This is kind of brain dump - beware!
Yesterday I stumbled across an academic paper from Sweden (in English thankfully) that related the idea of the implied reader and the writing of history. After about ten pages of densely technical stuff, and enough German and Greek buzz words to fill a book, it seemed to end up by saying that people get more out of reading stories of real people than from reading about nations and states.
One interesting aspect of the writer's work was the 'gestalt' (German buzzword) of 'The Past', which functions as a kind of character that looms large, alongside the omniscient, omnipresent Narrator. Real people don't feature in 'traditional' history - there are numbers of dead (she seemed to fix on this aspect especially) but no people. Nations and States are about as personal as it gets, Kings and Statesmen simply figureheads for these monsters (OK, I'm interpetting her a bit now). What she likes better, it seems, is books that tell little stories, vignettes I suppose, of real people in a much more story-like approach, with adjectives and description of sounds sights, smells, etc. By having as characters real people, the account functions a bit more like a novel, creating a world in the reader's mind and allowing her (she always uses the feminine as a generic, simply because she is female) to engage with it. Mimesis is the key thread of the argument - which she seems to use as a kind of image or imagined world (contra online definitions which see it as a mirror or reflection)
I need to chase up a few of her references - though I recognised many of them - and be sure I've properly understood what she is saying. But, whilst I can see that the 'story of little people' kind of approach (which she says is not social history or, I guess, Annales-type synchronic stuff) would be a nice read, one that would draw in the reader and allow them to identify with or relate to what is described, I'm not sure that it is automatically 'better' or more useful.
The writer asserts, and it makes some degree of sense, that when we read of wars (political history) where x thousand people died it doesn't really move us - they are just numbers - whereas if we hear about the inhabitants of a little village, with whom we identify as humans, we are moved when they are killed, maimed or driven from their homes. As a tool for making us behave differently in the future, as a means of employing the 'past' as an ethical lesson in how not to behave, it is clearly powerful. Whether it is any less open to abuse or manipulation, I'm not convinced - presumably such history would still be written by relatively powerful people with their own agendas and/or pressures and this would inform the story they told. Also, in an age when TV news seems to bring us such stories almost daily, and we simply switch off or walk away, the potential effectiveness is perhaps less than she might hope.
Making history interesting, rather than dull, is a valid concern. Moving from meaningless genealogies and numbers, lists of battles and doctrinal debates to something that 'lives' enough to engage our thought processes seems a good idea - at least in principle. Where I struggle, is how we avoid simply creating some kind of historical novel whose characters are 21st century people in fancy dress. Another paper I read this week spoke of a visit to a 'living history' museum where the characters (guides) ostensibly live a couple of centuries back. The writer observed how she felt unable to engage with these people in any meaningful kind of a way because they were prohibited from engaging in real dialogue with her (her research interest into the location and nature of lavatories, and its relationship to concepts of privacy, simply did not cross the cultural boundaries!! And I thought I was studying odd stuff!). In other words, the question is how do we address the inevitable writing in of our own reflection, assumptions, etc.
In reading - whether fiction or non-fiction - our imagination is to some degree engaged. Whether we conjure up images of people and places or not (one of the things I read commented about how when we see a film of a novel we often observe 'they didn't look like that', even though we never actually visualised them) somehow the idea-imagination continuum is involved.
(bit if a leap here!)
Pondering all of this - and how to read or write church history - I find myself drawn back to thinking about the Bible and its blend of theological reflection and history. The fourth gospel is a real case in point, I think. That it is a theological reflection on the life of Jesus rather than a biographical account is hardly the theological equivalent of rocket science. Even Luke, which states itself as being an attempt at an orderly account, is quite clearly biased in what it offers. Similarly the OT histories and even the letters which sometimes contain delightful references to mundane things (e.g. Paul's request for his books and coat to be brought by Timothy). The Biblical stories are more those of little people than those of nations - yet there are super-characters such as 'The Philistines,' 'The Children of Israel' or 'The Jews' at various times. The either/or doesn't fit - there's a both/and.
When we read the Bible we expect it speak to us. We don't, I suspect, come to it consciously as a 'window' into another world or a 'mirror' in which we see ourselves reflected nor yet as a 'portrait' of something to ponder, yet each and all are plausible readings. I'm not honestly sure we come to the Bible as 'exciting' or 'interesting' in the way that we do with fiction. Maybe because we read it so often? I don't know. In terms of attractiveness, it seems to sit somewhere between novels, which we enjoy, and history, which we endure. (Or am I just an unredeemable heretic).
Maybe the challenge for our reading and writing of church history, and our use of it in theological reflection is to be more aware of all this stuff about readers and imagination, about what captivates or repulses us, about why we approach the Bible so differently from other literature (even when we sometimes find some of it boring!).
Not sure any of this makes any real sense, but it is way too long already and time is against me. I think that whilst attempts to make history more fun to read and more adept at engaging our emotions and imagination is laudible, it is not the whole answer. There is also a need, I feel, for a more overtly self-aware and humble acknowledgement of intent and limitation in any such enterprise. To make the reader sympathetic to our cause, they need to be convinced we are willing to be engaged in debate. I think.
(PS I know this doesn't end tidily - neither do most of the things I read, so I reckon I'm in esteemed company!)