Chronicle II: October to December 2015

Somewhat to my surprise, I have now reached the second of the what-was-going-in-my-life round-ups I was promising to use as the anchor of the new blogging programme here at A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe, back in, er, February. It wasn’t supposed to take eight months to record what had happened in three, but as you’ll have observed there was a fair bit of hiatus and strife in there, and I hope that we can pick things up a bit now. There’s only one way to find out, anyway, and thus we now reach the point where I try and give some impression of my first semester employed at the University of Leeds. The first thing that needs to be said about that is that my new colleagues were absolutely lovely, and guided me through new offices and routines with cheerful generosity; it all unrolled a great deal more easily than it could so easily have done while I found my feet. To try and explain what I was actually up to, however, probably needs breaking down into headings, and the obvious ones would be teaching, what we might generally class as extra labours, seminars and similar, research work and, lastly, life more widely; I’ll say the least about the last, but it holds the rest together. So here we go.

Medieval European Coinage update (Name in the Book Somewhere III)

I have time for only a short post this weekend, but happily, I was just asked a question here that can be answered in such a post, and which also fits into the pattern of alternating what we might call ‘historical’ content with a recounting of my various and dubious scholarly achievements. So, this post, let me bring you up to date with that well-known scholarly series, Medieval European Coinage!

Cambridge University Press leaflet advertising the series

Now even my part in this could be a long story, but at least a short version of the full story is worth telling. It begins with the late Professor Philip Grierson, who somewhere towards the last third of his long career decided it would be a good idea to pubish a monographic series of accounts of the coinage of the European Middle Ages, using his own excellent collection as the illustrative basis. Originally, supposedly, he reckoned to write them all himself, figuring that one every two years would keep him busy till retirement, but predictably, it turned out to be a bigger project than that, and before long he had enlisted co-authors for several of the volumes, then assigned several of them to other people entirely, and eventually it was a whole British Academy-funded project which could afford a small staff. The first actual volume, covering the whole of the continent from the fifth to the tenth century, was co-written by Professor Grierson and his Research Assistant, Mark Blackburn, then freshly poached from the legal profession by the museums world and eventually, of course to be my boss.¹

Before that time, the team had squeezed out a second volume, co-written by Professor Grierson and Lucia Travaini, and covering Southern Italy from the tenth to fifteenth centuries, but since the first had come out in 1986 and it was now 1998, it was clear that this was all taking longer than initially planned.² The next volume was supposed to be that on the Iberian Peninsula, and it was because the team needed a copy-editor who knew some peninsular history that I first got into the Fitzwilliam. It’s hard to emphasise now how important that job was for me. Not only did it basically keep me alive during three quite difficult months, but it made me a lot of friends in the department, established in Mark Blackburn’s mind that I could work databases, and thus set me up for what would turn out to be five years’ paid employment, several virtual exhibitions you can still see (and some you can’t), my first numismatic publications and some quite important personal ramifications to boot; I am still reaping the benefit of getting involved with the project, and indeed I still sit on its committee. But when I left the employment of the Fitzwilliam in 2010, the Iberian Peninsula volume was still not yet published, and I have to admit, it was not quite clear then if it would be.

Now, that story I’ve told elsewhere and obviously it did emerge, finally, in 2013.³ That was a great achievement, celebrated in two countries indeed, but it left open the question of which volume would emerge next; we had several under work, and obstacles in the way of them all. As with the legendary London bus, however, you wait four years for one and then two turn up at once, or nearly. The volume covering Northern Italy, by William R. Day Junior, Andrea Sacocci and Michael Matzke, which we were already celebrating at Taormina as described, finally left the presses in November 2016, and very shortly afterwards, in April 2017, it was joined by Rory Naismith’s volume on Britain and Ireland 400-1066, covering some ground already covered by the Earlier Middle Ages volume again simply because the finds pattern has changed our understanding of the way money was being used in early medieval Britain so radically in the, well, thirty years since the project had last offered any thoughts on it.⁴ And I’m happy to celebrate this as in some small way my achievement as in 2008 to 2009 I copy-edited as much of the Northern Italy volume as then existed, and though I’ve no idea how much of my work remains visible in the finished volume—I certainly don’t have the files against which to check—nonetheless, this is something I had a hand in and now it exists where people can use it, so I’m happy.

So that is where we are, but where are we about to be? Well, obviously, given our pedigree, absolutely the last thing I should do is offer any predictions, and indeed I might seriously offend some of our authors if I were to guess here who will publish next! What I can do is tell you what is currently under work. The volumes actively under work are those on Germany, by Peter Ilisch, on the Low Countries, by Philip Grierson, Peter Spufford, Serge Boffa and now Marcus Phillips and Sue Tyler-Smith, on the British Isles 1066-1279, by Martin Allen, on ‘the Nordic Countries’ by Jørgen Steen Jensen and Elina Screen, on Central and Eastern Europe, by Boris Paskiewicz, and on the Latin East and Crusader States, by Julian Baker, Richard Kelleher and Robert Kool. Other volumes are also under work, but I think it is probably OK to say that they are currently moving more slowly. It will also probably not have escaped the keenly numismatic audience that the Low Countries volumes have also lost two of their authors and gained some others, and indeed when the first of them (Philip) died it was still being conceived of as only one volume, so a lot has happened there but it has not necessarily advanced that much closer to its finish line. I honestly wouldn’t like to guess which of these is closest to the finish line, but if I were to predict anything at all, it would be that although we can’t hope to maintain the current one-volume-a-year output, it should not be, say, 2021 before another volume has emerged, and by then again quite probably two. I’m just not sure which or when…

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1. Philip Grierson and Mark Blackburn, Medieval European Coinage, with a Catalogue of the Coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, volume 1: the Earlier Middle Ages (5th-10th centuries) (Cambridge 1986).

2. Philip Grierson and Lucia Travaini, Medieval European Coinage, with a Catalogue of the Coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, volume 14: Southern Italy (Cambridge 1998).

3. Miquel Crusafont, Anna Balaguer and Philip Grierson, Medieval European Coinage, with a Catalogue of the Coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, volume 6: the Iberian Peninsula (Cambridge 2013).

4. William R. Day Jr, Andrea Sacocci and Michael Matzke, Medieval European Coinage, with a Catalogue of the Coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, volume 12: Northern Italy (Cambridge 2016); Rory Naismith, Medieval European Coinage, with a Catalogue of the Coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, volume 8: Britain and Ireland, c. 400-1066 (Cambridge 2017).

An awful lot of numismatists in Sicily, II

So, after that bit of numismatic self-congratulation, let me take you back for the last time to September 2015 and the town of Taormina in Sicily, where I was then one of many gathered for the 15th International Numismatic Congress. You’ve seen some of the local antiquities, heard about the first two-and-a-half days of papers and visited a local castle, now it’s time to return to the thick of the academic fray. But first, a party!

Party in the coutryard of the Palazzo dei Duchi di Santo Stefano

Indeed, the first thing on our calendar after descending from Castelmola and eating was not an academic session but a party put on by the Medieval European Coinage project, to celebrate its resurgence into activity since the previous INC in the form of the publication of the series’ volume on the Iberian Peninsula and the near-completion of that on Northern Italy (which, much though I often doubted it, has in fact now also emerged, something I should probably announce separately too).¹ By now you may well not remember that I am a part of that project still, but I am, so I was there to share in the glory. There were speeches, there was a strictly limited quantity of free wine, but mainly there was a superb setting.

MEC authors Bill Day Jr and Martin Allen looking very relaxed by the Cambridge University Press stand inside the Palazzo

It was a good way to wrap up the day. The next day was the last day of papers, however, and with certain obligations among them, and so for once I was up and ready right at the beginning. Here’s how it all unrolled.

Name in Print XVIII

The chronology of the content in these posts is a struggle for me to follow, so I dread to think what it’s like for you, dear reader, but despite that, having now shown you more photos of medieval places from late 2015, I now want to bring you forward to April 2017, when somewhat to my surprise, a new publication of mine I’d more or less entirely forgotten about suddenly turned up in my pigeonhole at work.

Cover of Richard Verdi, Sarah Beattie, Jonathan Jarrett, Nicola Kalinsky and Robert Wenley, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts (London 2017).

You see, in the final frantic days at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, in which I had been counting all the coins, trying to ensure that my two dissertation pupils had what they were due from me and that the office would be usable by my successor, as well as maintaining a cheerful and helpful demeanour in the face of unexpected requests from members of the actual museum-going public, I also got asked to make some contributions to an update of the Barber’s introductory guide to its collections. These are mainly what you’d call ‘fine art’, but the old one had had coins in and it was thought best that these be updated in the light of what we now knew about the collection as a result of my tenure there. I did that quite quickly, though of course professionally, signed it all off in the last month I was there and forgot about it, and then 20 months later there it was in a pigeonhole in Leeds with me listed as one of the co-authors.¹

Title page, including my own name

It is perhaps a sign of the way that the world of museums works that of the five named authors, only two still worked at the Barber by the time it came out—we’d noticed the same churn in the All That Glitters project, where all the remaining participants were in different jobs by the time we finished—but I felt especially flattered by my name appearing there, because my entire contribution to this book on which I am named is three of the six coin entries, probably a total of about 500 words. (The others, like a lot of the text, remain from the previous edition.) So this is a very generous, and probably undeserved, co-authorship, but I was of course inordinately pleased by it anyway. And as ever with museums versus academia, more people will probably read those entries than any of my actual academic work!

Silver denarius of Emperor Claudius I, struck at Rome in 41-42 AD, Barber Institute of Fine Arts R0943

Silver drachm of Shahanshah Shapur II struck at an uncertain mint in 309-379, Barber Institute of Fine Arts S0078

Gold ducat of Grand Master Pierre d’Aubusson struck at Rhodes 1476-1500, Barber Institute of Fine Arts CR0037

The actual coins that got the benefit of my attention were these, a denarius of the Roman Emperor Claudius showing Nemesis (because we had to replace the previous Roman coin entry), a drachm of Shahanshah Shapur II (because the Barber has a really good collection of Sasanian coins that wasn’t even mentioned before and I insisted), and a ducat of the Knights of the Hospital of St John struck at Rhodes, because it’s unexpectedly flashy, one of those dissertation students had helped me identify it not long before, and because I was determined to get some of our medieval in there as well.² (The other coins in the catalogue are a tetradrachm of Lysimachus I, a solidus of Emperor Leo VI and a sovereign of Mary Tudor.) So I did those things (including getting the coins online, where they are), and they can thus be seen! And now you know.

Statistics, as long as we’re counting: obviously, this work was never presented, and it went through only one draft, as I’ve described. What that also means, of course, is that it ran a pretty standard year and eight months from first submission to print, stretching that average out just that bit further, but in a volume with this many moving parts that is perhaps not too surprising, and I’m completely happy with how it came out, which is maybe more surprising by now!

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1. Full citation, as above, Richard Verdi, with Sarah Beattie, Jonathan Jarrett, Nicola Kalinsky and Robert Wenley, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts (London 2017).

2. My contributions appear respectively ibid. pp. 18, 19 & 20.