Master Lecture of TCUS: Professor Suzanne Marchand
2025.04.02
Master Lecture of TCUS: Professor Suzanne Marchand
Title：The Escape from Flattery：How Historians Became‘Objective’
Speaker：Professor Suzanne Marchand
Moderator: Cheng-Ta Yang / Director, CHASS NCKU
Time：2025-4-28（Mon.）10:00-12:00
Location：Academic Lecture Hall @ NCKU KUANG-FU Campus, History & Goals College of Liberal Arts
Language：English
Registration：https://activity.ncku.edu.tw/index.php?c=apply&no=15969
Abstract：
In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, it was totally normal for histories to be written on commission, to inform, educate, and flatter patrons, who were often princes. Tales were spun that cast a monarch in a favorable light, and/or cast his or her enemies as devious and incompetent rulers. Histories were also written as educational manuals for princes in waiting, to teach them Christian practices and to warn them against bad behavior by giving them distant historical examples, such as the barbarian behavior of King Herod or the Emperor Nero. A great deal of early modern history writing was written by courtiers, or paid hacks, and meant to please a noble or clerical patron. Such texts were so slanted that thinkers such as Descartes completely despaired of learning anything secure from history. The escape from flattery was really only possible with the collapsing of the system of personal patronage, and the movement of historians out of the court and to the academies or universities, where the incentive to flatter individual leaders was much reduced. The advent of de-personalized institutions did not make historians entirely objective; but it did mean that their livelihoods now depended much less on the subjective needs, ambitions, and vanities of a single man.
Title：The Escape from Flattery：How Historians Became‘Objective’
Speaker：Professor Suzanne Marchand
Moderator: Cheng-Ta Yang / Director, CHASS NCKU
Time：2025-4-28（Mon.）10:00-12:00
Location：Academic Lecture Hall @ NCKU KUANG-FU Campus, History & Goals College of Liberal Arts
Language：English
Registration：https://activity.ncku.edu.tw/index.php?c=apply&no=15969
Abstract：
In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, it was totally normal for histories to be written on commission, to inform, educate, and flatter patrons, who were often princes. Tales were spun that cast a monarch in a favorable light, and/or cast his or her enemies as devious and incompetent rulers. Histories were also written as educational manuals for princes in waiting, to teach them Christian practices and to warn them against bad behavior by giving them distant historical examples, such as the barbarian behavior of King Herod or the Emperor Nero. A great deal of early modern history writing was written by courtiers, or paid hacks, and meant to please a noble or clerical patron. Such texts were so slanted that thinkers such as Descartes completely despaired of learning anything secure from history. The escape from flattery was really only possible with the collapsing of the system of personal patronage, and the movement of historians out of the court and to the academies or universities, where the incentive to flatter individual leaders was much reduced. The advent of de-personalized institutions did not make historians entirely objective; but it did mean that their livelihoods now depended much less on the subjective needs, ambitions, and vanities of a single man.