As A Historian
His historical work has been attacked by later writers. Geoffrey Elton wrote of "the falsehoods purveyed by Cardinal Gasquet and Hilaire Belloc." His collaboration with Edmund Bishop has been described as "an alliance between scholarship exquisite and deplorable." A polemical campaign by G. G. Coulton against Gasquet was largely successful in discrediting his works in academic eyes. One of his books contained an appendix "A Rough List of Misstatements and Blunders in Cardinal Gasquet's Writings."
David Knowles wrote a reasoned piece of apologetics on Gasquet's history in 1956, Cardinal Gasquet as an Historian. In it he speaks of Gasquet's "many errors and failings", and notes that he "was not an intellectually humble man and he showed little insight into his own limitations of knowledge and training." Coulton, though, he felt was in error, through over-simplifying the case.
Eamon Duffy said in an interview:
| “ | ...Cardinal Francis Aidan Gasquet, a great Benedictine historian, was both a bad workman and not entirely scrupulous about what he said. So you can be a churchman and a lousy historian. | ” |
Read more about this topic: Francis Aidan Gasquet
Famous quotes containing the word historian:
“The writer’s language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.”
—Paul De Man (1919–1983)