One of the vital lessons medieval historian Jeffrey Bowman tries to teach his students is that he doesn't have all the answers. In fact, no historian does.

"Many Kenyon undergraduates arrive with the expectation that the discipline of history involves a sort of Dragnet approach -- just the facts," he says. "Students can be frustrated when they suddenly realize there isn't one version of history, and you can't just look up the year 972 in the New York Times and discover what actually happened. The fun is when that moment of frustration becomes a moment of exhilaration and engagement. They realize that's what's interesting about the subject."

Watching students come to this new understanding of history is one of the most rewarding classroom experiences for Bowman, who earned his Ph.D. in medieval studies from Yale University and is the John B. McCoy-Bank One Distinguished Teaching Professor.

Bowman, who published the award-winning book Shifting Landmarks: Property, Proof, and Dispute in Catalonia Around the Year 1000 in 2004, knows firsthand the challenges one-sided or incomplete primary source material can present. "The historical evidence doesn't give you the whole story," he explains. "The task of the historian is to fill in the whole story or to imagine the story that doesn't get told, not just to understand the story that is being told. That is one of the challenges I try to convey to students looking at historical texts."