ABSTRACT
For the student of reenactment (as for reenactors themselves), evidence is one of the central issues to ponder. The question is not ontological: does reenactment produce evidence? It does. The question is: what kinds of evidence does it produce? And, by extension, is the evidence produced by reenacting the past epistemological: does it allow us to distinguish between opinion and justified belief? A more detailed interrogation of these issues, however, is hampered by the fact that the concept of evidence itself has been something of a theoretical wallflower. Indeed, with a few exceptions, the definition of evidence (both as a noun and a verb) is often taken for granted and rarely problematized. It does not, to take one notable example, rate an entry in Raymond Williams’s seminal Keywords (1976). Nevertheless, a glance at the longer Oxford English Dictionary (OED) makes it clear that the word has had many and varied definitions and usages over many centuries. A capacious definition was stultified early in the 19th century when Leopold von Ranke’s assertion that mining the archive for sources would shackle evidence to empirical data and present it as historical truth. Alongside empiricism, the promulgation of other “scientific” approaches to the study of history—such as an orthodox application of the Marxist concept of historical materialism—subsumed evidence into a pre-existing hierarchy of ideological certainties. Subsequent generations of post-empiricist historians have derided the search for truth based on so-called factual evidence as an epistemic folly, deeming all historical narrative to be nothing more than a fiction hide-bound to understandings of the present on the part of the historian, a symptom of fatally flawed praxis. The debates over truth need not detain us here, except to note that they have pushed the stand-alone notion of evidence further to the margins. When examining the concept in relation to reenactment it is important to return to the OED. As well as introducing the notion that documentation constitutes evidence, which can establish facts (in a legal context), the Latin and French etymons (ēvidentia and évidence) of the English word encompass a range of meanings—empirical, corporeal, and ethereal—relevant to reenactment: that which is evident to the eye; manifest to the senses; a rational thought; an act of imagination; or an article of faith.
