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Herman Paul explores why historians describe good scholarship in terms of personal qualities such as objectivity, empathy and fair-mindedness. Historians’ Virtues asks what such qualities contribute to historical study, why they have been called virtues rather than merely skills, and how their meanings have changed across different scholarly settings.
Case studies from different periods reveal disagreements about the historian’s character and task. Paul considers how virtues function as practical standards of performance, how they shape inclusion and exclusion, and how historians position themselves in relation to religious traditions, political authorities and universities. The book follows both changes in the language of scholarly virtue and the longer legacies that remain visible.
The emphasis is on the history of historical practice. Knowing facts and mastering techniques emerge as parts of a broader set of demands placed on the person doing the research. Readers will find a compact account of how historians have defined good work, together with an explanation of why apparently familiar scholarly ideals have not always meant the same thing.
Herman Paul. Historians' Virtues: From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108993067. Licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0; the unchanged original edition and its required notices are retained.