Henry VIII was a greenie??!

Yep, between busting up the monasteries and dispatching a few wives, Henry VIII was apparently driven by his green eco-sensibilities to create the 10,000-acre forest at Hampton Court . At least, that’s the story according to a recent lecture by the Prince of Wales. This and other such spurious uses of history get a lashing in The Telegraph, and are discussed with a good deal more depth and complexity in the Times Higher Education supplement.

Says Professor Pat Thane of the University of London:

"There is widespread abuse and misuse of history in public life, ranging from the silly to the downright dangerous. Bad history can create real problems by distorting understanding of contemporary issues when politicians and others use history as a rhetorical tool to conjure up past golden ages, appeal to founding fathers or simply to rewrite it for political ends.”

Further (as many of us know to our cost), “bad history can lead to bad policy analysis and bad policy”.

The strong connection between history and contemporary politics brings me back to the recent discussion we had here on the moral role of the historian in society (and, incidentally, should also answer all those people who ask ‘what’s the point of studying history?’). In the THE article, several highly respected historians weigh in on how to manage the delicate balance between past and present by using our knowledge of the past to help us understand the complexities of the modern world but without distorting history to serve specific political or cultural ends.

Crusades specialist Jonathan Phillips, for example,

"Is wary about drawing facile parallels with - or citing the past's lessons for - today's Middle East. Indeed, he believes that studying the period may help us understand "the sheer complexity of the region, then as now".

"It is far too simplistic to see the Crusades as a battle between Christians or the West and Muslims, since there were Christians fighting Christians, Muslims fighting Muslims, alliances across the religious divide - and the Greek Orthodox Church was always opposed to Crusading," he says.

But although they have to embrace complexity, Phillips adds, historians must also accept and be sensitive to the fact that "for much of the Muslim world, the Crusades have acquired a toxic meaning as part of a historical continuum - of Westerners invading, killing and conquering, as they were to do again in colonial times".

"Policymakers have come to realise that something serious underlay the Islamic response to George W. Bush's unthinking use of the word 'crusade'," he says.

The medievalist Miri Rubin thinks it is inevitable that past and present always interact, and therefore medievalists have an important role to play in shedding light on current issues.

"I find people have real misconceptions about issues of religious prejudice and the sometimes-related violence," Rubin explains. "People think of pre-modern Europe as a place where crowds - the mob, the unlettered - took to the streets in religious violence, especially against Jews.

"Such behaviour is invoked in our own times as 'medieval' and people who do such things - in the Balkans in the 1990s, for example - are deemed to be 'throwbacks' to another time. In this manner, they are classed as 'aberrant', and so can be bracketed and put aside.

"The truth is that, then as now, violence in the streets is inspired by key actors, who act knowingly, and who are informed and often linked up with privileged access to media. There are agents provocateurs - preachers, journalists, politicians - who endorse behaviour by those who respect their authority. So, rather than the product of 'ignorance' or 'age-old hatred', responsibility for violence ought to be identified along lines of communication and excitation."

The THE article goes on to deal with issues such as the troubled connections between a Whiggish history of ‘liberty, democracy and material progress’, colonialism, national identity, and contemporary ideas of citizenship.

As some tonic to the abuse of history, the THE notes that the History and Policy group, a partnership between the universities of Cambridge and London that "works for better public policy through an understanding of history” has started its own 'Bad History' series. Here, mercilessly exposed with relish and wit, are the grievous historical errors, oversights and deliberate distortions that are being used to justify current policy.