Official documents reflect intentions, not actual social reality.

Evidence

This example is useful because it shows that relying only on laws, manuals and official pronouncements to approach the reality of a certain historical period is useful insofar as it portrays what the officials had in mind and what their tools in shaping society might have been. Whether reality was shaped by these tools in the neat and exact manner that they envisaged is another point altogether, not only because there was bound to be a discrepancy between the textual plan and its implementation, but also because this differentiation between tool and reality, between the text and its context is an arbitrary one. As was shown above the text itself could not be viewed in isolation of its social context, in spite of its attempts at portraying itself as a detached, primordial and abstract writ. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 956

Categorization

• XREF: Methodological warnings about documentary sources echo similar cautions in A Midwife’s Tale about reading records for what they omit.