Our final seminar of the OxNet series took place last week, led by Giles Gasper. Thady Fox reflects on the session:
Professor Giles Gasper portrayed history as a story of change and thus illuminated the centrality of the narrator. Therefore, history is a study of perspective before a study of reality: two concepts proved to be distinct by Professor Hannah Smithson in our prior lecture. It is the historian’s role to drag history along this continuum, to achieve an asymptote of reality. The historian is one who analyses and interprets, finding a shared essence in various sources. The historian filters truth from fallacy.
Thady Fox, Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School