Prescott’s essay deals with the Old Charges, a body of medieval and early modern manuscripts central to the understanding of operative and speculative Masonry. As in his earlier research, Prescott’s objective is to reassess their historiographical role, question conventional readings, and frame their significance within wider cultural and social contexts.
Thesis and Main Contribution
Prescott argues that the Old Charges should not be treated merely as repositories of factual historical data or as constitutional documents of guild life, but rather as ideological and rhetorical texts. He stresses that their narratives were crafted to serve functions of legitimation, identity, and continuity, particularly in the transitional moment from operative to speculative Masonry. The main contribution is historiographical: he challenges earlier positivist or antiquarian uses of the manuscripts, emphasising instead their performative and discursive nature.
Method and Rationale
The author employs a primarily textual and contextual method. He undertakes close reading of the Old Charges’ narrative structures, focusing on elements such as legendary origins, lists of regulations, and biblical or historical genealogies. This is combined with comparison across manuscripts to highlight patterns of repetition and adaptation. Prescott situates these textual features within the rhetorical needs of early modern fraternities. His rationale is that the texts cannot be understood in isolation but only in terms of their functional context: they legitimised status, conveyed identity, and justified exclusivity.
Unlike earlier scholarship—such as Knoop and Jones, who concentrated on classification and institutional parallels—Prescott does not prioritise codicological or palaeographical minutiae. He instead stresses cultural reading, diverging from the focus on dating or on descriptive cataloguing that characterised predecessors. This marks a clear methodological shift: where others catalogued and arranged, Prescott interprets and reframes.
Main Arguments
- The Charges as ideological texts : Prescott contends that the Old Charges, with their mythical genealogies and biblical references, are less records of operative custom than ideological instruments. They narrate a history of Masonry stretching back to biblical or classical times, thereby granting authority and prestige to contemporary practice. This demonstrates that the texts’ value lies not in factual accuracy but in their rhetorical power.
- Continuity and adaptation : He highlights how successive versions of the Charges retained core elements while adapting details, showing the flexibility of the tradition. This underscores their function as “living texts” that were continuously reworked to remain meaningful. Prescott’s emphasis is on adaptation rather than archival fixity.
- Historiographical misuses : Prescott criticises earlier historians and Masonic writers who mined the Old Charges for data to construct linear genealogies of Freemasonry. He argues that such uses misinterpret their rhetorical nature, conflating legendary with factual history. The Charges should not be forced into modern categories of historical evidence but understood as cultural artefacts.
- Integration into wider cultural currents : Prescott contextualises the Old Charges within broader traditions of medieval craft identity, biblical genealogies, and early modern cultural memory. By reading them against this background, he positions the texts as part of a larger European phenomenon of legendary origin narratives for craft and professional groups.
Strengths of the Approach
- Rigour/Originality : Prescott reframes the corpus not as a passive archive but as an active cultural discourse. This original interpretive stance departs from cataloguing traditions and provides new insights into function and meaning.
- Methodological Contribution : By foregrounding ideology and rhetoric, he introduces cultural and textual analysis into a field long dominated by antiquarian description. This reorientation broadens the methodological repertoire available to Masonic historiography.
- Clarity of Argumentation : The exposition is well-structured, moving from critique of older approaches to his own positive proposals. Key points are illustrated with examples from the Charges, demonstrating his interpretive claims in a clear and accessible manner.
Limitations and Potential Biases
- Limitation 1 : By focusing on ideological readings, Prescott gives less attention to codicological and palaeographical details. This creates a methodological imbalance: the material conditions of the manuscripts, crucial for dating and textual transmission, are underexplored, which may weaken the precision of some historical claims.
- Limitation 2 : His critique of earlier scholarship sometimes risks reductionism, portraying antiquarian work as naïve. This rhetorical strategy sharpens his thesis but can oversimplify the diversity of previous approaches.
- Blind spot : The article does not engage with the evidence of archaic linguistic forms in the manuscripts which suggest deeper layers of textual transmission. Ignoring this dimension leaves unexplored the distinction between the date of the copy and the composition of the underlying text, a point that other studies in the dossier have emphasised. This omission narrows the scope of his cultural reading.
Critical Conclusion
Prescott’s contribution significantly shifts the study of the Old Charges by reinterpreting them as ideological artefacts rather than as simple constitutional or archival texts. His cultural approach broadens the interpretive field and compels historians to rethink the meaning of the manuscripts in their social contexts. However, by downplaying codicological analysis and textual layers, he leaves important aspects of the manuscripts underexplored. The article’s enduring value lies in its challenge to positivist readings, offering instead a perspective that insists on rhetoric, adaptation, and ideological function as central to the Old Charges. It redefines the ground of debate, even if it leaves certain philological and textual-critical questions unresolved.