Even so, one can often see in medieval historians that a critical skill is not absent; it is just that it is not their practice to remold the stories they are preserving in the image of their own critical opinion. They will, for example, retail contradictory stories and perhaps note that one is “scarcely credible,” rather than excising one of them. Compared to modern historians, they prefer to present evidence rather than conclusions and leave evaluation to the reader.77 Their practice is perhaps more comparable to that of a present-day archivist than a historian.
