Bad Neighbours

How do historians use written forms to interrogate their topics?
This chapter writes about 'bad neighbours' using the formal characteristics of bad neighbourhood. Its sections and ideas jostle and resent one another, struggling to maintain their distance, sometimes speaking to one another out of necessity, but more often striving to ignore their own neighbours. The chapter is about a village in rural France, about witchcraft, murder, criminal justice, psychiatry, fragments, silences, historical evidence, gaps, shards, and, of course, one story of bad neighbours. It draws on a criminal investigation into a man named Joseph Auloi who shot a man named Jacques Martin dead in Pouilloux, in northeastern France in 1886. The chapter is an essay made up of three texts, braided together. First come reflections on the methods of historical imagination. Second comes raw material, the brute words of historical sources. The final braid provides contexts and background. Each braid returns in turn: reflection, source, context. The essay does not provide conclusions or findings that can be summarised in this abstract, because the point is the form of the essay itself, uncertain and self-defeating. Imaginative histories teach readers to read otherwise. The tools of the historical imagination are more than just the conditional tense, the willingness to ask unanswerable questions, or the turn to ‘empathy’ as a method. Imaginative work is a question of form and structure as well as content. Bad neighbourly writing for bad neighbours, magical thinking for histories of magic.