These questions are not, I think, best tackled by a genial cry of chacun a son gout, because they go to the heart of how the discipline of history appears to those ou tside it, and this is the question Evans repeatedly shuns. But apparently we shouldnt tell anyone that this is what we are doing, because if we do we are selling the pass to the dogs of postmodernism. Its all very well to say, as Evans does, that if your historical jigsaw is a steam engine you cant make it a garden, but th is is just an instance of metaphors run mad. In the first place, Evans is confusing going beyond evidence with ignoring it, and in the second place, textual evidence is much more complex and difficult than a jigsaw, because the meaning of each piece of it is subject to interpretation, a process which may cause the whole picture to break up. What is much more likely to happen is that you have some words and some silences, and you have to think about whether if you could hear anything in the silences it w ould make a difference to the words.
Clear pictures are a luxury.
In my own recent work on Scottish witchcraft, there is an ellipsis in a trial narrative, which moves rapidly from the accused witchs supernatural diagnosis of the bastardy of another woman s baby to the birth of the womans own baby. Imaginatively, one can see many possible links between the two events - is the first baby also the witchs, is the bastard somehow an outcome of becoming a supernatural creature, and so on. But there may be no link at all. And if we make one, its fiction, and can only be judged as fiction. Nor do statistics on the prevalence of bastardy help, though social attitudes to bastardy might be, at best, suggestive, and one might even add that knowing whether the wom an had ever really had a child would only help minimally.