factum' or
'man-made thing' - really stand for? When
was it used and what were the events or
pieces of information that received this
seemingly untouchable label? Who elevated
mere descriptions, stories, anecdotes and
gossip to the semisanct status of undoubtable,
solid and foolproof status of factual evidence?
Barbara Shapiro, a professor of history
in the Graduate School at the University
of California, Berkeley, retraces the early
history of the concept of 'fact' in the
United Kingdom in the sixteenth and seventeeth
centuries. It starts in the courts, when
juries and judges were urged by early modern
thinkers to ground their verdicts on facts
as witnessed by reliable and trustworthy
observers. Sir Thomas More and Sir Francis
Bacon - himself a professional lawyer -
among many other lesser known philosophers,
contributed to the advancement of the 'fact'
in the legal arena, although it may come
as a surprise that they thought gentlemen
to be more reliable than commoners or men
more trustworthy than women.
In a matter of decades the concept gradually
spread from law to historiography, chorography
and travel reporting. By the end of the
sixteenth century, reporters of 'marvels',
'wonders' and other 'news' in the periodical
press had adopted the practice of quoting
witnesses and their antecedents to support
the factual status of their stories and
with the founding and the development of
the Royal Society, 'facts' became part and
parcel of scientific discourse. Finally,
at the beginning of the eighteenth century,
the use of the word had become so common
in English culture that it appeared even
in religious texts.
Barbara Shapiro has taken the work of Shapin
and Shaffer (see Leviathan and the Air Pump,
Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life',
Princeton, 1985, a landmark work on the
development of early scientific thought
and on the societal nature of science and
knowledge) to heart and clearly demonstrates
how the fact originated in law, not in science
and how this epistemological concept moved
from one realm to the other, reshaping the
structure of knowledge in its wake. She
does so in eight thematically arranged chapters
rather than one chronologically ordered
narrative, giving enough side information
for the reader to get the complete picture.
She draws from a truly formidable range
of reference, appropriately organised in
the footnotes to keep the prose clear and
readable, and she strikes a balance between
'factual' description and epistemological
interpretation. This makes this book a good
read for both historians and amateurs -
in the modern sense - of intellectual and
cultural history.