I wrote:
"Some secondary works have been drawn on to provide a framework, but the
emphasis is on the
extraction of evidence from contemporary sources."
Will Johnson wrote:
Which is the exact opposition of what the introduction page claims.
The introduction page says:
"The outline tables on royal and noble families presented in the Europaische
Stammtafeln series provide the basic informational framework. The objective
of the project is to verify all this data against primary source material
and supplement it with accurate historical background information."
And this flatly contradicts the previous sentence in same Introduction:
"In this work, the families of rulers and nobility...are being
reconstructed from scratch." ES is NOT "scratch".
The families have been constructed by Schwennicke and his contributors,
and the details are being verified (incompetently) by Cawley. Verifying
is NOT reconstructing "from scratch".
In July 2005 I told the FMG and Phillips that the work was not up to
scholarly standards and was not a systematic prosopography, yet in June
2006 Phillips began his presentation to SGM with these words:
"Charles Cawley's "Medieval Lands", subtitled "A prosopography of
medieval European noble and royal families", is being hosted on the
website of the Foundation for Medieval Genealogy, and the first edition
of the work has recently been made available there".
Why did the FMG and Phillips continue to associate themselves with a
false claim in the subtitle of the work?
Phillips continued:
"This is an ambitious project, whose aim is to document the genealogy
and biographical details of European royal and noble families through a
systematic study of primary source material."
Again, why does he insist on the non-factual, endorsing description as
"systematic" fully 11 months after being told that it was NOT so?
Further, Phillips stated:
"Some secondary works have been drawn on to provide a framework, but
the emphasis is on the extraction of evidence from contemporary
sources."
This deliberately belittles the amount of content that has been taken
directly - and uncritically - from ES and other secondary works. The
"emphasis" is actually on rehashing Schwennicke's work, with snippets
from often ill-chosen and ill-assessed sources thrown in. I have
demonstrated at length how inadequate this work is for Peter Orseolo,
one of the principal objects of attention in Cawley's own view of
things. In July 2005 I demonstrated the same to the FMG and Phillips
regarding the first part of the Flanders material, that Cawley himself
had offered as the sole example of his work - surely, in his view, some
of the best of it (and as it turns out, substituting "least bad" for
"best", quite so).
Phillips went on:
"In the current version, most data are available for Germany, Northern
France, Lombardy and Anglo-Saxon England, and for the earliest 600
years of the medieval period."
Again, this covers the Flanders stuff that was critiqued as inadequate
by scholarly standards for the FMG and Phillips last year, and we have
since been told by Tim recollecting Cawley's AGM presentation that all
the material for England is unverified - so that even allowing the
dishonest twist of "verified" to mean "reconstructed", his process had
reportedly not been carried out for the data on Anglo-Saxon England as
Phillips stated.
Phillips continued: "Statements not yet documented from primary sources
are indicated in some parts by [...], and in others by the absence of
source citations."
I have shown in the posts on Peter Orseolo that even this has been done
so erratically as to be flatly misleading to users.
Phillips finished: "Work on the project is continuing, and it is hoped
to produce a more fully documented second edition in due course.
However, as it stands now the work contains a tremendous amount of
information, and I'm sure people will find it an extremely useful
resource."
Thats is not strictly factual, but an opinion: one that Phillips has
not seen fit to retract, and one that he has indeed sought to justify
by misrepresenting my words from July 2006 about the usefulness to many
people of this "kind of" work.
Phillips asks why Francisco might think he was lying. If the above
isn't plainly dishonest on the part of Phillips, can someone explain to
the newsgroup - as he obviously cannot - specifically how and why?
Peter Stewart