INTRODUCTION

Writers from Froissart to Fussell Praise knights for their wit, not their muscle.            Yet the valor they laud            Is so often a fraud That I call it the chivalrous hustle. --Charles T. Wood There was a young French demoiselle Whose nickname was Joan la Pucelle,            But without Richard Three            (Whom he added with glee) Charlie knew that his book would not sell. --A. J. Pollard, Richard Barber, Sharon D. Michalove, Felicity Riddy, Helen Maurer, Maureen Fries May 9, 1998

Charles and Susan Wood at symposium session

The term 'History in the Comic Mode' is effectively used by a student who took one of Charlie's first classes. That former student, Caroline Walker Bynum, now president of the Medieval Academy, past president of the American Historical Association, argues that the writing of history, like all scholarly writing, is inevitably incomplete. The historian therefore needs not so much a new method as a "new voice of a new mode...the comic mode" (Fragmentation and Redemption 1991, p. 25). In renouncing any claim to be telling the whole truth, the historian instead embraces the craft of contrivance: provisional stories, easily disrupted. Great historians, like Charles T. Wood, keep readers alert to this knowledge--all stories are invented, all endings are contrived, and all scholarship is provisional.

'History in the Comic Mode' also describes Wood's work, mood, and historical voice: wise, wittily aware of the contradictory impulses at the heart of human experience and literature, and always as gleeful about the past as he is hopeful about the future.

Congregatio de Silvescendo