Da Vinci Hoax authors respond

In the past few days I've received e-mails from both Carl E. Olson and Sandra Miesel, the authors of The Da Vinci Hoax, a rather successful debunking of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. They've done real yeoman's work in slogging through Brown's book to show how often Brown's ideas are completely wrong-headed. But they also seem to have some rather old-fashioned ideas about history, as I wrote about last week. In the interest of fairness and promoting further discussion, I'm posting the key points of Olson and Miesel's e-mails.

From Olson:

I'm not convinced that Brown does think we can know the truth about the past, nor am I sure that he could articulate, as you have, the difference between interpreting recorded history and figuring out what actually did happen. There is, it seems to me, a very fine line to be walked here, and I don't think Dan Brown is much for fine lines. I am firmly convinced that one reason his novel has done so well is that he relies on a relativistic notion of truth, while also claiming to have The Truth. Again, having it both ways.

[...]

In other words, Brown does make (as Sandra indicates and you well know) a myriad of factual errors. This is quite serious in its own right, of course, but here are other problems, namely his coy, slitherly remarks about history and it being "written by the winners" and so forth. This attitude, however poorly expressed by Brown, owes quite a bit to postmodern and deconstructionist thought, as I attempted to explain in our book.

[...]

Both Sandra and I understand the difference between the historical record and how history has sometimes been written; I'll also acknowledge that we don't make that entirely evident in our book, and so you make a valid and helpful point. But we can, I am convinced, know truth about the past, even while we might revise our understanding of particular events, people, etc. I have a serious problem with the statement, "We can't know THE truth about the past," since it begs a number of serious questions: Is that a true statement? Can we know the truth about the present? Can we know the truth about truth? Can we know TRUTH, period?

[...]

I don't think that Brown really takes history seriously at all; in reacting against his irresponsible and insulting approach, I may have overreacted a bit in the other direction. But I think it's unfair to say that our view of history is "awfully outdated," when our view is simply that there are many historical facts that we can and do know, and that these need to be taken seriously and address soberly. And we also know that there are many things that we do not know about the past and many judgments that historians will disagree about to one degree or another.

And from Miesel:

I was indeed a history major, specializing in the religious and social history of the Middle Ages. MA, University of Illinois; abd Indiana University. My old professor, the distinguished Reformation scholar Gerald Strauss, who taught me historiography, could assure you that I am aware of the impossibility of fully recovering the past. But the kinds of errors that Dan Brown makes require no lofty analyses of "discourse." He inverts and invents on matters over which there's not the least disagreement. (ie, who arrested the Templars; the significance of Templar architecture) He attempts to exalt silly, worthless sources at the expense of consensus academic authorities. And no, not all history is "written by the winners." Such revisionism and relativism were our targets. You have not demonstrated that we failed to demolish Brown's claims.

I'll post my response tomorrow.