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  3. In the early 1950’s, historians who studied preindustrial Europe (which we may define here as Europe in the period from roughly

In the early 1950’s, historians who studied preindustrial Europe (which we may define here as Europe in the period from roughly

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问题     In the early 1950’s, historians who studied preindustrial Europe (which we may define here as Europe in the period from roughly 1300 to 1800) began, for the first time in large numbers, to investigate more of the preindustrial European population than the 2 or 3 percent who comprised the political and social elite: the kings, generals, judges, nobles, bishops, and local magnates who had hitherto usually filled history books. One difficulty, however, was that few of the remaining 97 percent recorded their thoughts or had them chronicled by contemporaries. Faced with this situation, many historians based their investigations on the only records that seemed to exist: birth, marriage, and death records. As a result, much of the early work on the nonelite was aridly statistical in nature; reducing the vast majority of the population to a set of numbers was hardly more enlightening than ignoring them altogether. Historians still did not know what these people thought or felt.
    One way out of this dilemma was to turn to the records of legal courts, for here the voices of the nonelite can most often be heard, as witnesses, plaintiffs, and defendants. These documents have acted as "a point of entry into the mental world of the poor." Historians such as Le Roy Ladurie have used the documents to extract case histories, which have illuminated the attitudes of different social groups (these attitudes include, but are not confined to, attitudes toward crime and the law) and have revealed how the authorities administered justice. It has been societies that have had a developed police system and practiced Roman law, with its written depositions, whose court records have yielded the most data to historians. In Anglo-Saxon countries hardly any of these benefits obtain, but it has still been possible to glean information from the study of legal documents.
    The extraction of case histories is not, however, the only use to which court records may be put. Historians who study preindustrial Europe have used the records to establish a series of categories of crime and to quantify indictments that were issued over a given number of years. This use of the records does yield some information about the nonelite, but this information gives us little insight into the mental lives of the nonelite. We also know that the number of indictments in preindustrial Europe bears little relation to the number of actual criminal acts, and we strongly suspect that the relationship has varied widely over time. In addition, aggregate population estimates are very shaky, which makes it difficult for historians to compare rates of crime per thousand in one decade of the preindustrial period with rates in another decade. Given these inadequacies, it is clear why the case history use of court records is to be preferred.
According to the passage, the case histories extracted by historians have______.
选项 A、scarcely illuminated the attitudes of the political and social elite
B、indicated the manner in which those in power apportioned justice
C、focused almost entirely on the thoughts and feelings of different social groups toward crime and the law
D、been considered the first kind of historical writing that utilized the records of legal courts
答案B
解析 事实细节题。第二段第三句提到，一些历史学家，比如勒鲁瓦．拉迪里从这些文件中提取个人历史档案，这些个人历史档案阐明了不同社会群体的态度并展现了当权者是如何执行审判的。[B]项是对原文的同义转述。
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