Here is another post that has been in the wings for a long time, but which appears now with sudden news that completely changes how I have written it, with a new and unexpected happy ending! So, let me tell you a story about an article I wrote and its path to publication, which is also the story of a journal from beginning to more-or-less end.
This is a story that begins in 2012, when a team of four bright postgraduates doing early medieval doctoral study at the University of Leeds decided that what they wanted to do was to start a new journal. With great energy and determination, they got a website set up and assembled an impressive-looking editorial board, largely, I later learned, by getting their supervisor to call in favours on a massive scale. Nonetheless, they did it, and got in several convincing looking articles to kickstart the first issue, as well as a set of book reviews and conference reports to fill it up. Somewhere in the process, they started talking to the then-brand-new anarchistic academic press, Punctum Books, and secured an arrangement with them by which Punctum would give this new journal a print existence, on demand. With that, an ISSN and a professional-looking website running the Open Journal System, they were good to go and off they went. Thus was born the journal Networks and Neighbours.
Cover of Networks and Neighbours volume 2 issue 1, Comparisons and Correlations
I became aware of this about midway through 2013, I think, when the first issue went live and I was finishing up at Oxford. Somewhere in the later part of that year I became aware that they were now on volume 2 and I decided I wanted in. There have, I know, been repeated attempts to turn the Internet into the new space of freely-available scholarship at the highest level—I think of now-dormant journals like Chronicon, intermittent journals like The Heroic Age (to whose intermittency I’m conscious I have contributed in my time, or rather failed to contribute, sorry folks), and more successful ones like Rosetta or Marginalia, which latter two survive by being run by a cyclical staff of postgraduate students. So perhaps their odds weren’t good, but there seemed to be something about the set-up, the ethic, the coincidence with the burgeoning open access movement and the number of important people they had behind them, and I decided that this looked like fun and possibly the future and that as someone who was, at that stage, still being published as an authority on scholarship on the Internet, I should endorse it.1 They had a call for papers up about cultural capital, which made me wonder whether some of my new work on the frontier as concept could benefit from an application of Bourdieu, and so I put a little while into writing an article-length version of some of the ideas I worked up in my big frontiers posts here, making cultural capital one of the backbones of my argument.2 By the time I’d finished (which I did, as I recall, largely in an afternoon spent in the Bibliothèque de l’Université de Genève, thanks to a kind host who will not wish to be named), I thought it was pretty good, but it had also really helped me think through some of that material and start making it do useful things.
Initially, things seemed to go well. I mean, they were inconvenient, but only in the way that peer review can be, in as much as the article went out to review and came back with a report that basically said, “if your points are any good they ought to work in Castile as well as in Catalonia and I’m not sure they do, but convince me”. Of course, it was an article about Catalonia, not Castile, but since my project pitch was that I was generating transportable theory, I decided I had to face the challenge. So I downloaded or borrowed everything I could on the Castilian frontier in the tenth century, while my first job in Birmingham drew to a close, and sent off a revision, which was nearly twice the length (and nearly half of that now citation) but did, I flatter myself, satisfy that requirement. Anyway, it satisfied the editors, who had all but one now graduated and moved on, and before very long at all a pre-print version appeared on their website and everything seemed to be under way. Admittedly, that preprint did spell my name wrong—not that that would be a first among my publications—and even after I’d sent in proof corrections which also made it clear that the preprint’s pagination was wrong, there it remained. So, things now began to get sticky. The supposed print date came and went and nothing seemed to happen, and then the issue after mine went up, and I began to fear that something had gone wrong.
Cover of Networks and Neighbours volume 3 issue 1
Now, at this point in the process, an unexpected but useful thing happened, which was that one of the editors, Ricky Broome, came to present at the Digital Humanities Seminar I mentioned a post or two ago, on 16th November 2015 with the title, “OA and Me: a postgraduate perspective of Open Access publishing”. So I turned up, and of course, it was the story of Networks and Neighbours, peppered with reflections on the wider sphere of open access publishing. Ricky emphasised that in order to edit such a beast you need a living and spare time (which rarely coincide in academia), a credible editorial board and a lot of willpower, including to avoid the temptation simply to fill space in the journal with your own work. He thought that their ability to generate any revenue, even to cover basic costs, had hinged on the production of the print version, since as he put it more people would buy something they could see. He also had great hopes for the immediate future, with another issue in hand, but not so much for the long-term, as he saw the traditional journal as unlikely to make it online in the face of alternative models like repository or publish-then-filter mechanisms of dissemination. The discussion revolved largely around that and alternatives to peer review, but of course what I wanted to know, but waited till afterwards to ask, was where was issue 2.2? And Ricky was helpful and explanatory about that—the problems were not all theirs but their most web-savvy team-member had also got a full-time job that removed him from the project—but it didn’t leave me with much hope. And then a few months later the project officially folded the journal, moving the whole operation onto a Blogspot site where they now intended to publish articles as and when they came ready, in one of those future styles that had been discussed at the seminar indeed, but not what I was hoping for when I’d sent the proofs in expecting print, by now a year and a half before.
So I then did something I shouldn’t have done and would live to regret. After one more attempt to get a corrected version uploaded, I told them I wanted to withdraw the article. It was now part of my probation slate at Leeds and I couldn’t see that it would in fact be published, and the protestations of the people I could reach (not Ricky, I should say) that it was published online, for me, failed in the face of the fact that it still wasn’t correctly paginated and still didn’t spell my name right. I would not be able to show it to my colleagues as was, so it wasn’t going to do. Therefore, I needed to send it somewhere else that would actually publish it, which I hoped would be fairly easy since it had already been through peer review. But such a journal wouldn’t accept it if it had already been published elsewhere. So I stamped my electronic foot and got Networks nd Neighbours to take it down and unlink it, which they did; you could no longer download it and it wasn’t listed in the issue. And I sent the article out again and, by way of nemesis, perhaps, the relevant journal rejected it as not being at all well enough informed about Castile. So there I was with no article at all, and no time at all in which to do the reading that would be required to make the necessary revisions. Not my smartest move, and the cause of some difficulties in probation terms, as you can imagine, as well as no little disheartenment about his work for yours truly.
So there, apart from occasional denials of its existence to people who’d found references to the article in searches and couldn’t then get it, things rested until May 2018. I only found out about this a few days ago, however: I was putting together an application and thought to myself that I really could use something that demonstrated my ability actually to do this frontiers stuff of which I speak, and I wondered if even the old preprint was still around anywhere to link to. And what I found was that the Blogspot operation has now ceased as well, and the whole journal has been archived on its own static website. And, blessed day, whoever did that job had not got the memo about withdrawal and had, more to the point, somehow found and uploaded the corrected, properly paginated, Jarrett-not-Jarret version of the article which I had never before seen. On re-reading, it is still, dammit, an article to be proud of and I am exceptionally glad to have a version I can, at last, cite. So although I had just about reached Ricky’s seminar paper in my backlog and was preparing a post explaining the story of this missing article, now it has a quite different ending. Of course, the journal’s fate is still an exemplar of what can and can’t be done without institutional support and postgraduate levels of free time, and it helps explain why so few other such journals have made it. I am sad about my meanness in the face of their difficulties now, but hey: Networks and Neighbours the project continues, doing some impressive things, indeed; the journal was itself an impressive thing even if not always printed; and at last I have my article, and I can be happy with that.
So, statistics as is now traditional: two drafts, and time from first submission to publication, four years one month. Of course the story explains that, and let’s face it, I seem to collect these stories. But it exists, you can read it and cite it, and I think it’s quite good.3 And that’s the end of the story…
1. I refer, of course, to my previous works, Jonathan Jarrett, “Views, Comments and Statistics: Gauging and Engaging the Audience of Medievalist Blogging” in Literature Compass Vol. 9 (Oxford 2012), pp. 991–995, DOI: 10.1111/lic3.12016, and Alex Sayf Cummings & Jonathan Jarrett, "Only Typing? Informal Writing, Blogging, and the Academy" in Jack Dougherty & Kristen Nawrotzki (eds), Writing History in the Digital Age, Digitalculturebooks (Ann Arbor, 2013), pp. 246–258, DOI: 10.2307/j.ctv65sx57.26.
2. A good introduction to the theories in play here is Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital”, transl. R. Nice in J. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York City, NY, 1986), pp. 241–258, online here, and in the words of ‘well-known’ band Half Man Half Biscuit, “if you’ve never, then you ought”.
3. That cite being: Jonathan Jarrett, “Engaging Élites: Counts, Capital and Frontier Communities in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries, in Catalonia and Elsewhere” in Networks and Neighbours Vol. 2 (Binghamton, NY, 2018 for 2014), pp. 202–230, online at <https://nnthejournal.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/nn-2-2-jarrett-engaging-elites1.pdf>, last modified 26 May 2018 as of 12 April 2019.
A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe 
“my new work on the frontier as concept”: have you looked at Graham Robb’s The Debatable Land? Its account of part of a British medieval frontier that originated (he suggests) in the Iron Age took my interest. As two special bonuses he repairs Ptolemy’s second century map of the British Isles and identifies nearly all the sites of the battles of “King Arthur”.
Even if you are not persuaded you’ll probably enjoy it – he writes well. (While I’m on the subject, have you read his Discovery of France? A crackerjack, in my view.)
It was going OK till we got to the bonuses: anyone who think Arthur’s battle-sites can be identified, even just from the text in Nennius, is probably over-reading their evidence. Still, it sounds worth a look, albeit possibly by my British-working colleagues. There are a lot of ‘debatable lands’ out there to compare with!
Good to know NN articles are open to public download! I fully agree on your view about the need of both economic AND cultural incentives to ‘assimilate’ frontiers peoples, but I would like to stress that those are ‘modern’ concepts, they expand our vision of the world, not necessarily enhances our understanding of the vision those people had. Two ‘sociological’ examples that differentiates Gothia from neighbors (ie: Auvergne, or Bourgogne). 1)Emma buys small land properties for his cloister, St. Joan de les Abadesses, almost systematically, yet at the same time, other continental monasteries (ie: St. Julien of Brioude) records only donations. 2)Women’s property rights and matrilineal heritage seems to be the norm there and that’s clearly not the case in neighbor territories (neither christian nor muslim). Now, the point to me is: how they valued/perceived those ‘customs’? We have no direct evidence about how those elements (small land owners / women’s right) existed on the muslin side of the frontier, but probably they do-it very differently, so it’s even harder to imagine the situation in between…
Thankyou, Joan, good points as ever. I think on 2) all one can do is agree with you: it’s hard to know. It’s not too hard to find cases of property moving down the female line on ‘our’ side of the Pyrenees, either, but not enough to suggest that it was the default, just that it was possible and that most landed families probably did give their daughters land in the inheritance as well as bequeathing to their sons. But given the formulaic nature of the documents, social expectations are hard to calculate in anyway but the statistical. As for 1), however, Jinty Nelson has suggested, and I think it’s observable in a few places, that most monasteries and nunneries go through a cycle of change over time, where when they are newly established they buy a lot of land, having not yet achieved a local reputation, then move from that to a wave of donation once people have learned to take them seriously, and then settle down into a lower volume of transactions of both sorts. It’s sort of like the way stars develop, without the supernova phase at the end (though maybe the white or black dwarf one!). Brioude’s much older than Sant Joan, so should have gone through its buying phase long ago by the time Sant Joan was established. Cluny is closer in time… but probably not comparable!
1) That’s an interesting idea, but I am in doubt about having enough evidence… Do you know some example(s) of monasteries showing this property acquisition cycle?
Well, Sant Joan de Ripoll is definitely one, and I think Sant Pere de Casserres and Saint-Pierre de Beaulieu both fit though in both cases the founder families have to have a second attempt before their foundation really takes off. Sant Benet de Bages might be what happens without that sustained interest, a very slow gathering of momentum involving a search for alternate patrons because they have no buying power. Not everywhere can fit, I guess. The Nelson argument I mentioned is in Janet Nelson, “Women and the Word in the Earlier Middle Ages” in Women in the Church: Papers Read at the 1989 Summer Meeting and the 1990 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. by W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood, Studies in Church History 31 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1990), pp. 53–78, and she has other examples, but I’m afraid I don’t remember where. Northern Francia seems likely, but that’s not a lot of information, I know.
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