|
|
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
Historical accuracy, fact.
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 2,788
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
OP
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 2,788 |
Historicity arises from the (sometimes outlandish) notion that the actual facts of history can be accessed and known with the same sort of certainly available to scientific measurements. When its pursuit is applied with rigor to fable, legend, myth, poetry, saga, and ancient hagiography, it largely misses the point.
The marvelous old stories about Saint Joseph of Arimathea are illustrative. Joseph appears in the New Testament and was likely a living, breathing, actual human being. There is a certain historicity to that part of his story.
But Joseph also figures in certain apocryphal writings, penned subsequently to the Gospels, and their historicity is very much in question.
Still later legends have it that St Joseph was sent to Britain by the Apostle Philip to Christianize the Island. He carried with him a staff carved from the True Cross. He landed in the British west country with twelve disciples and planted his staff in the ground and the Glastonbury Thorn grew from it. At the direction of the Archangel Gabriel, they build a daub and wattle church upon which, later, the great Benedictine abbey of Glastonbury is built, where King Arthur is buried.
As E.A. Freeman says, in Avalonian Quest, "We need not believe that the Glastonbury legends are records of facts; but the existence of those legends is a very great fact."
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613 |
Ah; thanks. Thus the reason why all the debates arising from "The DaVinci Code". Your explanation also reminded me of something I saw on television (Discovery Channel, I think), about the Alvarez Asteroid Theory: a geologist was saying that the earth can be read like a book (facts, in other words); and that Alvarez Jr. or Sr. looked at a thin layer of dirt between Cretaceous and Tertiary rocks and found a much higher concentration of iridium than would normally be expected. Further examinations revealed the same finding in that layer all around the world. Therefore it seemed to be a fact that a huge asteroid hit the earth with such an impact that its iridium spread throughout the atmosphere, falling back to earth in this one thin layer, in which there were suddenly no fossils. So--I guess they "read" the earth and came up with this "fact", which sounds like historicity to me if I understood you correctly.
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 2,788
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
OP
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 2,788 |
Quaere: Are historicity and facticity synonymous? coextensive?
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Mar 2005
Posts: 500
addict
|
|
addict
Joined: Mar 2005
Posts: 500 |
are historicity and facticity synonymous? I suspect one is a sleeper community ("city") of the other. Is facticity a word?
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
Is facticity a word?I get 28,700 googlits. Answers.com has a definition for it. Where's your bar set for wordicity? http://www.answers.com/facticity&r=67
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 2,788
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
OP
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 2,788 |
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,027
old hand
|
|
old hand
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,027 |
Is facticity a word? it's even in the OED. But so is factitious which points in the opposite direction..
|
|
|
|
Forums16
Topics13,913
Posts229,374
Members9,182
| |
Most Online3,341
Dec 9th, 2011
|
|
|
1 members (wofahulicodoc),
268
guests, and
0
robots. |
|
Key:
Admin,
Global Mod,
Mod
|
|
|
|
