Instead of writing history from the top down, she writes it from the bottom up, beginning with attention to specific detail:Ī sudden light upon the legs of Dame Elizabeth Partridge sends its beams over the whole state of England, to the King upon his throne: she wanted stockings! and no other need impresses you in quite the same way with the reality of medieval legs and therefore with the reality of medieval bodies, and so, proceeding upward step by step, with the reality of medieval brains and there you stand at the center of all ages: middle, beginning, and end. She addresses the topic not through theory and synthesis, but through attention to “fitful” and “minute” details that illuminate everyday life in the Middle Ages. The story begins with an introduction by Miss Rosamond Merridew, a fictional historian who travels the length and breadth of England in search of documents that illuminate the medieval system of land tenure. Virginia Woolf’s early story, “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn” (1906), suggests how a woman might approach the writing of history.
An attention to the realistic detail of everyday life robs historical narratives of what Hayden White called “the odor of the ideal.” Drawing upon Schor’s work, Ruth Hoberman, in Gendering Classicism, argues that by focusing on the details of the “previous everyday,” female historians and historical novelists resist the male-dominated master narratives of history from which women have largely been excluded. Schor argues that detail can be threatening in its “tendency to subvert an internal hierarchic ordering of a work of art which clearly subordinates the periphery to the center.” Detail refocuses attention on the marginalized, the seemingly insignficant, the banal. In Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine, Naomi Schor explores the connection between detail and female identity in art and literature.
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