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Kristin Bundesen, PhD

The Cookie Jar

Staying dry on the island of conclusions


The person in power determines reality. Another version of this is that history is written by the winners. The first is present tense, the latter past tense. Sometimes, someone comes along to rewrite history years, decades, or centuries later. Philippa Langley and her work on Richard III is one such example. She is ‘fascinated by the tales we don’t tell and why we don’t tell them’. Me too.


It is also at the heart of my work as an historian. There are tales we don’t tell and reasons we don’t tell them. Most of the reasons, it turns out, are baseless. Sometimes it is simply a matter of jumping onto the island of conclusions in the middle of a sea of knowledge and staying put. Challenging the resulting assumptions, the island perspective, can be dangerous work and, if done properly and thoroughly, damaging to one’s reputation. (For example, see the Shakespearean Authorship Question.) That lurking threat can keep one silent for decades.



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