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).