Once upon a time, I was a historian-in-training, and much of my professional development as a researcher and writer stems from the years I spent in academia [there was also a short stint pursuing law, but that’s another area, another story, another time…]. Over time, I learned that one element that separates good from great historians is the ability to tell a story. It’s a skill I’m still working on. But every historian, whether an armchair history buff like myself or a professional, has a certain amount of imagination about the past, and it stems from the curiosity we have about those who went before us.

Who, what, where, when, why, and how aren’t just questions we throw at students and other historians; they’re questions we ask ourselves, especially when we become immersed in a particular era or person’s life. A good writer/storyteller, whether a historian, a novelist, or a journalist, re-creates a particular world, a certain time and place, and above all, a specific perspective.

But stories and narratives aren’t just orally told; sometimes it’s the location itself. Anyone who’s traveled in the older part of a town or city, whether here in the United States or abroad, knows what I mean: the sense as you walk onto a battlefield, down church cloisters, up narrow staircases, that you are now somehow of another time and place, even as you remain firmly grounded in this particular point in time.

But sometimes these buildings don’t tell us enough. How long did it take to build? What was it built with? How many people had to work on it before it was completed? Historians and archaeologists pondered for decades how exactly the Egyptian pyramids were completed (even though these days they have made very good educated guesses and explanations about the process, based on years of research and study). We know it took hundreds of years to build medieval churches. But there is no one alive who has constructed these places, and workers did not record their daily work (if they did, those accounts have not survived); most, if not all, were illiterate. Reading and writing weren’t exactly prerequisites for physical labor.

So it’s kind of neat when a modern-day effort occurs to replicate the past. In present-day Burgundy, France, a medieval castle is being constructed, replicating as much as possible the actual process of construction as it would have been in the 13^th century. While I gather the workers aren’t dressing up in jerkins and hose, or being referred to as serfs, a world long gone is being restored to our knowledge.

It does sound like something the Society for Creative Anachronism would do, but I think it is interesting from many perspectives: historical, archaeological, and social. We can read history books or fiction about this time (Michael Critchton’s Timeline comes to mind), or participate in re-enactments (such as the SCA folks, or the Civil War enthusiasts), but those who are working on this project can tell us from their own perspectives what it was like to build a castle from the ground up. This is the closest we’re ever going to get to understanding the life of a 13^th century construction worker in medieval Burgundy, and it’ll be interesting to learn the story of this building. I hope to have the chance someday to visit it, along with the original versions that still cover the European landscape.