2. 考研
  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.
The passage would be most likely to appear as part of______.
选项 A、a book review summarizing the achievements of historians of the European aristocracy
B、an essay describing trends in the practice of writing history
C、a textbook on the application of statistical methods- in the social sciences
D、a report to the historical profession on the work of early-twentieth-century historians
答案B
解析 文章主旨题。本题考查文章的出处。文章主要讲述历史学家对于前工业化时期的欧洲非精英人口的调查。[A]项提到研究欧洲贵族的成就，不合文意，故可排除；[C]项提到在社会科学中统计学方法的运用，文中并没有提及统计学方法，排除；[D]项提到20世纪早期历史学家的研究工作，文中提到的时间点是20世纪50年代早期，故也可排除。
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