The heroic study of records: Problematising archive and textual sources of historical writing

Before the document and the written text, there was the word and the oral tradition. Modern scholars have lately become more mindful of this fact as they have come to view documentary truth, vested in the archival resource, in a more sophisticated and critical manner. A wider range of sources has also attracted the historian concerned with areas of social and personal life, sources which are not captured in the remaining archival 'net' from earlier ages. Memory and oral sources have offered new perspectives on closed worlds of past experience.