A Culture of Fact, England, 1550-1720

by Barbara J. Shapiro
Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2000,
284 pp., Trade,
ISBN: 0-8014-8849-4.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

Over the past decades, critical observers and suspicious citizens have learned to mistrust reports about the facts of military campaigns, corporate (ir)responsibility, royal mishap and scientific success. The media, we have gradually come to understand, are as easily creating 'facts' as they are hiding others from public view. Misters Bush and Blair 'know for a fact' that the former Iraqi regime was producing and hiding weapons of mass destruction, and it is a well known 'fact' that man never walked on the moon. Yes, Elvis lives, as a matter of fact, I have met him at a recovery center in the South of France where lady Di has gone in hiding too.

Facts are no longer facts, it appears, but how have they ever become facts in the first place? What does this overworked four-letter word - derived from the latin 'factum' or 'man-made thing' - really stand for? When was it used and what were the events or pieces of information that received this seemingly untouchable label? Who elevated mere descriptions, stories, anecdotes and gossip to the semisanct status of undoubtable, solid and foolproof status of factual evidence?

Barbara Shapiro, a professor of history in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, retraces the early history of the concept of 'fact' in the United Kingdom in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries. It starts in the courts, when juries and judges were urged by early modern thinkers to ground their verdicts on facts as witnessed by reliable and trustworthy observers. Sir Thomas More and Sir Francis Bacon - himself a professional lawyer - among many other lesser known philosophers, contributed to the advancement of the 'fact' in the legal arena, although it may come as a surprise that they thought gentlemen to be more reliable than commoners or men more trustworthy than women.

In a matter of decades the concept gradually spread from law to historiography, chorography and travel reporting. By the end of the sixteenth century, reporters of 'marvels', 'wonders' and other 'news' in the periodical press had adopted the practice of quoting witnesses and their antecedents to support the factual status of their stories and with the founding and the development of the Royal Society, 'facts' became part and parcel of scientific discourse. Finally, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the use of the word had become so common in English culture that it appeared even in religious texts.

Barbara Shapiro has taken the work of Shapin and Shaffer (see Leviathan and the Air Pump, Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life', Princeton, 1985, a landmark work on the development of early scientific thought and on the societal nature of science and knowledge) to heart and clearly demonstrates how the fact originated in law, not in science and how this epistemological concept moved from one realm to the other, reshaping the structure of knowledge in its wake. She does so in eight thematically arranged chapters rather than one chronologically ordered narrative, giving enough side information for the reader to get the complete picture. She draws from a truly formidable range of reference, appropriately organised in the footnotes to keep the prose clear and readable, and she strikes a balance between 'factual' description and epistemological interpretation. This makes this book a good read for both historians and amateurs - in the modern sense - of intellectual and cultural history.