Seminars CXXXVIII-CXLI: busy in Oxford

The title is true of the present and the past, for I continue very busy even now that term has stopped. We will not speak of job applications, but even without that and purely domestic affairs, over the last week I have:

• finished a paper on Catalan place-names based on Latin palatium;
• travelled to Winchester to give that paper and been warmly hosted;
• sent off an abstract for my next paper, which somewhat unexpectedly is to be given in Australia (see sidebar);
• sent off final text of a chapter on the valuation of tenth-century cows
  for Mark Blackburn‘s memorial volume;
• gone through and sent off the second proofs of Medieval European Coinage 6, which is now very close to actually emerging at last;
• sent off various other things to further the emergence of Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Charters;
• and read quite a lot of Gregory of Tours’s Histories over breakfast.

What I have not done is written blog, as you have noticed and may also now understand. So, let me change that by giving an unfairly rapid account of four Oxford seminars from last May, connected by nothing more than their location and my interest but perhaps also yours!

Scylla and Charybdis

On the 7th May 2012, the speaker at the Medieval History Seminar in Oxford was Dr Paul Oldfield, now of Manchester, and his title was: “A Bridge to Salvation or Entrance to the Underworld? Southern Italy and International Pilgrimage”. This picked up and played with the facts that as pilgrimage to the Holy Land grew more and more important from roughly 1000 onwards, Italy became equally crucial to it as a point of embarkation for those going by sea, which was most people going, but that this enlarged transient population also bred an alternative economy of banditry and ransoming. Pilgrimage was of course supposed to involve suffering, though maybe not quite like that, and this seems to have bred stories that also greatly exaggerated its natural dangers, especially concentrated around the very busy and notoriously tricky Straits of Messina but also, for example, Vesuvius (3 known eruptions 1000-1200) and Etna (probably rather more). Classical literature that plays with these places as gateways to the bowels of the Earth was well-known to the kind of people who would write about these things. The result was, argued Dr Oldfield, that one might wind up unexpectedly meeting one’s Maker en route (and dying on pilgrimage was reckoned a pretty good way to go, in terms of one’s likely destination) but some of the things that might kill you were gates to Hell, at least as they were talked about, making Southern Italy an uncertain and liminal zone that reflected the status, decontextualised, uprooted and vagrant, of those among whom these stories circulated. This was all good fun and of course anything involving Italy always has splendid pictures, here especially of the pilgrim-favoured church San Nicola di Bari, so here it is for you below.

First-world problems

Next, on the 9th, Paul Harvey, emeritus of Durham I understand, came to the Medieval Social and Economic Seminar to talk to the title, “How to Manage Your Landed Estate in the Eleventh Century”. That sounded as if it should interest me, so along I went. Professor Harvey was looking for the kind of problems that manorial surveys indicate big English landowners were meeting before the end of the twelfth century, and observed several in them some considerable difficulty with actually defining demesne in terms of how its labour or revenues were organised differently from anywhere else. He wound up arguing that in England demesne land was really a late eleventh-century invention, and that the surveys’ expectations were all quite new. On the other hand, that doesn’t appear to have been a time of great change in land organisation or settlement nucleation, or so says Professor Harvey, and what might really have been happening is simply that the choice between direct extraction and leasing was made on the basis of what was convenient given the existing settlement patterns, but that the surveys themselves might be changing things by defining more closely who was responsible for what renders. In either case, using them as windows on earlier land use is probably dodgy! This mainly seemed to meet with people’s approval but it seemed to me that this must, if it’s happening, also be the point at which the Anglo-Saxon hide ceased to be a useful land-measure, as it was based on a standard yield. Land that could produce that yield was a hide; if yield went up, the hide got smaller. You can’t easily measure land like that, especially if you’re trying to change the obligations of a hide. When I raised this Ros Faith pointed out that Domesday Book uses plough-teams anyway, so I suppose it was kind of an obvious point, but I was glad to have thought it out anyway.

Buildings of opposition

The next week, speaker to the Medieval History Seminar was Isaac Sastre Diego, developing the work on which he’d presented earlier that year to the Medieval Archaeology Seminar. Here he took a group of Asturian monumental churches, Santa Maria del Naranco (above), San Miguel de Lillo, Santa Cristina de Lena and one or two others, that have distinct royal connections. The first and third have been called palaces, the former by modern historians and the latter in the seventeenth century when it’s first documented, but Isaac argued that they need to be seen as exclusive royal chapels in which perhaps the king himself was officiant, since the two `palaces’ both have altars in but no clear separation of space for the clergy. Isaac saw this as a deliberately new kind of display initiated by King Ramiro I (who is named in an inscription on the altar at Naranco) to deal with the similarly new monumentality of the rule of Emir ‘Abd al-Rahman II in Córdoba, perhaps also the Carolingians and most of all their probable candidate for the throne whom Ramiro had defeated, Nepotian (whom as we know would later be recorded as a lord of wizards). Isaac sees these sites as buildings of opposition, in which an explicit differentiation was made between the new r´gime and its competition both in the past and at the time. Discussion, especially with Rob Portass, brought out the extra dimension that at Oviedo, where the first two of these sites are, they would have been in explicit distinction to the cathedral and royal place of King Alfonso II, which were in the city while these still perch on the hills above. Chris Wickham suggested that San Vicenzo al Volturno might be seen as another such opposition building, which works for me. I had expected not to get much out of this seminar because of the earlier related one and in fact it was really thought-provoking, so I hope it gets published where I can easily find it.

Twelfth-century monastic xenophobia

Last in this batch, the same place a week later was graced by Professor Rod Thomson, with a paper called, “‘The Dane broke off his continuous drinking bouts, the Norwegian left his diet or raw fish’: William of Malmesbury on the Scandinavians”, which is hard to beat as is much of William’s work, which of course has mostly been edited by Professor Thomson. William was here talking about the Scandinavian response to the Crusades, where he gets unusually ethnographic, but as you see not necessarily without an agenda. As far as William was concerned these nations were still barbarian, and would be that way till they learnt civilisation, however orthodox and devout their Christian beliefs might be. This was a communicable disease, too, barbarians being more resistant to acculturation than those among whom they came to live! Most of the paper was however an exegesis of William’s method of using his sources, which was neither uncritical nor reverent but highly intelligent. There was even a suggestion that William might have had access to some saga material. This raised various intelligent questions, one obvious one being what he thought he was himself in ethnic terms, to which the answer seemed to be `the best of both English and Norman and thus neither’, and another being that of how far his sources and his audiences shaped his attitudes, which there wasn’t really time to resolve. It’s always impressive to hear someone who’s really lived inside a text without turning into an apologist speak about it, though, and Professor Thomson got points for this and also for being almost 100% unlike what I expected him to be like from his writing alone, all of which only goes to show that it’s not just the cover of a book one can’t judge by, both for William and his editor…

Right, that should do for this time; next time, much more than you probably want to read about mills, with footnotes sufficient for anyone who’s been wondering where they’ve been these last two posts! À bientôt!

Name in print IX & X

While I wait for information to reach me that will enable the next in our very delayed series of seminar reports, it’s about time I returned to the blog’s primary purpose, that being of course to publicise me and my work. 26th March—yes, I’m as badly behind with the personal stuff as the seminar reports—was a big day for publication-related milestones. I sent off the second submission version of what will now become Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Charters, editors me and the inestimable Allan Scott McKinley; I received notice that Paul Freedman, no less, had reviewed my Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia 880-1010 in Catholic Historical Review,¹ and then when I got to my pigeonhole in college I found this in it!

This is issue 2 of volume 1 of St Andrews’s new medieval flagship, The Mediaeval Journal, and I’m pleased to say that the first twenty-one pages of it contain my “Caliph, King or Grandfather: strategies of legitimisation on the Spanish March in the reign of Lothar III”, a revised and improved version of my 2010 paper from the Leeds International Medieval Congress.² That allows me to do my usual count of statistics and say: 3 drafts total, of which only 2 for actual publication; Brepols, who publish TMJ, have excellent copy-editors in whose hands I’m pleased now to have Problems and Possibilities, though I still wish the third round of changes they asked for had actually been input but hey; and, all-importantly, time from first submission to publication, 18 months, which is just about a quarter below average, so I’m pleased with it—I think it’s a good article, too, but it was also easy to get through the process of publishing it.

Larger version linked through

Then, of course, it’s been so long I’ve taken to mention that that meanwhile, still more has emerged from the pipeline, though this is a piece with a rather long history and my first ever piece of published co-writing. It originated in an international project that involved the Fitzwilliam Museum when I was still working there, and whose findings I was invited to take to a conference in Vienna in 2008 that I mentioned here, but so late that I couldn’t get into the conference proceedings, which were of the sort that get published simultaneously with the conference.³ Subsequently I saw a suitable-looking call for papers on the Heroic Age blog, thanks guys, and was lucky enough to have the paper accepted. Somewhere in there we all had to admit that what I was primarily doing here was writing up other people’s research in reasonably accessible English and so the people who’d done the actual work got their names added, they being Sebastian Zambanini, Reinhold Huber-Mörk and Achille Felicetti, of a number more who might have been named if they’d chosen, and the result, finally, is a chapter called “Coinage, Digitization and the World-Wide Web: numismatics and the COINS Project” in that above handsome blue-cloth volume, which is entitled Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture, New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and was heroically edited by Brent H. Nelson and Melissa Terras, who have been commendably good-humoured about a print process that has, well, taken long enough to make most digital work outdated.⁴ (Improvements to Google Image Search have certainly taken some of the zing out of ours, and the fact that the website on which all the project’s downloads were uploaded has now gone and its EU domain been camped by an insurance scammer is also something that time has wrought in defiance of what I actually cited, but what this means is of course that now this paper is about the only way you can find this stuff out…) Statistics here are: 5 drafts, I’m no longer sure how, and two sets of revisions, and time from first submission to publication, well, 3 years 8 months, no easy way to get round that. Still, it’s there, making my CV a weirder place, and it’s in the volume with some really exciting stuff, too, which it’s great to be included amongst. So, there we are, my name continues to be in print and there’s more a-coming, and by the time that emerges, maybe I’ll be announcing things on time again! Or, maybe not…

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1. Jonathan Jarrett, Rulers and ruled in Frontier Catalonia 880-1010: pathways of power, Studies in History (Woodbridge 2010), reviewed by Paul Freedman in Catholic Historical Review Vol. 98 (Washington DC 2010), pp. 93-94, DOI:10.1353/cat.2012.0074.

2. Jonathan Jarrett, “Caliph, King, or Grandfather: Strategies of Legitimization on the Spanish March in the Reign of Lothar III” in The Mediæval Journal Vol. 1 (Turnhout 2012 for 2011), pp. 1-22, DOI:10.1484/J.TMJ.1.102535.

3. Robert Sablatnig, James Hemsley, Paul Kammerer, Ernestine Zolda & Johann Stockinger (eds), Digital Cultural Heritage – Essential for Tourism. Proceedings of the 2nd EVA 2008 Vienna Conference, Vienna, August 25-28, 2008, books@ocg.at 238 (Vienna 2008).

4. Jonathan Jarrett, Sebastian Zambanini, Reinhold Huber-Mörk and Achille Felicetti, “Coinage, Digitization and the World-Wide Web: numismatics and the COINS Project” in Brent H. Nelson & Melissa Terras (edd.), Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture, New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Tempe: University of Arizona Press 2012), pp. 459-489. No, neither of the books about digitization are online, what would the point in that be, I don’t understand, world-wide what? etc….

“There are many roads to the great good we seek”

[Written partly offline on the bus between Oxford and Cambridge, 18/04/2012]

Over the last year, in the world of actual academia I seem to have written more about research methods than about the results of actual research, including two papers about blogging. I’m not sure what’s scarier, the fact that there is, eighteen years after my first introduction to the Internet, still a market for printed work about it,¹ or that running a blog makes me a viable contributor to that literature. Nonetheless, there are two, one loosely based on the paper I gave in Siena now forthcoming in Literature Compass, and another piece with a more complicated genesis still under review.² That genesis is interesting, in fact, as far as new media publishing goes (still, some might say, not very far): if accepted, it will be part of a ‘born-digital’ volume whose review process has up till now been done on the open web, at a site named for its prospective title, Writing History in the Digital Age. Here, various contributors, invited or responding to a CFP, were invited to post essays on more-or-less agreed topics (mine being blogging) and then several readers selected by the editors, as well as anyone else who wanted to, weighed in with comments. Feeling as if it was part of my role as a contributor, I actually read all of it, which is when this post became the stub that it’s taken me many months to fill out, but never mind that now; there’s some very interesting stuff in the volume and if you’re on this kind of new media humanities wavelength I do advise you to browse. Let me just finish talking about me first though, and then about one of those ‘nothing is ever new’ moments one sometimes gets that one of the essays there gave me.³

(Ultimately everyone is deriving from Chuck Berry anyway, right?)

My first go at a contribution for this volume was decidedly second-rate; I wasn’t sure that the editors knew what they wanted from me, and I wasn’t sure there was anything much of rigour or weight to be said about blogging as a historiographical enterprise anyway. Then I got asked to do the Literature Compass piece, which made me write at least a bit more seriously, and reading the other essays contributed to this volume generally forced me to buck my ideas up. Firstly, they introduced me to a welter of scholarship on digital humanities I had somehow managed to ignore, and secondly they showed me a number of contributions that were saying genuinely insightful things about the way we work and can work with these new tools in the æther. I decided I actually wanted in on this thing and therefore rewrote with a much better grounding in that scholarship and also an actual argument, and you can at time of writing see that version here; it’s kind of my current definitive statement on academic blogging in history, in as much as I don’t know what would have to happen for me to change my mind, well, apart from blog posts and readership figures officially counting towards academic promotion. (Tl;dr: they never will while peer review is still how we govern entry into the Academy.) What then happened was that the editors had more good stuff than would fit between the covers they were allowed to pitch for by their prospective press, and so winnowed thoroughly. What I had written crossed the tail-end of another contributor’s essay and so we were asked to make our two 5,000-word pieces, which disagreed over crucial issues, into one co-authored 4,000-word one. This request, you can imagine, I met with a certain amount of offline vituperation, as I felt I’d said what I wanted to say, and I might well have ignored it had not the other contributor, a gentleman or at least a scholar called Alex Sayf Cummings,⁴ who also hath a blog, got in touch and asked what I thought. Putting aside my spleen, I came up with a suggested best-of structure, he refined it, I built it out of the parts of what we’d written then we both refined, deleted, joined up and generally edited till we had something we were both happy with. It shouldn’t really have worked but I think it’s a better essay than mine alone was, and it at least doesn’t do him any disservice, I hope. (It’s here, at the moment, if you’re interested.) It’s been a weird way to work, and I don’t know if I’m ever likely to meet my now-co-author, but if it does come out I shall be quite pleased with it.

Have you seen this man?

So that’s all been interesting, but it’s very far from being the only interesting thing in the volume, so do have a look. I was, however, especially struck by this bit from “Historical Research and the Problem of Categories: Reflections on 10,000 Digital Notecards” by Ansley T. Erickson:

It makes sense that historians would think about categories, as we encounter them in many ways in our work. As new graduate students, we learn to identify ourselves by sub-field – “I do history of gender,” or “I’m an Americanist.” And we are trained implicitly and explicitly to organize information and causal explanations into categories of analysis – race, class, gender, sexuality, politics, space, etc – when in fact these categories are never so neat and separate, whether in an individual’s life or in a historical moment. Then we research in archives that establish and reify their own categories – legal records divided by plaintiff or defendant, institutions that keep their records with an eye to confirming their power or reinforcing their independence. To make sense of a sometimes overwhelming volume of fact, all of which needs to be analyzed relationally, we rely on categories that we create as we work – like my database keywords.

This matter of categories connects to at least two fields of scholarship. Scholars of the history of knowledge like Peter Burke have examined the organizational schemes embodied in curricula, in libraries, in encyclopedias, and have shown us how these structures and taxonomies represent particular ways of seeing the world. Burke then shows that such schemes reify or naturalize those ways of seeing, helping to reproduce the view of the world from which they came. They also make some kinds of information more, or less, accessible.

Think, for example, of the encyclopedia. We are accustomed to its A to Z organization of topics, but this structure in fact represented a break away from previous reference formats that grouped subjects under a structure of classical disciplines. The alphabetized encyclopedia came about at a point when the previous disciplinary categories were no longer so stable as to be able to contain growing knowledge, and a new, more horizontal or less hierarchical model took their place, a model that allowed readers access to information by topic, outside of the hierarchies of a discipline. Burke points us to the importance of how we categorize information, where these categories come from, and how categorizations affect our access to and experience of information.

And there’s more here. Now, call me an old hippy if you will, but isn’t that quite like this?

Since Aristotle, man has organized his knowledge vertically in separate and unrelated groups — Science, Religion, Sex, Relaxation, Work etc. The main emphasis in his language, his system of storing knowledge, has been on the identification of objects rather than on the relationships between objects. He is now forced to use his tools of reasoning separately and for one situation at a time. Had man been able to see past this hypnotic way of thinking, to distrust it (as did Einstein), and to resystematize his knowledge so that it would all be related horizontally, he would now enjoy the perfect sanity which comes from being able to deal with his life in its entirety.

Now this latter perpetrates the Great Greek Myth and so on, but bear in mind the context: it’s a liner note from the first album by the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, a Texas band with a chequered and short history who have some claim to the title of the USA’s first psychedelic band. It is, ineluctably, from 1967. But its relevance to re-envisioning the humanities might not be as surprising as it seems, given that this was a band whose lyrics were written by a would-be poet and whose signature acid manifesto, ‘Step Inside This House’, is actually a Coleridge filk, even if also that it is a general depressing tendency of listening to late sixties and early seventies rock that almost none of the social and political issues it’s about have ameliorated. But I’m figuring, all the same, that this is a reference point that isn’t going to make it into the academic literature any time soon, more’s the pity. Because it’s as the title says, in the words offered to the Roman Emperor Theodosius Valentinian II [edit: oops] by the senator Symmachus when the emperor proposed to close the last pagan temples, there are many roads to the great good we seek, and sometimes they seem to meet up.⁵ Still not convinced? First extract written by one Ansley Erickson; the Elevators’ singer, one Roky Erickson. I’m telling you man: once you look at it the right way it’s all connected…

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1. I’d have thought it was all said in Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: a Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/, but apparently technology develops!

2. It will hopefully be Jonathan Jarrett, “Views, Comments and Statistics: Gauging and Engaging the Audience of Medievalist Blogging” in Literature Compass (Oxford forthcoming).

3. For which I might now cite Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge MA 2006), about which I had no idea before getting involved in this.

4 He may well be a gentleman! But not having met him, I don’t want to presume; it’s not, after all, a title I feel I own either.

5. You’ll notice that this seems to more of a periphrasis than a translation, the version that the IMSB link gives (“One road alone does not suffice to so great a Mystery!”) being closer to canon. I’m not sure where I got this translation from; I’ve had it in my head since doing undergraduate work on paganism and Christianity in my second year, but I obviously didn’t find room for it in either of the pieces of coursework I did then because it’s not there. It seems likely to me that I’ve borrowed it either from Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven 1981), Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians in the mediterranean world from the second century AD to the conversion of Constantine (London 1986, 2nd edn. 2006) or Jocelyn Hillgarth (transl.), Christianity and Paganism, 350-750. The conversion of Western Europe (Philadelphia 1986), the first and last of which I remember fondly but not with enough clarity to be sure…

Leeds 2011 Report 4 and final

[Written offline on the same trip to Birmingham as previous.]

The last day of Leeds was made extra-special for me, as had the last day of Kalamazoo been both this year and the last—it’s stopped being funny now and my have something to do with my decision not to present at either next year—by having to be up first thing in the morning after the dance to make sure my sessions ran OK, including, you know, my own paper. Basically the whole of the rest of Leeds for me was the Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Diplomatic sessions and then missing booksellers with whom I’d reserved stuff, and finally goodbyes. So, the latter two need no discussion here and the former is quickly dealt with, thus!

1507. Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Diplomatic, I: royal charters and royal representatives

Portrait of Charles the Bald in the so-called Vivian Bible

• Alaric Trousdale, “Some Thoughts on the Charters of King Eadred, 946-55″
• Shigeto Kikuchi, “How High the King? Monarchical Representation in Carolingian Royal Charters”
• Jonathan Jarrett, “Taking it to the March: Carolingian justice in 9th-century Girona”

Attendance was surprisingly good given the circumstances; even Alaric turned up eventually… But seriously folks: this was a pleasant mix of new and old because, well, you know, I was there at the start of these sessions and presented in every one of the six years they ran; Alaric was an early adopter; and Shigeto had only just met us all. Alaric showed indisputably that there is more that can be said about the politics of Eadred’s rule of England than what’s in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (though even there I think he shows up pretty well, consistently defeating all comers); Shigeto used both charters and art history to demonstrate that Carolingian kings or their clerks probably really did have a policy about what titles they used in describing their power in their documents, which was excellent—diplomatic and art history should meet more often—and then there was mine. I’ve already said I didn’t think much of mine: it was a game attempt to make something of a research question that didn’t come good, and I had to try and argue a trend from three instances of my chosen phenomenon (shifts in the representation of royal power at court hearings in Girona) because that was all there were. But hey, it made for a couple of good blog posts.

1607. Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Diplomatic, II: members and margins

"Representation of the medieval social network with force directed algorithm", Boulet et al., "Batch kernel SOM and related Laplacian methods for social network analysis", fig. 1

• Julie Hofmann, “Women and Witnessing under the Carolingians: a reappraisal”
• Arkady Hodge, “When is a Charter not a Charter? Documents in Non-Conventional Contexts in Early Medieval Europe”
• Fabrice Rossi and Nathalie Villa-Vialaneix, “Exploration of a Large Database of Charters with Social Network Methods”

This session was, in all ways, a bit less traditional in its modes. Julie was raising difficult questions about the assumptions people have made about what women were and weren’t allowed to do, in terms of dealing with property and being generally legally active, and even beginning to answer them using her forthcoming database of the material from Carolingian-period Fulda. Then, you may have occasionally heard, especially if you work on Ireland, Scotland or Bavaria, of property transfers being written into Gospel books or similarly solemn but non-documentary contexts. But wait: Scotland… and Bavaria? And in fact more widely than that, which is what Arkady was showing: he argued strongly that when you have this many instances of a weird oddity, we probably have to stop thinking it’s odd, which will mean actually thinking about it! And lastly Fabrice, who was the one of this pair actually giving the paper (though weirdly I met Nathalie at the next conference I went to), made a complex system with lots of maths in it understandable to a lay audience and I think left them fairly excited that they could probably get something new out of their datasets, however large, using this kind of technology. This is not easy to do, and he did it well, even though he was speaking in his second language, so I was impressed. And, of course, that this paper even exists is ultimately down to this blog post, and it may the most academic impact this blog’s ever had (unless stories of students printing posts for study purposes are actually true, which would be worrying). So it closes a circle or two to have ended with it.

Because that was the end of the Problems and Possibilities sessions, and I think it genuinely is the end. We certainly aren’t running any next year, whoever `we’ would be, and I don’t think it’s needed. Though we’ve managed to rally every time, it’s often been a struggle to get speakers for these, but this year that was because a lot of people who might have been interested were already presenting in other related sessions. There were other sessions dedicated to being clever about charter evidence. It would be nice to think we’d started a trend—maybe we did, maybe we were just on one—but at the very least it is no longer up to us, and specifically me, to keep it trending. So, for now, Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Diplomatic ran from 2006 to 2011, inclusive, and thankyou to all who helped it do so.

But it doesn’t end with the sessions, folks! The reason that blogging has been so sporadic of immediate late is actually exactly the opposite of that. After the peak year in 2007 when we had nine papers and a tremendous audience, my co-organiser Allan Scott McKinley observed, “If people want to hear this stuff we should really think about publishing it!” and he was of course right, as I have found he usually is. It has just taken us a while, for various reasons, to get round to it.¹ But the other thing that happened at this Leeds was that we got given a deadline to come up with a book by our prospective publishers, and that deadline was December 31st. Yowch! It is of immense credit to our planned contributors that only one of the seventeen of them did not agree to try and meet this, and all but one have in fact managed it at time of writing despite immense odds against in several cases. I owe them each a considerable debt. I typed this on the way to and from meeting with Allan, now my co-editor as well, and as a result of that meeting I can say that I’m pretty sure this thing is going to happen, and that it will be pretty damn good. There’s two chapters here I already wish I could set for my students, they’re so helpful, and a bunch of other interesting things too. I won’t plug it in detail yet: firstly it has to go through full review still, and secondly it’s not yet clear exactly what the running order will be, but as well as the last two blog posts I wrote two thousand words of introduction today while perched on Allan’s sofa and this reaffirms in me the conviction I’ve had every time I pile this stuff up and look at it; this will be an exciting volume, which I think may be an unusual boast about something to do with charters. So look out for more as we have it. And that will have been the final upshot of my Leeds 2011 conference experience.

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1. And I believe I still owe Kathleen Neal several drinks (or one big drink) for helping dispel one of those reasons without offence to anyone.

If I’d had two days

(This is probably gesta’s fault. Or archy’s. My apologies to those who versify better or have it worse…)

If I’d had two days
I would not be writing
Because I’d be sleeping
Or reading, slowly
Because term is ended,
The last meeting done
And I am so tired
That everything’s difficult
Especially getting up
(And, weirdly, going to bed).
Also, I have a cold
So thick you could cut it
Like smelly French cheese
That runs in the heat
And I really want
To fall over and rest.
If I’d had two days
I’d be there right now.
But there’s this paper.
It is overdue
And I’ve just not been able
To get four hours straight
To work these last weeks
To gather the sources
To bump them together
And think about them.
Instead I’ve been building
Slight lean-tos of words
Through which I lace charters
Like erudite wattle
Hoping each will stand up
And when it won’t, rebuilding.
Like science, if you squint
But alas, not so much
As to make a good paper.
It may yet be scholarship;
I can’t tell from here.
If I’d had two days
I’d have done it tomorrow
After sleeping a bit
And I would feel better
But libraries shut
On Sunday round here
And Monday is all forms
For interviews Tuesday
That run until Thursday
After which comes collapse.
In any case, Monday
Is now the new due date.
So I had one day
And one day was all
I could wholly spend
On this task, and so
I have spent all that day
And small hours besides
The paper is done
It will do, it’s enough—
In fact it’s too much
But leave that aside:
I’ve accomplished my task
I wrote on demand
In the way that I do, but
If I’d had two days
I can’t tell you how much
I would rather have slept.

Name in prints II & VI part two: where to buy my works

Yesterday, because of various bad travel choices I won’t burden you with, was one of the most exhausting days I’ve had in a long time and today I am surviving only on coffee, for which I must principally thank a learned colleague; also, too many books currently on my reading piles have chapters of over a hundred pages in and only a few can possibly justify this. What all this means is that I have no time to write substance for you today, and instead I’m just going to resort to blatant advertising. Of recent weeks it has become possible to buy more of my work online than was previously the case, so, here’s the details.

Cover of Jonathan Jarrett, Coins in Collections: Care and Use

In late September 2009 I published a little booklet on coin collections and the looking-after thereof. This gives me some sadness just now as Mark Blackburn wrote a good third of it and insisted he should not be credited, but, be that as it may, actually a number of people have been after knowing where to buy it. I am happy to tell those people that it is now available postage-free for £7.99 from the Fitzwilliam Museum’s online shop here, and if that link doesn’t work, a search for “Jarrett” in their search box will turn it up. I hope that’s useful and I’m sorry it took so long.

Cover of Deyermond & Ryan, Early medieval Spain: a symposium

Then more recently and more on my actual topic of study, in late 2010 a volume I’d been awaiting eagerly came out, that being no. 63 of the Queen Mary University of London series Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar. This too is tinged with sadness in as much as it bears the name of another dead scholar we have good reason to miss, but, it is a thing of joy in itself, containing as well as myself waxing lyrical about the weirdnesses of the uncontrolled frontier beyond early medieval Catalonia, Jinty Nelson wisely setting early medieval Spain in a European context (which is very rarely done), Ralph Penny asking how many languages early medieval Iberia had, Wendy Davies being sage and clear about counter-gifts and Rose Walker making sense of some of the manuscripts of Beatus’s Commentary on the Apocalypse, as well as much more, of which quite a lot by Andrew Fear. I think it is a jolly useful little volume and it will set you back a mere £16·15. Further details and a purchase link can be found here. So there you have it, commercial over and I will return in the next day or two with more thoroughly academic content.

Stock Take VI: the work, the job, the life?

This is the sort of post that is more use to me than to you, most like, so tune out as soon as you feel ready. You might just remember that in May of 2010, I was professionally required to write a report on my academic year, which was actually quite encouraging. Some time before that, too, I’d done a set of four posts here about the various pieces of work I had in process, mainly in an effort to shame me into doing something about their ridiculous number. When I came across that May stock-take whilst looking for a link a year later, it struck me this would be worth doing again, just to see how I’ve done. This has actually taken some time, because it meant trying to squash the four posts into one, which is of course huge and which I have therefore mounted elsewhere, for any real stalkers or procrastinators, as a hidden page under a password (that being `goonthen’) here. I’m not sure why you should really want to read it, but it will remain thus accessible till this post drops off the front page just in case. For the normal people, though, I’ll do a summary here and then add some brief notes on the year’s employment and maybe something about life more widely. I reserve my options on that last though, because I’ve been sleeping badly for a while and so everything is currently coloured grim, whether it is really or not. Anyway, here we go.

Name in print VIII

While I assemble things for Kalamazoo and generally panic about marking deadlines with which it clashes, there is this late but still fresh piece of news: I have a review in the year’s first issue of respected Swedish archæological periodical Fornvännen: Journal of Swedish Antiquarian Research, 2011/1, tackling, as was once mentioned here before, a volume of conference papers about the Europeanization of the Baltic in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, to wit: Jörn Staecker (ed.), The Reception of Medieval Europe in the Baltic Sea Region. Papers of the XIIth Visby Symposium held at Gotland University, Visby, Acta Visbyensia XII (Visby 2009). My review is on pp. 65-67, and is the only thing in English in the issue apart from abstracts, which I find quite amusing. I had fun with it, a small thing but mine own. It will presumably be online before too long as that’s how Fornvännen operates. This leaves me with only two more things forthcoming, I have to get some stuff submitted! But the flow should continue sporadically for just a little while yet at least.

Statistics: one draft, one revision, time between first submission to print less than two months. I have sung the praises of the editor before but I think that says more than I ever could. Thankyou!

Name in print V, VI & VII!

Just before I leave 2010, there was one more small thing that needs recording…

Three late 2010 publications featuring yours truly

On the left, in the blue cloth, ladies and gentlemen, the current issue of Archiv für Diplomatik, featuring, I’m very happy to say, an article by myself on a certain archbishop of Catalonia, who most likely wasn’t ever actually an archbishop. Arguing this, which is a variation of the Dirk Gently inversion of Sherlock Holmes’s dictum (i. e., in this case there seems to be unimpeachable evidence, but what it asserts is just so improbable that the evidence must be questioned), however, ultimately means suggesting that maybe about a third to a half of the ninth-to-eleventh-century documents we have issued by the popes may not actually have been officially issued by them. I suppose this might ruffle a few feathers but I don’t think there’s any getting away from it and I’m not the only person saying it. For the others, you should see the paper.¹ I have offprints spare.

1st page of Jarrett, "Archbishop Ató"

Then, on the right, in the tasteful grey card covers, a long-delayed issue of Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar, published by Queen Mary University of London, collecting the papers of a conference at which I presented that you may remember me blogging about. A variety of misfortunes have beset this publication but it is now out, under the title Early Medieval Spain: a symposium and featuring Jinty Nelson, Wendy Davies, Ralph Penny, Andrew Fear (twice) and, towards the back, me, giving the paper that was all that could be got out of my original idea for my thesis, one of the pieces of writing I’ve done I’m most pleased with describing the little we can see of the local societies on the Catalan frontier before they are incorporated into the wider polity of counties and bishoprics and castle terms and so on.² It is good fun, includes a lame pun for Anglo-Saxonists, and it’s called “Centurions, Alcalas and Christiani perversi“, what is not to like? I am very pleased to have it out there. No offprints, sorry, but it’s not expensive.

First page of Jarrett, "Centurions, Alcalas and Christiani Perversi"

And then lastly, that’s how the thesis didn’t come out, here (in the centre in sophisticated white hardback) is how it did.³

My own copy of my book, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia, 880-1010: pathways of power

This is not actually exactly the thesis (which of course you can download here anyway). The preliminary whining about charters from the thesis is gone, and though several chapters remain substantially as they were, it adds new work on a couple of places and one particular viscount, sharpens up my treatment of Borrell II, including a deep analysis of a trial of a moneyer for passing false coin; it eliminates a bucketload of embarrassing mistakes (though I’m sure more remain), and of course, it is just three years more up to date than the thesis, with consequent added value. I have no more free copies of this: I kept one, one went to my mum and others to those who have helped me for longest or from furthest, especially those who had no institutional reason to do so. I have however, somewhat to my surprise, found myself recommending it to people I think it would actually help with their stuff, so I suppose I think it all has merit. Just as well really! And it is, well, not cheap, but available, as they say, from all good bookshops, so you can judge for yourself if you like! So hurrah! I’m really quite pleased about this.

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Grim statistics:

• “Archbishop Ató”, first drafted 2003! and presented then and again 2006, but first submitted, March last year. (Yes, I know. But I’m getting better.) Five drafts. Time from first submission to print therefore just under ten months! I could draw a moral but it involves national stereotypes so I won’t.
• Rulers and Ruled, first drafted in some sense 2005, revised 2006, and then really thoroughly revised 2006-2007. First submission, March 2007. Time to print therefore three years nine months. I figured it was worth holding on because of the imprint, but also it must be said that now it exists my publishers are doing a sterling job promoting it.
• Lastly “Centurions”, first drafted late 2007 for a conference in Exeter, lightly revised for its reappearance at Queen Mary, submitted March 2008; stolidly withheld from a journal that were hunting it for 2009 publication because of prior promise; eventual time first submission to print, two years nine months.

My mean time first submission to print now therefore 28 months, removing the two outliers more like 24 months. How a young scholar is supposed to make any ground without wrecking the progress of his or her Ph.D. in this kind of environment I don’t know. But, there it is, I’ve done it, and I must now update my webpages…

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1. J. Jarrett, “Archbishop Ató of Osona: false metropolitans on the Marca Hispanica” in Archiv für Diplomatik Vol. 56 (München 2010), pp. 1-41.

2. Idem, “Centurions, Alcalas and Christiani perversi: Organisation of Society in the pre-Catalan ‘Terra de Ningú’” in †A. Deyermond & M. Ryan (edd.), Early Medieval Spain: a symposium, Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar 63 (London 2010), pp. 97-127.

3. Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia, 880-1010: pathways of power, Studies in History (London 2010).