18th c. understanding?

[Robert Vermaat]

Is there a good overview available for how the last two hundred years have changed our understanding and interpretation of the sources? What authors might have been taken at face value and later rejected, or vice versa?

I don't know if tghere's a study available, but with regard to my own dabblings in early medieval studies regarding 5th-6th c. Britain I can tell you this: up until the early 1970s it was accepted to take every source quite literally. Of course differences in interpretation existed throughout the field, especially between historians and archaeologists, but it was common to see books published by the latter in which historical sources was used verbatim. Authors like Leslie Alcock or John Morris (their books are still widely read) used Gildas or 'Nennius' like eyewitness accounts, and Classical sources were even better. Especially the source-criticism regarding early medieval authors changed sharply from the early 1970s onwards, with historians like David Dumville taking a sharp minimalist stance, although the pendulum has swung a bit the other way in the last decade.

Critical sudies are therefore (in my opinion) relatively new. If anything, the rise of the spread of information through the internet causes a swing back to dilettantism, in which sources are taken at face value again. :-(