You Had to Be There

An emerging field of history asks if we can ever really understand how our forebears experienced love, anger, fear, and sorrow.

- Gal Beckerman

The historian Rob Boddice sat cross-legged on his couch in Montreal on a frigid day last winter and conjured for me the image of a medieval carpenter, hammering away in his workshop.

“Imagine this guy; he’s building a table,” he said. Suddenly the carpenter misses the nail and bangs his thumb instead. “What did that feel like for him?” Boddice asked.

I stared for a few seconds while Boddice smiled encouragingly, as if he'd just asked me to solve a quadratic equation in my head. “I guess it probably stung, and then his thumb throbbed?” I ventured, remembering actually banging my own thumb a few weeks back while assembling an IKEA desk. Boddice nodded, then said, “Let me ask you again. What did it feel like for him?”