Reviewer 2 Demands Primary Source Proof that 14th-Century Peasants Actually Felt 'Vaguely Anxious'

"Produce the document," Reviewer 2 wrote, "or strike the adjective."

The adjective is "vaguely." It modifies "anxious." It appears eleven times in an 8,900-word article on peasant emotional life in an English manor between 1330 and 1360, and until the second round of reports it had done nobody any harm. The author, Anya Pell, put it there on purpose. Anxious is an interpretation. Vaguely tells the reader how much weight the interpretation will carry.

Reviewer 2 does not dispute the anxiety. He disputes the vagueness. "If the feeling is documented," he writes, "the adverb understates your own evidence. If it is not documented, the adverb is doing the work of a source." He then lists all eleven occurrences by page and paragraph, which took him longer than reading the article, and asks that each one either acquire a primary citation or be deleted.

Pell's response letter runs to thirty-one pages. Page nine contains a table with four columns: Claim, Source, Evidentiary Status, and What the Document Would Have to Say for the Claim to Be False. The fourth column is empty for nine of eleven rows, because no document could contradict a feeling. A manor court roll does not record apprehension. It records that Walter son of Ralph withheld suit, that Joan la Zouche brewed three ale-batches without presenting them for assize, that someone's pigs were in the rye again.

The archive's record-keeper, Edith Marrow, answered the journal's inquiry for supplementary documentation politely and at length. The strongest item in the collection, she wrote, is an entry from 1347 in which a tenant "withdrew himself from the homage without word of reason." That is behavior, she noted, and it was filed as behavior, by a clerk who was not asked and would not have answered.

"The court can tell you a man existed, held three acres, owed six shillings, and was fined for brewing on a Sunday," Marrow wrote. "It will not tell you how he felt about any of it. It was never in business to."

Reviewer 1, meanwhile, approves the piece and adds one small question, which is a comment: whether "vaguely anxious" is not simply the historian's own condition, transposed four centuries backward and given a period costume.

Pell strikes the adjective. The sentence now reads that the peasants were anxious, flatly, with eleven citations pointing at harvest failures, a doubling of bequests to the Virgin, and a chantry founded by a family that lost four people in a single season. The sentence is stronger. Reviewer 2's third report arrives in four days. He accepts the deletion, commends the evidentiary table, and asks what "anxious" meant in 1349 as opposed to now, noting that a modern clinical term applied to medieval subjects requires either a period-appropriate equivalent drawn from a primary text or withdrawal of the claim entirely.

He has requested, in effect, a medieval word for a feeling the medieval record was never asked to keep.

Dario's First Questions, filed for anyone opening a peer review for the first time: What would have to exist for this claim to be false? Who recorded it, and for whom? And when a reviewer asks you to prove a dead person's interior life, notice that you have stopped discussing evidence and started discussing his.

The footnote, for the record, now has four descendants and a table of contents.