That’s a good question, and I’m afraid I don’t have a formula to share except maybe the method of the history of ideas which was once the characteristic approach of the University of Toronto, which is to put weight on primary sources and try to understand their internal logic first, and only then let yourself be influenced by secondary sources. My first step is to always look for the earliest source I can find. In this case our best primary source is a man named Francisco de Castro who knew Saint John of God when Castro was a boy, and then became a chaplain at the hospital later. It’s thanks to his position in time that we know things like, for example, that out of the four prostitutes whom Saint John was trying to help, the one who did change her life was married, widowed, and still living an exemplary life at Castro’s time of writing. I usually find that after trying to make sense of what the primary sources say, I know what questions I want to answer using secondary sources. So I’d have a look at secondary sources for example to better understand the way that Oropesa responded to the French invasion, how the campaign went, etc. Sometimes too the secondary sources can help you to understand the author of the primary sources, especially if there’s a problem of potential bias or something, although in this case there wasn’t much of that. For this story one of the big puzzles in the Castro biography was the question of why the priest would take the young Saint John away from home. When I first read this I thought I must be missing some obvious piece of context because the story was so strange, but alas no, everyone is puzzled. The secondary literature contains some pretty ridiculous suggestions for which there is absolutely no evidence, like ’John’s mother must have been sick and he heroically set out to go get rich to help her!’ or ‘John must have been in a Jewish family that faked their conversion to Christianity and somehow the wandering priest found out and abducted him to Christianize him properly and everyone covered it up including Castro!’ So when I saw that everyone found this puzzling, I concluded Castro is telling the story in the most objective way he can, and that’s how I retold it.
I love your Substack. Where do you get all your information? It would take a huge amount of work to source this and I want to know more!
That’s a good question, and I’m afraid I don’t have a formula to share except maybe the method of the history of ideas which was once the characteristic approach of the University of Toronto, which is to put weight on primary sources and try to understand their internal logic first, and only then let yourself be influenced by secondary sources. My first step is to always look for the earliest source I can find. In this case our best primary source is a man named Francisco de Castro who knew Saint John of God when Castro was a boy, and then became a chaplain at the hospital later. It’s thanks to his position in time that we know things like, for example, that out of the four prostitutes whom Saint John was trying to help, the one who did change her life was married, widowed, and still living an exemplary life at Castro’s time of writing. I usually find that after trying to make sense of what the primary sources say, I know what questions I want to answer using secondary sources. So I’d have a look at secondary sources for example to better understand the way that Oropesa responded to the French invasion, how the campaign went, etc. Sometimes too the secondary sources can help you to understand the author of the primary sources, especially if there’s a problem of potential bias or something, although in this case there wasn’t much of that. For this story one of the big puzzles in the Castro biography was the question of why the priest would take the young Saint John away from home. When I first read this I thought I must be missing some obvious piece of context because the story was so strange, but alas no, everyone is puzzled. The secondary literature contains some pretty ridiculous suggestions for which there is absolutely no evidence, like ’John’s mother must have been sick and he heroically set out to go get rich to help her!’ or ‘John must have been in a Jewish family that faked their conversion to Christianity and somehow the wandering priest found out and abducted him to Christianize him properly and everyone covered it up including Castro!’ So when I saw that everyone found this puzzling, I concluded Castro is telling the story in the most objective way he can, and that’s how I retold it.