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The study of the past, for better or worse, has never been a "closed" discipline. Although of course different sometimes in practice, in theory anyone who learns the methods scholars use to try to access the past - how to access and properly contextualize primary sources - can have something meaningful to say about a given period.
That said, some people are better at this than others.
Prof. Bruce Holsinger at the University of Virginia has recently shown just how this can work and what dramatic consequences it can have. His article "Thorkel Farserk Goes for a Swim: Climate Change, the Medieval Optimum, and the Perils of Amateurism," just published in a volume entitled The Middle Ages in the Modern World: Twenty-First Century Perspectives, tells a story about a 10th-century Viking and a modern scientist who read with too little skepticism , which has dramatic implications as we confront the recent UN report on climate change.
The origin of all this, the medieval story, comes from the 13th-century Book of Settlements. There, one of the earliest Viking settlers of Greenland expected a visit from a relative and didn't have appropriate food for the coming feast. So, the story goes, Thorkel Farserk swam over a mile out to an island to get a sheep, then swam back home with the sheep on his back.
The story was seized on by an early climate scientist as an anecdote that helped prove what's since become known as the "Medieval Warm Period." Basically, the theory of the "Medieval Warm Period" suggests that the climate particularly of Northern Europe from the 10th to 13th centuries was slightly warmer than it was during the early 20th century. This impacted not only weather but agricultural production. Thorkel's story fits here because it seemed to suggest that the water around Greenland was much warmer than it is now (otherwise he and the sheep would have died). Certainly, this was just one among many scientific data points that led to this theory but it became a colorful anecdote that was repeated in many writings on climate change through the 2000s.
Nowadays, the scientific consensus is much more nuanced in how it understands this period. With more data, scientists have a better sense of just what changed and when. In other words, we now recognize that the "Medieval Warm Period" was very much a regional phenomenon, not even true across all of Northern Europe, and much more muted (less extreme) in temperature changes than people initially thought. Climate change deniers, in addition to refusing to believe the science, now point to the "erasure" of the "Medieval Warm Period." As such, that strain of climate change denial is one example failure to understand methods and why they're important for understanding something.
But there's also another failure to understand methods that got us here in the first place.
As Holsinger shows, the story of Thorkel's swim is a weird story to begin with and never should have been read the way it was. Along with sheep-laden swims, the Book of Settlements also has stories about mermen giving prophecies and women filling the sea with fish via witchcraft, just for starters. Clearly, this text as a whole was never intended to be read as a straightforward recording of facts. Properly contextualized, Thorkel's swim likely should be read as another fantastic tale about the settlement of Greenland - as something much closer to myth than history. But this, unfortunately, wasn't how it was read and we're still dealing with the consequences today.
In the end, there's good scholarship and bad scholarship. The lesson here is that scholars in the sciences and humanities need to work more closely together, to learn from one another as equals. Those material objects, the remnants of the past that come to us in the present, don't belong just to one field of study but to all of us. This is critical to understand in this specific case, Prof. Holsinger elegantly concludes, because "these stories, written in ice, skin, and wood, that may well come to shape our common future."
