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!
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.
A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe 