How useful? 103the past’, and often in the mode that Croce dismissed as ‘dead
history’. Aspects of that work can become a source for the
‘true’ history that would, on Croce’s or Carr’s terms, be the
‘historical facts’ of particular interest to architects as their
‘contemporary history’. This qualifi cation, then, determines
the relevance – inherent or as perceived by architects and
their fellow travellers of the subjects, methods, media or
judgements of architectural historians.
Having posed true history as a problem, we could consider
the third of Croce’s historiographical categories as an anti-
dote: ‘philology’ or erudition. In this context erudite history
is a kind of study that privileges artefacts on their own terms,
outside a relation to the present, and outside narrative struc-
tures. We could easily conjure up the stereotype of the tweed-
and-elbow-patch-clad scholar working in dusty archives,
books and papers piled perilously on the desk and on shelves
as high as the walls allow, but we would be missing part of
the point. The philologist’s documents, and written artefacts
especially – the term ‘philology’ derives from the Greek
phrase for ‘to love words’ – are both the stuff and the com-
plications of narrative history.
True history, as well as erudite, relies on specialized
knowledge, and in architectural historiography on the agree-
ment of buildings, monuments and other forms of architec-
tural work with archives, libraries and other sources external
to the work itself. Naturally, some who work in this mode
aim to refi ne Carr’s dead facts: revising chronologies, setting
paper trails in order, questioning the involvement of one
individual or another in the events to hand.
A historical study to determine the structural principles of
a twelfth-century tower may shed light on a longer chronol-
ogy of technical invention, on principles of what we would
now call architectural composition and decoration in the
medieval world, or on the various roles of the individuals
involved in the conception and realization of the building.
Removed from the specifi c imperatives of the archive, though,
discoveries that could easily be dismissed as irrelevant to the
twenty-fi rst century can come to have a critical currency.
When introduced as ‘historical factors’, they need not form
a lesson, but can also act as a provocation within the fi eld
of architecture’s contemporary history. In the manner that