Post by Andrew LancasterPost by Peter StewartPost by Andrew LancasterPeter I think you are misunderstanding me. I am not saying Keats-Rohan or any of these authors are useless. I said they are all useful in my experience.
You are misrepresenting me - I never took you to be saying that Keats-Rohan's work is useless, but only that its quality is comparable to Medieval Lands and the works of Douglas Richardson. Obviously poor work can be "useful" if it leads to a better understanding because of taking the trouble to find what is wrong with it - but in most cases this is a gross waste of time, and for those who don't have the resources to find the errors such works are actually worse than useless. But Keats-Rohan's work is not. I disagree with some of her conclusions, strongly at times, and aspects of her methodology occasionally, but that doesn't mean I would denigrate her skills - especially not by comparing her output to the work of people who patently lack essential skills.
I quite clearly said that I am not talking about her skills or knowledge, only the result, the genealogy.
The prosopography - strictly speaking she is not presenting herself as a genealogist - IS THE RESULT OF HER APPLYING HER SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE. Your attempt to evade this obvious and plain fact is not going to work.
Post by Andrew LancasterI quite clearly pointed to imperfections only in a relative way, because I respect both her and her work. You write as if Keats-Rohan is perfect and Cawley is a moron. That is inaccurate, and not a helpful stand point for genealogy.
You are responding to my post saying "I disagree with some of her conclusions, strongly at times, and aspects of her methodology occasionally" by trying to represent me as writing "as if Keats-Rohan is perfect". That too is not going to fly.
Post by Andrew LancasterConcerning what you said, here it is "If you find her works less useful than Richardson's this can only be because you either don't know how to use them properly or make glib conclusions from relatively few problems." So you did make this misrepresentation of me.
And your point is? The comparison of Keats-Rohan's work and Richardson's is the matter under discussion.
Post by Andrew LancasterConcerning "poor work" I think with this "admission" you are deliberately being stubborn and not admitting what is simply both logically correct and observable in every day life. (Indeed it is part of the normal theory of economics, used by managers etc.) Teams of people (and also communities, traditions, etc, i.e. people working in some kind of synergistic way towards a common goal) with narrow skill sets can do BETTER than individual "superstars". That is just a fact. We see it every day.
Again, not to the point. Richardon, Cawley and Keats-Rohan have this in common, that each of them offers work for public consumption under their own sole name. They are not trying to be part of a "synergistic" or collaborative effort, whether or not anyone thinks it might be better if they were. Richardson's work started from collaboration with David Faris (I think that is the right name), but only one name is now on the title pages.
Post by Andrew LancasterPost by Peter StewartPost by Andrew LancasterI deliberately chose frequency of mistakes as a measurement of quality because I thought that fact would show a logical error you are making. I did not choose it because I think such a simple measure is a good way to have a constructive discussion. (But I do think you must not ever have tried to work through Keats-Rohan much, because you seem to over-rate the quality a lot. I wonder if she had students doing a lot of the compiling or something. The sources are not at all carefully selected or showing any sign of brilliant observation or superior knowledge that I have seen. I have the impression sources used were often simply forgotten, or sometimes mixed up. This of course does not imply bad intentions! Anyway, if you do not agree with my observation about frequency of errors in the Domesday books, which I just thought was self-evident, then it did not illustrate my point well, but I think the logical point is still correct.)
You haven't tried to illustrate your point at all, you just keep repeating a characterisation as if it is established fact. Rosie Bevan has done a valuable job in collecting errors in Keats-Rohan's *Domesday* works (for some reason you write as if that was all she had ever published). I don't see anything there to sugegst a rate of errors remotely comparable to the reams of Richardson's and Cawley's errors documented in this newsgroup, quantitatively or qualitatively. If you disagree, for goodness sake PUT UP specifics.
Post by Andrew LancasterPost by Peter StewartNow you are brazenly misrepresenting Katherine Keats-Rohan - she did not start frmo people and work towards sources, that is a fundamental flaw of Richardson's and Cawley's method, but rather she started from sources and worked through these systematically to draw out prosopographical data.
No, I clearly am not. I made it clear that I find it hard to imagine exactly how things were put together and checked. I am guessing there were several disjointed steps in a collecting process. I made it clear I was looking at the results. Obviously I am not complaining about Keats-Rohan, and what criticism I am making of her works' formats, sourcing, error count etc is all very relative.
So you are criticising Keats-Rohan's major works based on your guess about how theyr were compiled. Your criticism of her works is "all very relative" to some supposed rate of error that you compare to Richardson's and Cawley's but don't (I suppose can't) prove this with examples.
Post by Andrew LancasterObviously you don't want it to be clear that I am complaining about an over-simplistic dismissal using "apples and pears" comparisons to completely different types of genealogist.
To give another example of that, you propose to compare her to Richardson concerning how much they over-defend when wrong. Richardson participates in online discussions and publishes updated versions of his work. In practice, this shows it can't be as bad as you say, even if it looks bad. With Keats-Rohan there is not much we can look in terms of publications, and I am not aware of her participating in public discussion. So that is a bit of a cheap shot. This can be used to argue that everyone who participates in public debate can be shown to be nasty, and the people who don't are all nice? It is just an illogical criticism, and it is NOT criticism of the genealogy. It is ad hominem.
Good gracious - Keats-Rohan's work has been exposed over years to criticism in peer-reviewed journals and at symposiums and conferences. She has engaged in controversy in print and in person without making a full-scale production of her infallibility such as Richardson has treated us to in this newsgroup time and again. Apparently you were not in attendance at the time, or have forgotten his countless delinquencies in this regard.
Post by Andrew LancasterI think good discussion of the genealogy is an aim which is in conflict with ad hominem discussions.
Ad hominem attacks are such as "He can't be right about medieval genealogy because he is cruel to his pets", and so on. No amount of criticism that is directed to the point at issue, including about someone's integrity and however swingeing, is ad hominem unless the tenor is irrelevant to that point. Again, a cop-out that won't work here.
Post by Andrew LancasterPost by Peter StewartPost by Andrew LancasterMy point in a nutshell is that you are simply committing a logical fallacy when you equate the quality of a "product" with the respect (or disrespect) you feel for the "producer". (I use odd words deliberately here, to show this is a claim concerning the logic.)
This is tortured circular logic - my "respect (or disrespect)" for "producers" can be based only on their "product" since I don't know any of the people we are discussing. I haven't met any of them, and don't expect I ever shall.
My point exactly, and your recent "apples and pears" criticisms of the people you do not like tend to be filled with character descriptions, very little genealogy. Again, my point exactly.
Another point that escapes me. What "apples and pears" criticisms? What "character descriptions" that have "very little" to do with genealogy?
Post by Andrew LancasterPost by Peter StewartPost by Andrew LancasterYour comments about Latin are one aspect of that broken logic. Extending this logic we can probably name more types of knowledge that people have more or less of, for example concerning medieval legal systems, and call each of them absolutely essential. But are they? What is essential, surely, is that those skills are available, but NOT that EVERY researcher has them to the same level. Great scholarly work is often done by teams, or people making minor contributions over a long period, which can even just involve proof reading and cross checking. And while Wikipedia is an obvious and relatively minor example today, the whole way that modern natural science works is a bigger and better one. Modern science has historically been criticized many times for being narrow and aiming at practical results, in a way which means that teams of less superior people, with a narrow base of knowledge and skill, can, like artisans always could, produce bigger results that no individual ever could.
I have no idea how you think you can rationalise the reading of Latin into a optional extra skill for medieval research.
Not exactly what I said though is it? I said that when we consider teams or people working on the shoulders of others, not everyone one of them needs the complete skill set to the highest level. Do you agree with that or not?
Richardson, Cawley and Keats-Rohan are not teams of people, they are three individual researchers whose own skill-sets are used to produce their own results.
Post by Andrew LancasterLatin is of course something you are highly respected for, for example. But not everyone who makes any kind of small contribution to medieval genealogy has the same level of skills.
Quite obviously I wouldn't be here if I thought that everyone participating needs to read Latin. My point is that anyone setting themselves up to research directly from primary sources MUST be representing that they can comprehend medieval Latin. Adequacy for this task is not hard to achieve - Latin is hardly rocket science. Scholarly work in the field of medieval studies also requires the ability to understand at least the gist of exposition and argument in some modern languages other than English.
Post by Andrew LancasterYou can use the exact same criticism you use of Cawley against most people, because unfortunately very few people today have the ideal level of Latin. So by extension your argument against Cawley means most of us are all better off getting out of medieval genealogy.
Rubbish - how many others try to represent that they can produce a general or specialised guide in the field of medieval genealogy through working from primary sources? The only sgm participant I can think of who does this is Stewart Baldwin, who has taken the trouble to learn the languages he needs for his task.
Post by Andrew Lancaster...I think this point is self-evidently wrong, but you keep writing as if it is incomprehensible to even doubt it. At the very least, it is comprehensible.
Post by Peter StewartPost by Andrew LancasterActually FWIW I respect all of the genealogical "producers" mentioned, and find all of their "productions" useful. I also agree with your all or most of the more thoughtful criticisms made on occasion about their various methods and formats. But there is, just to make my point a different way, nothing logically inconsistent about holding all those positions.
Perhaps you could retrieve your position by showing us how you competently use a website such as Medieval Lands, and then provide us with an example of a comparable error in the entire body of Keats-Rohan's work.
Try this page: http://fmg.ac/Projects/MedLands/nfravalver.htm
"1. MATHILDE de Vermandois (-after [1130]). ...
"The fact that Mathilde was the eldest daughter is confirmed by the De Genere Comitum "Flandrensium, Notæ Parisienses which records "Agnes uxor domini Ingelranni de "Cociaco" as daughter of "domina de Baugenciaco primogenita [comitis Hugonis li
"Maines [note 314: De Genere Comitum Flandrensium, Notæ Parisienses MGH SS, p. 257.]"
Mathilde was indeed the eldest daughter of Hugo Magnus of Vermandois, and the source cited is indeed the appropriate one for this specific information. So what is wrong with Cawley's statement? And why would anyone trusting it be accepting a specious assertion based on glaring ignorance?
I think there have been many good discussions here about specific errors on MEDLANDS and also systematic tendencies towards certain types of errors and also about the way errors have spread, compounding the problem. You are once again committing a logical fallacy by telling me I have to be arguing against that if I say anything which defends MEDLANDS even in a limited way. I am not.
I should also remind that concerning error frequencies and citation format and completeness, it was Richardson's books, not MEDLANDS, which I compared favorably to Keats-Rohan's books. Your response was to change the subject to something else: implying that we should compare how Richardson and Keats-Rohan react to criticism, but as mentioned above, we can not compare them on this.
MEDLANDS clearly contains more errors than both, but again it is a completely different type of project. We've recently had more detailed discussion about this here which were more constructive, so I think those do not need to be repeated.
So you have squibbed the challenge - that was predictable, I didn't suppose you would take it up. Let me make it easier then: I defy you to produce any one example of an error by Katherine Keats-Rohan that is due to her ignorance and incompetence rather than simply overlooking something or misjudging something. Anything, in other words, remotely comparable to Charles Cawley's boast when Medlands was launched that he had made the discovery of two medieval queens of Hungary in turn marrying Lui von Frizberg (a 20th-century Austrian man). You seem to imagine that his work today isn't still a tissue of imbecilities of that kind (obviously not all of that degree), but if so you are wrong. Demonstrably wrong.
Peter Stewart