Chronicle III: January to March 2016

I’m sorry there was no blog last weekend. Frustratingly, the thing I spent that time on now isn’t going to work out, so I’m determined to make sure there is a post this weekend, and the post that is due is the next round-up of my academic life, which has now reached 2016. It has been five months since I posted the last of these three-month slices, and the only real consolation there is that it took me less time to get through those three months of blog content than it did the previous one, but we will hopefully still see further gains made as marking ebbs and the summer shapes up. Can but hope, eh? But meanwhile, here’s how it looked at the beginning of 2016 for your humble blogger.

Teaching

It’s not just tradition but also a reflection of the real state of life that the first item on the bill is always teaching. Actually, in the first half of 2016 I had a lower teaching load than I have had since or likely ever will at Leeds, given what they need me to cover; I was running one module, albeit a big one, and contributing bits to a couple of others. That said, the beginning of the semester was still a fairly steep learning curve, as the module I was running was an inherited first-year course called Empire and Aftermath: The Mediterranean World from the Second to the Eighth Centuries, and even my undergraduate study experience only previously went back to AD 284; I’d never done the second or third centuries before in any context, let alone one where I needed to show expertise. Thankfully I had the help of two postgraduates who’d taught the module before and that made everything easier, although I did also have to second-mark and observe those postgraduates so they were not solely a labour relief. It was all a fair bit of work, and it coincided with the early part of the excellent but intensive Palaeography: Reading Medieval Manuscripts that we put our MA students through, which has continuous assessment. Furthermore, Leeds has examinations on the first semester’s modules as soon as the students get back in January, so I was reading up for the new stuff and choosing manuscript images for palæography at the same time as marking these exam scripts, and by the time I was done with those the first palæography assignments were in, and they were only just back to the students by the time the first-years’ formative essays came in, alongside the second palæography assignments… and in general it seemed a long time before the marking stopped.

One that was set; can you read this? Come to Leeds and we’ll teach you! But if you want to know more independently, it is Wolfenbüttel MS Codex Guelfybertiani 13, folio 6 verso, and you can find out more via the link through the image

In between these I fitted a couple of workshops for an Institute for Medieval Studies module, Medieval Narratives on the Modern World, on European national origin myths and on the so-called Reconquista, but those were fun and much less work. And there were also personal tutorials to be fitted in, to which only half the students turn up but of course you must book the time anyway, and feedback meetings, and also joint care of a visiting Chinese Ph. D. student. I felt fairly busy. Still, looking back, I was not carrying very much and the next year would have been much harder if I hadn’t had this run-up.

Extra Labours

That must also be how I had time for the other things I was doing. In particular, having found out that there was this coin collection in the bottom of the Library, I had resolved to make it part of my teaching, and so one of the few changes I did make to Empire and Aftermath was to turn one of the seminars into a coin-handling session to try and get people excited about the reality of the period in their hands. I’m not sure how well that worked, though commendably both my postgrad assistants leapt at the chance to be able to say they’d taught with coins and did some crash-course Roman numismatics with me, which made me feel useful. More prosaically, in the state of the collection there wasn’t really a way to find out what there was to teach with except to inventory it, so I put aside my Friday afternoons for most of this period to inventory the medieval, Byzantine and late Roman coins and got through a fair few. Some day soon I will get round to sorting out the photographs I took of the cool ones…

Here is one that perhaps only I could think is cool, a horribly-made copper-alloy 40-nummi of Emperor Constans II overstruck at Constantinople in 641-642 on a coin of Emperor Heraclius, DOC II Constans II 59c, Leeds, Brotherton Library, uncatalogued

There was also other stuff involving coins. Back at the Barber Institute the process of replacing me had unfortunately crossed with their normal exhibition schedule, so my humble effort, Inheriting Rome, was extended for a few months to give the new curator a chance. I got to see my thus-prolonged exhibition again because there were still two more sessions of the now-legendary All That Glitters project to do, about which I will tell you shortly, and of course back at Leeds this was also the time in which I started the wheels turning on the project that would become Unlocking the Winchester Cabinet. My head of department was actually concerned that I was going to spend all my time doing late antique numismatics and not the research on whose basis I’d been hired, which I didn’t see as a serious worry because, at this point, there was still time and I used it on stuff that was interesting and useful for others as well as for me.

Other people’s work

I was also at this point still managing to travel for seminars a bit, and I have a lot of notes from this period that I’m not really going to say much more about. The itinerary looked like this, though:

• Katherine Cross, Dominic Dalglish and Robert Bracey, “Images, Relics and Altars: comparing material religion on the first millennium”, Earlier Middle Ages Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, 20th January 2016, to which I went mainly because Robert is an All That Glitters collaborator, but at this stage he was also busy with a project called Empires of Faith, which was doing the kind of cross-cultural comparison implied by their title here, with Katy Cross bringing early English Christian monuments like the Gosforth Cross to the table, Dominic Dalglish coming from the ancient Mediterranean world and Robert from Kushan India, but here talking as much about what made for valid comparison in this set-up as the actual objects. This was interesting but the results of the project can now be investigated on the web, so I’ll leave this one aside and move on to…
• Hugh Kennedy, “ISIS and the Early Caliphate”, Centre for the Study of the Middle Ages Annual Public Lecture, University of Birmingham, 27th January 2016, to which I travelled down and which I thoroughly enjoyed, but which needs treatment together with…
• Julia McClure, “A New Politics of the Middle Ages: a global Middle Ages for a global modernity”, Medieval History Seminar, University of Leeds, 3rd February 2016, also substantially about the way people were reading the Middle Ages into the situation in the Middle East at that time, but approaching it from a very different direction. So I’ll do a post about those two together.
• I also made it down to London for Alex Rodríguez Suárez, “The Komnenian Emperors: a Latinophone dynasty”, Earlier Middle Ages Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, 11th February 2016, about the extent of the changes brought about in Byzantine court ceremonial under, especially, Manuel I Komnenos that would be attributed to Latin influence, which Dr Rodríguez wanted, I think rightly, to read as appropriation of ways to assert dominance over the new Latin lords in the Middle East, not an aping of their flashy chivalric habits as they have often carelessly been read. That seemed convincing to me but I don’t have much more to say about it, so on to a clutch of things back at Leeds, as follows:
• Pat Cullum, “‘Looking the Part’: presentation and representation of clerical masculinity in late medieval England”, Medieval History Seminar, University of Leeds, 24th February 2016;
• Esther Eidinow, “Seeing into the Future? Oracles and the Ancient Greeks”, Classics Seminar, University of Leeds, 25th February 2016, about ancient Greek stories in which oracles were tested before being consulted for real, pushing at the edges of our categories of rational and irrational, interesting and my first step in a plan to make friends with my counterparts in Classics and Ancient History;
• Natalie Anderson, “Tournament Trappings: Textiles and Armour Working Together in the Late Medieval Joust”, Medieval Group Seminar, University of Leeds, 7th March 2016, the culminating presentation by one of our Ph.D. students then about to finish and very much a mature piece of work about the ways in which combatants in late medieval tournaments displayed and distinguished themselves, which was as much or more a matter of fabric as the armour that more often now remains to us.
• Then, back to London again to see a big name, Philippe Buc, “Eschatology, War and Peace: of Christ’s Armies, Antichrist and the End of Times between ca. 1095 and ca. 1170″, Earlier Middle Ages Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, 10th March 2016, arguing for a change in the way that medieval people thought about the oncoming end of the world that occurred with Crusading, in which it becoming OK to kill for God was itself a sign of the end times, but one that could last for quite a long while, setting up the fight that would now go on until everyone was Christian and the End finally came. I remember this being fun and extremely erudite, but looking back over my notes I’m not sure what I have to add to that summary, so it’s back to Leeds for two more to close the season, the relevant items being:
• Travelling the World: from Apuleius to the Icelandic Sagas, from the picaresque novel to travel literature, a more substantial seminar in Classics whose separate components were:
  • Regine May, “Travelling to the Land of Witches: Apuleius’s Golden Ass“, about Thessaly’s Classical reputation as a hotbed of magic and sorcery and how travel might thus lead you out of the known world in several dimensions, and
  • Ros Brown-Grant, “Encounters between the East and West in Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures”, on pictures of Westerners meeting Easterners either in West of East as imagined by Western manuscript artists, usually for tales of betrayal where Greeks were concerned or conversion where Muslims were, sort of inevitably.
• and finally, Ross Balzaretti, “Early Medieval Charters as Evidence for Land Management Practices”, Medieval History Seminar, University of Leeds, 16th March 2016, to which I would have gone even had it been further afield since Ross has been a supporter of mine for a long time and I am very interested in his work, but precisely because it’s quite similar to my own, I’m not going to do a detailed write-up here because it would look a lot like, “Ross’s charters say things like mine do!” It was good, but you can already read the same sort of thing here.

My Own Research?

So that brings us to the end of the timespan, and I have only promised three extra posts out of it this time, though actually there are also one news and two tourism posts that should also be fitted in there. But what is as ever missing is my own research. What was I working on in this period, looking back? Well, for one thing I was finishing revisions on the conference paper that nearly wasn’t, “A Problem of Concavity”; the final version of that was fired off into what became a suspicious silence in the middle of February 2016. After that I seem to have turned to the reading to support the revision of my venerable paper on early medieval crop yields, of which I’d done the bulk while still at Birmingham, and I had a new draft of that done in March, although, it would seem, not one I thought submissible; that was still a way off, and I now don’t recall why. But beyond that it’s hard to see what I was doing, and the conclusion has to be, I think, that despite the apparently light load I was struggling. I would build up academic muscle from here, and reluctantly trim back a lot of the activity above to make other things possible, but at this stage I was still enjoying being an established academic as I’d imagined it and seen it done by others, as well as reading a lot for teaching, and perhaps not getting that balance entirely right, in retrospect. I think, also, I still hadn’t actually worked out how to schedule research in a job that finally actually included that as a duty, but had structured time only for other activities. Actually accepting that it was a legitimate use of my employers’ time to read a book, after years governed by the next deadline, was still proving weirdly hard for me… Of course, I still was governed by the next deadline, functionally, but I was only letting others set them, wherein a mistake with future complications. Anyway, this story will be continued! But for now there’s enough queued up to write about, and this has already been a long post, so I’ll wrap it here and thank you for reading.

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Name not in print II: story of an article lost and found

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…

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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.

He’s a jolly good Fellow

This is, for now, the last of the posts about my great achievements; I have so much stuff in publication queues that another can’t, hopefully, be too far away, but for now this is the last one. (Then we can get to really clearing backlog… !) I already mentioned these two things in passing, but in the last couple of years I have achieved a certain level of professional recognition that lets me start adding more letters after my name when I really want to show off. In late 2016, I managed to achieve election as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Then, in August 2017 I also attained Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy. These two things are quite different in both process and signification so I thought I’d say something briefly about both.

The Royal Historical Society is a 150-year-old learned society in the traditional mould, which it is now working to break down a bit as it generates important work about how that ‘traditional’ mould has restricted career progress for anyone who’s not male and white.¹ (I was born lucky in this respect, of course.) The way you get to be a Fellow of it is that you make a case to them that your work is a significant achievement in the field, get someone else who already is a Fellow to write agreeing with that, and then they decide. In my case, I had a slight starting advantage in that the book of my thesis was published through the Royal Historical Society and they nearly (alas, only nearly) gave it a prize, so I was pretty sure it was OK in their eyes, and I made it the cornerstone of my case. I took a long time doing this, however, and I will admit that what made me actually apply in the end was a combination of going to hear Katy Cubitt talk at the Society and there being names announced of new fellows whom I thought of as much younger than me (because they are) and became outraged that I hadn’t already achieved this before them—which was my own fault of course—and of trying to achieve some sense of recognition in my new job. But once the application was in it was easy, I was elected and since then it’s just been a matter of remembering to pay my society fees.

The Higher Education Academy no longer exists as such and was when I applied a youthful 14 years old. (It is now called Advance HE and is slightly differently constructed, but still awards the Fellowships.) Its focus is entirely on teaching quality. For a while the UK university sector proliferated teaching qualifications, ranging from the nationally-recognised Postgraduate Certificate in Education that schoolteachers take through to various bespoke university ones some of which weren’t recognised even throughout their own institutions, let alone more widely. The HEA Fellowship scheme was, as I understand it, a governmental intervention in that situation to provide a recognisable accreditation for university teachers, and it has become more and more popular, partly because of governmental use of it as a teaching quality benchmark but mainly, I think, because it has allowed universities to apply a universal standard of teaching qualification to the staff they take on. I, for example, hold a Certificate in University Teaching from Birkbeck College London. It was very useful to me, but no other institution could easily find out what it means in terms of training, not least because Birkbeck, University of London (as they now are) no longer offer it. But if you hire someone with an HEA Fellowship you know what they’ve done to get it. One can be a Junior Fellow, a straightforward Fellow or a Senior Fellow and what these more or less mean is “I have some recognised teaching training and experience and some idea that this is a subject of academic study in its own right”, “I am up to speed with modern requirements on university teachers, how we can teach and why the scholarship thinks we should do it so” and “I am all that, but have also made other people change how they teach”. I went for the middle one.

This was a lengthy process. Leeds supplies pretty extensive support, so there were training sessions, other people’s draft applications to read and so on, but it boils down to references from two people who’ve seen you teach, a log of one’s professional development over the previous year, a reflective account of one’s teaching practice with reference to the scholarship, and a form saying you’ve done all those things. The log was the most frustrating of these, and if I’d understood the process better I would have made a better job of it. As you may just remember me saying, on arrival at Leeds I threw myself into quite a lot of training, thinking I wouldn’t have as much of a chance later and conscious that it was one of my probationary requirements. But you may also remember me saying that while applying for Fellowship was also one of those requirements, the University had just, when I arrived, pulled its scheme for doing so, and the national one they were using as backup required you have a year of experience teaching in post first. So, by the time I could do my application, most of my training was already ageing out of relevance! Anyway, leaving that aside, the reflective log was also not something I enjoyed putting together. In the first place, it had to speak the right language, that of the UK Professional Standards Framework. That’s not actually hard to do, and there are worse jargon structures, but it does mean one starts to write in parrot form unless one’s careful, losing one’s own voice in the writing. In the second place, it means one has to at least show awareness of a lot of literature about university pedagogy and, while, there is much good stuff about that out there (I now know) there is also quite a lot of soapboxing or science-by-anecdote, and standards of proof are slippery in much of it. Some of it certainly did challenge me to improve my teaching. Nonetheless, I took a certain vicious pleasure, firstly in citing myself, and secondly in making sure that Hacking the Academy, and especially the chapter therein called “Lectures are Bullshit”, were in the Bibliography, as some kind of reward to myself for having perforce to cite this stuff without space for critique.²

Anyway, it all worked, I got the Fellowship and, eventually, cleared probation, though that is a longer and separate story that will not be told here. And I have to say, looking back over the reflective statement just now, there are things in there I had forgotten I’d done in a classroom, as well as many promises to do things I have yet to follow up. I could be a much better teacher if I followed my own advice… I have, accidentally, created a reflection that deserves further reflection, and in that respect, I have to admit that the process was and will continue to be more useful to me than it seemed at the time I was doing it. I should pay attention to that message! Such are the thoughts on this occasion of Dr Jonathan Jarrett, M. A., Ph. D., F. R. Hist. S., F. H. E. A.

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1. See Gender Equality and Historians in UK Higher Education, The Royal Historical Society (London 2015), online here; Race, Ethnicity & Equality in UK History: A Report and Resource for Change, by Hannah Atkinson, Suzanne Bardgett, Adam Budd, Margot Finn, Christopher Kissane, Sadiah Qureshi, Jonathan Saha, John Siblon & Sujit Sivasundaram (London 2018), online here; Promoting Gender Equality in UK History: A Second Report and Recommendations for Good Practice, by Nicola Miller, Kenneth Fincham, Margot Finn, Sarah Holland, Christopher Kissane & Mary Vincent (London 2018), online here.

2. I got myself in there via talking about coins as a teaching tool (on which see Jonathan Jarrett, Coins in Collections: care and use. A Guide to Best Practice by the COINS Project (Cambridge 2009), if you can somehow find a copy). The other cite is of course Jeff Jarvis, “Lectures are Bullshit” in Daniel J. Cohen & Tom Scheinfeldt (edd.), Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities (Ann Arbor, MI, 2013), pp. 66-69. Of what I read without the intent to be smug, Arthur W. Chickering and Zelda F. Gamson, “Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education” in American Association for Higher Education Bulletin (Denver, CO, 1987), pp. 3-6, repr. in Biochemical Education Vol. 17 (1989), pp. 140–141 inter alia, repr. separatim as Wingspread Journal Vol. 9 no. 2 (Racine, WI, 1989) and thence online here, Michael Jackson, “But Learners Learn More” in Higher Education Research & Development Vol. 16 (Abingdon 1997), pp. 101–109, DOI: 10.1080/0729436970160108 and Anoush Margaryan, Allison Littlejohn & Gabrielle Vojt, “Are Digital Natives a Myth or Reality? University Students’ Use of Digital Technologies” in Computers & Education Vol. 56 (New York City 2011), pp. 429–440, DOI: 10.1016/j.compedu.2010.09.004 might be my top three, and John B. Biggs and Catherine So-kum Tang, Teaching for Quality Learning at University: what the student does, 3rd edn. (Maidenhead 2007) would be an incredible resource if trying to implement it wouldn’t clearly kill you from overwork. Philip Race, The Lecturer’s Toolkit: A Practical Guide to Assessment, Learning and Teaching, 3rd edn. (London 2007) is probably the single one I found most practically useful. It’s tempting to give a list of ones I thought were terrible too but that would just make me into a bad person.

I got given money for studying frontiers

I would, of course, be catching up on my backlog quicker if I weren’t alternating posts from it with differently-backlogged notices of my various achievements. But what am I supposed to do, either stop achieving things or stop reporting on them? I’m running a blog, the choice against false modesty or even politely refraining from self-publicity was made a very long time ago now. So, here is another achievement post, and it will not be the last such, either. I hope you can cope!

A view from the platform of the Castell de Gurb down the erstwhile frontier of the Riu Ter

All that said, we are still in the past here, and the relevant markers in the past are October 2016 and April 2017. As even fairly short-term readers here will know, since about 2012 I’ve been thinking that the next big thing I’d like to do research-wise, alongside my general refinement of the world’s understanding of tenth-century power and authority as seen from Catalonia, is to get people thinking about frontiers using medieval evidence. I’ve organised conference sessions about this and I’ve even started publishing on it, against some odds (long story, near-future post).¹ But I have also been planning a bigger project to do this. It was one of the things I promised, as part of my numerous probation obligations at the University of Leeds, that I would apply for funding for, and the two markers are, therefore, when the bid went in and when I got notice that I had in fact received the money. None of that would have been possible without the support of the Leeds Humanities Research Institute (as it then was), to whom I owe considerable collective thanks for guiding me in my first ‘big’ bid (and to then-Director Professor Greg Radick for scaling it down to a more-likely-successful size from my original aspirations), but obviously the main people who are owed thanks here are the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, one of whose Small Research Grants paid for what followed. So this is where I express my gratitude to them all: thankyou folks, I think you chose wisely but I’m very glad you chose me.

A logo from my sponsor…

Now, the obvious question now is what did I do with the money, indeed what did we do, because this was a network project involving several other fine scholars of such matters. But actually, one of the answers to that was, “start another blog“, which was one of the reasons I was editing here rather infrequently during 2017, when this was all coming off. So, rather than write it all out again here, I will direct you to it on the project website (also my own work) if you’re interested, saying here only that it covers the genesis of the project, its historiographical and methodological bases, a workshop, some connected activity, a triumphant conference (there are pictures), a related conference run by someone else and some of our future plans. If frontiers are your thing, and you didn’t somehow hear about this at the time, you might want to have a look. And if for some reason you just like reading my writing about what I’ve been doing, well, there is another missing chapter of it over there for you. Thankyou, as ever, for the attention and feedback!

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1. Jonathan Jarrett, “Before the Reconquista: frontier relations in medieval Iberia, 718–1031” in Javier Muñoz-Bassols, Laura Lonsdale and Manuel Delgado (edd.), The Routledge Companion to Iberian Studies (London 2017), pp. 27–40.

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.

Chronicle I: July, August and September 2015

I’m back in the UK, and even if you’re not, you may have gathered that quite a proportion of this country’s academics are currently on strike about proposed cuts to our pensions. In theory, therefore, I can do nothing like work today, but for various reasons I think blog can be allowed; after all, given that the main reason I haven’t been blogging regularly of late is my job, it seems all sorts of perverse if when the job halts I still can’t blog. So, without further ado, I’m going to test out the new format with a short account of the three months of my academic life following the last backlogged event I covered, a conference in Lincoln which you can go and read about if you so desire.

We begin here… The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham

Now, I say my academic life but it’s even more difficult to separate that from the rest than usual for this particular patch of my existence, as in this time I was transferring that existence from Birmingham to Leeds. The two themes of my life in this period were therefore movement between cities, and counting coins. The latter was because one of the things the Barber Institute had hired me to do when I started there was an actual audit of the coin collection, whose records from the previous few years were sadly not all they should have been. In the event, it was only once I knew I was leaving that I really got started on that, becuase immediate priorities were all more, well, immediate. But now it had to be done, so I was spending most of any given working day in the coin room comparing trays to spreadsheets, and occasionally finding where someone had evidently dropped such a tray at some point then put things back in the wrong places. There were only a few of those but they really slowed things down… But it did, finally, happen and I wrote a big report which not only confirmed that the Barber was then in possession of 15,905 coins, 35 tokens, 22 medals, 165 seals, 42 weights and 10 other objects of paranumismatica, as well as collections not formally part of its holdings like the so-called ‘Heathrow Hoard’, but gave them something much more like a firm footing for future development of the collection. At the same time I was also setting up a lecture series for my exhibition, which I was now going to miss, processing uploads which you already heard about, and zapping coins with X-rays on occasion. It wasn’t a bad job, really. Oh yes, and I was also supervising two MA dissertations, one of which was on the Heathrow Hoard, indeed, so there was some teaching even though it was outside term.

A tray full of pale gold and billon coins of Emperor Manuel I Komnenos (1143-1180) in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Barber Institute of Fine Arts B5704-B5735, which did not get dropped

So all that was busy enough, but in August my old diaries and e-mails betray a slow shift: correspondence about workshops I would be doing in Leeds, moving company quotes, a farewell party at the Barber (bless them) and eventually the actual close of play. Somewhere in there, of course, was also happening the slow packing-up of stuff and eventually it all going into a Pickfords lorry, in coordination with my partner’s stuff coming up from London to be so shipped as well, and finally our actual installation into what we then thought would be our new home for the foreseeable future. I also did a medievalist tour of Dudley with a couple of friends, and I will post about that separately, with photographs, because there is actually medieval stuff to photograph there. But it’s September where the itinerary just gets crazy: from Leeds to Birmingham on the 8th, crashing for one last night in my now-empty previous home to hand over white goods and keys the next day, and then back to Leeds; to London and then Harpenden, of all places, at the weekend for a gig, then back to London and back to Leeds; and back down to Birmingham again on the 15th, for reasons I’ll say more about in a moment, and back up to Leeds again on the 16th; and then on the 20th I flew to Sicily, where I was for the following 6 days for reasons I’ll likewise mention below. And the day after I got back, we had to start having our house hot-water system replaced and I started teaching in my new job, opening up my career there with a lecture on Charlemagne and the Carolingians, all fairly fitting I think. Up to that point I’d been on campus quite a lot anyway, for induction and training, and also organising next year’s frontiers sessions for the International Medieval Congress, but now it had really started.

Can it be that we have got so far through this post without an actual coin? Here’s a good big ugly one to make up for that, a copper-alloy follis of Emperor Justinian I struck at Cyzicus in 543&ndash544, Barber Institute of Fine Arts B0692

I’m still quite smug about the second Birmingham trip, just because it involved seeing an opportunity coming from a long way off at a time when I was otherwise completely lost in the weeds of the job. As I mentioned, there were a set of lectures intended to support my exhibition at the Barber. For various reasons they took a long time to organise, and I was having trouble finding suitable guest speakers. But as the date slipped back and the new job became clear, I suddenly realised: by the time they happened, I could myself be a guest speaker, because I would no longer work there! So that’s what I did, giving my successor in the post the job of introducing me for a lecture I’d set up. Perhaps it shouldn’t seem like a triumph, but it did. After all, if you want something done, do it yourself… The lecture was called “Small Change and Big Changes: minting and money after the Fall of Rome”, and it basically went through the changes that the imperial coinage system underwent as large parts of the Roman Empire fell into the control of non-Roman rulers, using Barber coins as illustrations throughout; the background idea was that of the exhibition, that we are still the heirs to Rome’s monetary and iconographic vocabulary of power, but the foreground was much more me working out ideas that I intended to take into the classroom; the lecture title is, after all, suspiciously similar to that of one of my current modules…

Which means we are now here, the Parkinson Building, University of Leeds,once again. Photo by Tim Green from Bradford [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

So, what haven’t we covered? Well, one thing that this new post format means sacrificing is the old write-up of trips, papers and conferences. I should still mention what they were, however, I think, so this is the list such as it was:

• 3rd August: the medievalist outing to Dudley and Claverley, of which there will be separate photo posts;
• 12th August: Eleanor Blakelock, “Secrets of the Anglo-Saxon Goldsmiths: underlying truth of the Staffordshire Hoard”, a seminar in the Department of Physics at the University of Birmingham whose details have now gone from the web, but a very useful contact with someone who genuinely knows about metallic analysis of early medieval gold, which resulted in an exchange of references as well as some useful knowledge about how Anglo-Saxon goldsmiths seem to have made their work look shinier;
• 23rd August: an actual visit to the then-new display of the Staffordshire Hoard in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, which was good but probably isn’t worth recording separately for you all at this long remove given how much coverage the Hoard has already had here;
• 21st–25th September: the XVth International Numismatic Congress in Taormina, Sicily. This needs a post of its own, and I’m not quite sure how I’ll keep it to one, but I am determined; it was a good but intense experience and I’m still trying to find out if my paper at it will be published. As you might imagine, I also managed to fit in some medievalist tourism here and there will be photos of that too.
• 29th September: David Hinton, “Personal Possessions in Medieval England: archaeology and written evidence”, Institute for Medieval Studies Public Lecture, University of Leeds: my first academic event at my new job put one of the great figures of Anglo-Saxon archaeology before me and he was, of course, interesting; he emphasised the great spread of standards of living and wealth that Anglo-Saxon and medieval English material culture covered, from subsistence farming with almost nothing incidental owned (or at least lost) up to hoards of treasure such as have already been mentioned. Nonetheless, probably more people than that implies had precious items, however paltry; these were kept for lifetimes, which can make dating them from context difficult to do, but were also often metal and therefore recyclable, so the evidence all needs careful interpretation. Of course it does! But here was someone very used to doing that who made it sound manageable.

So, firstly that sort of summarises two and a half of the busiest months of my life until last year, but secondly I seem already to have promised five more posts of various kinds, mainly photos. I’d better therefore leave this one here and thus properly establish the new state of the blog! More will follow! After all, we haven’t got our pensions back as yet…

What’s (Been) Going On

I stubbed this post in April last year, meaning then to tell you at least in outline what was happening in my life and with this blog. As the fact that it’s now most of a year on from that and that this post is being written in Turkey, you will guess that actually things are not much quieter, but they are better than they have been and I do have hopes that some kind of blogging can resume here. So this post is about what that might look like, and says something about how things got this way.

The path to this point (has not all been easy)

So. Obviously we all know that in October 2015 I got a job as Lecturer in Early Medieval History at Leeds, and at that point the blog was a little bit more than a year behind. Now, because I had not been around to advertise my new modules because I was then still working somewhere else, two of them did not recruit enough students to run, so in my first year in post I was teaching less than I expected. That said, I was still teaching on, er, two large-scale first-year courses, one second-year one I’d built myself and two graduate skills courses, plus a couple of guest appearances, all of which was new prep, and I put, um, 4 grant applications in in that time as well (of which I got 2, one of which is why I am right now in Turkey and the other of which saw me co-curating a numismatic exhibition at the end of the next year—plus ça change…). For a while I was also, of all things, enrolled on a MOOC by way of learning my way round an admin role which I subsequently demitted, so I was busy enough. But I was still blogging and still reading a bit. Nonetheless, I am told by my partner that in the second semester all this plus marking turned me into a grey joyless sink of exhaustion, in part presumably because I’d had minor surgery just before Christmas 2015 and was still recovering; one of our cats getting run over also didn’t help.

The office building where this story mainly takes place, the Parkinson Building, University of Leeds, its grandeur equalled only by the unpredictability of its upstairs water supply. By Tim Green from Bradford [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Now, come October 2016, I had been able to advertise my own courses, so the two that were dormant had recruited and now had to run for the first time. In addition to that, I co-led an overhaul of our medieval survey course, which is taught to the whole cohort, and I also co-convened our intensive palæography course. What this all meant was that, more or less by accident, I was now teaching across 10 modules and running 6, only 2 of which were repeating in the same form as the previous year and 2 of which were entirely new, one involving collaboration with our Library’s (brilliant) Special Collections team and the other, a full-year module, involving lots of translation of primary material on what quickly became a week-to-week basis. I also put in 3 more grant applications and got 2, and was of course now also dealing with the work coming from the previous ones… I was also now studying for and putting in for Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy, which I got, and Fellowship of the Royal Historical Society, which I also got. I mentioned the numismatic exhibition already. Oh yeah, and I bought a new house and moved halfway through all of this! The new house is much much better and a great delight, but the commute is longer and of course moving is never easy, especially when you’re buying in a chain.

The other place this was all (by now) happening, my half of our study at home, complete with me at work in it and the (new) junior cat trying to work out why

In the classroom, again, the second semester was heavier than the first. By the middle of it, unable to progress anything outside teaching and working more hours than I ever have to keep that going, I had to tell my press that I could no longer deliver my next book in the foreseeable future, and shortly after that I hit a crisis point that meant that something had to be done. My bosses were personally sympathetic and quick to act, and I also owe thanks to my union representative and Chris Wickham, who were both vital support. Anyway, the main positive result of all this (apart from the successful funding bids) was that an application I’d made for a semester of study leave was approved; the secondary positive result was that despite everything I got a teaching commendation, for which I must mainly thank my students, and I suppose the third one was the HEA Fellowship. For the study leave I had targets that amounted to finishing an article-length piece of work every month—which I did do—so blogging time was still hard to find. And now study leave is over, I’m still on probation and I’m back to teaching, with what is for now a lighter teaching load, but still enough to mean that a short-lived attempt at weekly blogging has stumbled. Obviously (obviously!) the blog is not my first priority, but it is a priority, so what can happen with it?

The state of the blog, present and future

Well, if we take a look at the blog as it currently sits, it is upwards of 700 posts going back more than a decade, and its sheer mass on the web means that it continues to draw at least some traffic even if I do nothing with it, which is quite gratifying. I have at least been able to keep up with comments and I think some kind of community remains aware when I post, and to you folks also I am very grateful. But we have this silly double structure of ‘sticky’ front-page posts that I wanted you to know about straight away, as opposed to the regular posts emerging blinking from the backlog, and I have literally sixty more stubbed, and in some cases part- or all-written, from up to three years ago, which I was determined to post in order between my normal seminar reporting. Even with as little detachment as I can manage, this has become a structure of lunacy that can’t be maintained. On the other hand, I really miss the interaction and sense of having a public, and the constructive and amusing response to half-formed ideas I could get here; as a sandbox, as well as a public face, blogging has seemed a worthwhile exercise to me ever since I worked out what I really thought it was for, and I want to get it going again and keep it there. I have also, I admit, used the fact that I have a blog on which to publicise my endeavours in a couple of my funding bids, and it’s probably not wholly honest if I can’t shout about my successes here as well as via Leeds press releases.

So, most obviously, the seminar and conference reporting cannot continue as it once did. That may prove something of a relief to those who were covered, though I know some people liked it, but it just took so long, and in any case I’m now outside the so-called Golden Triangle so can’t report on it to those likewise outside as I used to. On the other hand, I don’t want just to jump-cut three years of my life, especially since as the narrative above tells you, they have been busy and full of things and successes on which I would ideally have reported with glee. And there are all these posts stubbed which belong in that time. So, I have a plan and it looks like this:

1. The ‘sticky’ posts will all be unstuck when I next post, and return to their places in the stream; there should be no more of them.
2. I will start a new series of posts called ‘Chronicle’ or something like that, in which I just record what was going on in my life academic in chunks of a month or two at a time, in as summary a form as I can manage, mainly to give chronology to the whole effort but also by way of presenting some kind of a record of what the transition into full-time long-term academia, with which I know I’m not the only one who has struggled, looked like (and looks like) from here. That will continue till I reach the present day, and I’ll adapt the size of them so that I am gaining on that goal each time I post.
3. In between those posts I will insert shorter focused pieces on the things in each chronicle chunk that merit their own reporting, or which were stubbed at that sort of point, and so there’ll still be something here other than me trying to make my diary entertaining.

And maybe that will work! I hope that I can post most weeks, probably on Sundays, and that that ought actually to work down the backlog. I guess we’ll see how it goes? I’m very conscious that my previous promises of a return to blogging have, like prophecies of the end of the world, all so far proved false, but hopefully this is easier to bring about than Apocalypse. Assuming the horsemen don’t arrive, therefore, see you soon! And thanks for continuing to hang round A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe!