The conference before the storm: Leeds International Medieval Congress, 2019

Looking back on the last pre-Covid International Medieval Congress seems like a different world by now, even though we’ve but recently had the 2022 one, where, ironically or not, I caught my first dose of Covid. I guess that, because of that and because of the big push towards online hybrid participation that the pandemic gave us, it’s clear already that we’re never going back to quite the same experience of a campus full of medievalists meeting and interacting, but will now live with the sense, firstly, that that may be dangerous as well as desirable and that some people just aren’t going to be able to take part, and secondly that a lot of the action is in fact happening off-stage, in the ether.¹ So this was the end of an era, or the last stop before a change of trains, or some other metaphor. And, to be honest, because of that, before picking up my notes on it I would have said I remembered very little of what happened at the 2019 Congress, as opposed to any other year since the IMC moved to the Central campus. I didn’t organise anything myself, is all I would have told you this morning, and on inspection that is completely untrue: Rethinking the Medieval Frontier ran for a full day, with people speaking from two continents about places from the Canaries to Kashmir. So as it transpires, I was there (obviously) and was pretty busy (nearly as obviously) and learnt a good few things (thankfully), and it was actually an impressively international and intersectional gathering that had all kinds of promise for the future threaded through it, and it still seems worth writing a report on it. It’s just that the future took a different turn… Because these reports are always huge, however, and not necessarily of interest to all (certainly not throughout), I’ll do what has become my practice and give you the running order of my conference experience, and then put actual commentary below a cut and let you decide (the few of you reading on the actual site rather than in your e-mail, anyway) how much further you care to go.

Monday 1st July 2019

119. Materialities at Birkbeck, I: between mind and matter in medieval monetary policy

• Rebecca Darley, “Discourses on Absence, or Kalabhra and Vakataka Monetary Policy in Early Medieval Southern India”
• Chris Budleigh, “Surplus and Scarcity: the contested relationship between monetary supply and aristocratic land management in Comnenian Byzantium”
• Sidin Sunny, “The Lighter Dirham: power relationships in medieval Spanish society and tendencies in coin fineness and debasement.”

240. The Use and Construction of Place, Space, and Materiality in Late Antiquity

• Edward James, “Materiality and the Holy in Gregory of Tours”
• Guy Halsall, “Trace, Space, Place: the materiality of identity”
• Catherine-Rose Hailstone, “Place and Space: Gregory, Materiality, and the Fear of God”

334. Seas and Floods in the Islamic West

• Andrew Marsham, “Nile Flood Levels and Egyptian Revolts in the Early Medieval Period”
• Xavier Ballestín, “Ships, Seafarers, Sails and Bows: a source approach to marine networks and coastal settlement in the Western Mediterranean basin on the eve of the rabaḍ uprising in Córdoba, 202 AH/818 AD”
• Maribel Fierro, “Sea in the Life Narratives of Andalusi Scholars and Saints”

Tuesday 2nd July

530. Rethinking the Medieval Frontier 2018, I: Iberian Spaces

• Jonathan Jarrett, “Ends of Empire: Two Island Frontiers between Byzantium and Islam”
• Stacey Murrell, “Centering the Marginal: concubines on Castilian frontiers, c. 1050-1350
• Sandra Schieweck, “Iberian Border Regimes: the case of Castile and Navarre in the late Middle Ages”

630. Rethinking the Medieval Frontier, 2018, II: Administration and Control

• Luca Zavagno, “‘The Byzantine Liquid Frontiers’, or How to Administer Insular and Coastal Peripheral Spaces and Stop Worrying About It”
• Davor Salihović, “The Distribution of Bordering in Late Medieval Hungary”

730. Rethinking the Medieval Frontier 2018, III: between religions

• Roberta Denaro, “Far from the Corrupting City: building the frontier as a stage for martyrdom and asceticism, 8th-10th centuries”
• Turaç Hakalmaz, “‘Islandness’ of a Coastal Kingdom: the case of Cilician Armenia”
• Aniket Tathagata Chettry, “Exploring the Complexities of a Brahmanical Frontier in Bengal”

830. Rethinking the Medieval Frontier 2018, IV: dealing with power on the frontier

• Jakub Kabala, “Claiming Authority over the Edge of the World: Frontier Strategies in Salzburg, c. 870″
• Zeynep Aydoğan, “Conquest and Territoriality in the Late Medieval Anatolian Frontiers”
• Andreas Obenaus, “To Whom Might/Do They Belong? Claims to Newly-Discovered Atlantic Islands in the Late Medieval Period”

Wednesday 3rd July 2019

1048. Forging Memory: false documents and historical consciousness in the Middle Ages, I

• Graham Barrett, “Charters, Forgeries, and the Diplomatic of Salvation in Medieval Iberia”
• Daria Safranova, “Using and Detecting Forged Charters in Northern Iberia, c. 900-1100″
• Levi Roach, “True Lies: Leo of Vercelli, Arduin of Ivrea, and the Struggle for Piedmont”

1140. Byzantine Materialities, II: Ephemera and Iconoclasm

• Rachel Banes, “You Can’t Write That Here! Mapping Religious and Secular Graffiti in Asia Minor, c. 300-700 CE”
• Daniel K. Reynolds, “Images, Icons and Apologetic: Christian Iconoclasm in Early Islamic Palestine”
• Leslie Brubaker, “Dancing in the Streets: the ephemera of Byzantine processions”

1252. Transport, Traders, and Trade Routes in Early Medieval Europe

• Ewa Magdalena Charowska, “Dugout Builders: the trademark of the Sclaveni in the 6th and 7th Centuries”
• Daniel Melleno, “From Strangers to Neighbors: Franks and Vikings in the late 9th century”
• Thomas Freudenhammer, “Rafica: early medieval caravan trade between the West Frankish kingdom and al-Andalus”
• Victor Farías Zurita, “Response”

1340. Byzantine Materialities, IV: workshops, trade and manuscripts

• Shaun Tougher, “Macedonian Materialities: the Menologion of Basil II”
• Chris Wickham, “Materialities of Middle Byzantine Exchange in the Aegean”
• Flavia Vanni, “Men at work: stucco workshops on Mount Athos”

Thursday 4th July 2019

1509. Gold, Coins and Power in the Early Middle Ages

• Marco Cristini, “The War of the Coins: Numismatic Evidence for the Gothic War”
• Nicholas Rogers, “Angels and the King’s Evil: projections of royal authority”
• Vera Kemper, “‘All that glitters is not gold’: heroes and material wealth”

1652. The Monetary System and Currency in Eurasia in the Pre-Modern Era, II: money and its circulation in British Isles and Scandinavia

• Yuta Uchikawa, “Commerce and Coin Circulation around the Irish Sea in the 9th and 10th Centuries”
• Hiroko Yanagawa, “The Irish-Sea Imitations and their Circulation during the Middle Ages”
• Kenji Nishioka, “The Use of Money in Scotland during the 12th and 13th Centuries”
• Takahiro Narikawa, “Church and the Money Circulation in High Medieval Norway”

1738. Materialities and Religion in Medieval Armenia and Byzantium

• Katherine New, “The Representations of Material Objects in Medieval Culture: statue or doll in Byzantine mythography”
• Carmen Morais Puche, “Medieval Byzantine Coinage in Patrimonio Nacional: image, materiality and religions”

Books and coins in Blackburn

Having been sadly recalled to the present, it now seems safe to retreat again to the past, and specifically 9th and 10th November 2017, when I was in Blackburn by way of a favour for someone who often features on this blog, Dr Rebecca Darley of Birkbeck, University of London. A further chain of favours and persons hangs thereby, and the story of how I or any of us came to be there is a little complex, but it can be told fairly briefly and involves a conference and some coins, so is definitely the kind of story this blog tells. So: it begins with an industrial ropemaker in the town of Blackburn by the name of Robert E. Hart.¹ Hart was quite the collector, especially in the field of manuscripts and early printed books but also of Roman and Hellenistic coins, and when he died in 1946 he left most of his collection to the people of Blackburn as, as he had put it, “something for my native town”. And there, in what is now Blackburn Museum, those collections largely remain.

R. E. Hart, in a much-reproduced portrait here borrowed from and linked through to Wall Street International’s page about the permanent exhibition at Blackburn

It took a while for them to come to notice, however. In the proceedings of this conference, Dr Cynthia Johnston explains how their cataloguing in 1962 led a thin trail of scholars, one by one, north-west to see the various things which interested them, and in 1976 some of the manuscripts were exhibited, but it was really only when Cynthia herself got involved in 2012 that a momentum built up.² By the time I made it to Blackburn to see any of this stuff there had been two exhibitions and two conferences, all in London where Cynthia is based, but this was the first event that had really been possible in Blackburn itself.³ This was the running order (and where the papers occur in the proceedings, I’ve given a reference).

• Nigel Morgan, “The Blackburn Psalter: a 13th-century manuscript by the artists of the Bible of William of Devon”⁴
• Scot McKendrick, “Contextualising the Art and Innvoations of Blackburn’s Treasure of Early Netherlandish Illumination (Hart 20884)”⁵
• Catherine Yvard, “Picturae antiquae: a dismembered Book of Hours reconsidered (Hart 20984)”
• Eric White, “Toward a History of Early Printing used as Binding Waste”⁶
• Rebecca Darley with Jackson Hase, “Collections to Think With”⁷
• Emma Herbert-Davies, “The Winchester Cabinet: unlocking an eighteenth-century coin collection”
• Cleo Cantone, “Bird’s Eye View: travel and pilgrimage to the holy cities of Jerusalem, Mecca and Medina”⁸
• Ed Potten, “A Monastic Pharmacopeia: Robert Edward Hart’s copy of the 1485 Gart der Gesundheit“⁹
• Cynthia Johnston, “‘Given Me by Mr. Maggs’: the relevations of R. E. Hart’s ‘Connoisseur’s Library'”
• David McKitterick, “Collecting – For Whom?”¹⁰

Obviously, this is not really my field for the most part and there are only limited comments about the actual papers I can make here; if I don’t mention them all, it’s not because the ones I don’t mention were any less interesting, it’s just because my notes don’t now let me give a fair account. My notes make it look as if I was especially struck by Eric White’s painstaking detective work in tracking down fragments of books now scattered about various European libraries after being dismembered to serve as bindings for later books, which he described as basically a habit of 1550-1650. The best example he gave was a 1459 Psalter printed in Mainz, which went through 56 editions and which we have in bits of 70 copies; all but 10 of those bits are binding waste…¹¹ Emma, of whose work we’ve read here before, introduced the Winchester Cabinet in the Brotherton Library at Leeds to this audience as a kind of parallel to Hart’s collection. Rebecca’s paper was (as you’d expect me to say) excellent, and focused on the learned networks into which Hart’s coin collecting, as revealed by the notes in his ledgers and papers that are still in the museum, propelled him and the numismatic world in which he thus took part. Lastly David McKitterick rang numerous bells of recollection for me by linking Hart’s activity to a wider world of industrial collecting, already gestured at by several other speakers but here explored, even if through the medium of books, by reference to many other collectors, some of whose coins I’d worked on in my time at the Fitzwilliam long ago; it seems as if it was pretty normal to acquire both manuscripts and coins in this world. In the proceedings of the conference, Rebecca explores this world still further with some really interesting reflections on the civic identities and local pride which explain why these collections actually exist where they do to be used, and Cynthia also does a more holistic take on the world of book-collecting in which Hart so thoroughly took part.¹² And the exhibition which went with all of this made very clear what a richness there was to display, and included a small display of some of Hart’s coins with some of his books and study tools, as if he’d just stepped away from the desk for a minute to check something and would be back when he’d found it.

Manuscripts from the Hart Collection in the Blackburn gallery

But, you may reasonably be asking, where are you in all this, Jonathan? You wouldn’t be blogging it unless there were something about you, now, would you? And I might, actually, but this time that’s a fair cop. You see, as part of the activity around the exhibition, the Museum had been able to get money together for a refurbishment of its major gallery and the construction of a new study space above it (as well as, for a short while at least, the salaries of the staff necessary to make any of this stuff available…). And so, the evening before the conference, there was an open evening for the new study room, with handling sessions available with some of the collection objects. Rebecca had been asked to do one of these sessions with some of the coins—because the Blackburn collection of coins is rather bigger than just Hart’s stuff, and includes some really unusual stuff such as a decent-sized and basically unknown collection of Sasanian Persian drachms—but she was teaching that evening, so asked me if I could do it. And so a few weeks before I’d come up, had a rather whistlestop introduction to the coin cabinets and nominated my four pieces, and then on the evening in question I was set up with a table, a tray and some handouts, and basically made myself available to anyone who wanted to check out some old coins.

Obverse of a silver sixpence of King Charles I struck in Newark Castle, 1646, Blackburn Museum

Reverse of the same coin, which is Spink 3146 in the relevant catalogue

This kind of work is always fun and it’s possibly the second thing I really miss from the museums world (the first, I admit, being the unfettered access to the treasure troves of stuff). Coins are such an excellent teaching tool, because (for now at least) everyone’s used to using them and thinks they know how coins work, but they often don’t read them in any depth, so by confronting people with coins that aren’t quite familiar, but can be read, you can teach them not just about the era of the coin in question, but also of a new way to look at the material culture of their own lived world as well. The four pieces I picked were a London bronze of Emperor Constantine I from after his supposed conversion showing the Unconquered Sun, a teaching point of which I never tire, a Canterbury ‘PAX’ penny of William the Conqueror (also one of my stand-bys), a Lancaster halfpenny token of Daniel Eccleston (there being no actual Blackburn tokens I could immediately find, alas), and the above. The above is probably the most interesting piece of the bunch, not really being a coin as such, and having a very specific context: as my handout has it,

“During the English Civil War which ended with the capture, trial and execution of King Charles I by the forces of Parliament in 1649, a number of royal outposts were besieged by Parliamentary forces, very few of which could be relieved. Money was among the supplies that did not reach the defenders, forcing their leaders to cut up silver plate and ornaments to make coins with which the restless troops could be paid. Newark was besieged three times during the war, but never fell; this coin survived from the final siege between November 1645 and May 1646.”

It drew a lot of interest because of its shape, of course, and kept it when I told the story that goes with it, but I probably still shouldn’t have used it! It was only afterwards, you see, that I did a cursory search and found that, of course, because such pieces are fantastically rare given how few were issued and how briefly, its probable market value was a full order of magnitude greater than any of the other three. But we were careful and everything was still on the tray when we closed, and perhaps, indeed, we might have relied on that same pride on the part of the visitors in their native place and the collections belonging to those who belong there. As Rebecca’s paper explores, these things get complex. Anyway, it was all great to be part of and got me into a collection I’d never have known about otherwise, and with which I’m still trying to come up with a way to work in future. Who knows but what this may some day come off, and if so, of course, you’ll hear about it here.

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1. I draw these background details from Cynthia Johnston, “Introduction. A British book collector: rare books and manuscripts in the R. E. Hart Collection, Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery” in Johnston (ed.), A British Book Collector: rare books and manuscripts in the R. E. Hart Collection, Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery (London 2021), pp. 1-5.

2. See Johnston, “Introduction”, p. 2; for that exhibition, see J. J. G. Alexander and P. Crossley, Medieval and Early Renaissance Treasures in the North West (Manchester 1976), and note how the title sort of implies that it needs specifying that these things are not in London.

3. Publications resulting from the earlier ones were C. Johnston & S. J. Biggs (edd.), Blackburn’s Worthy Citizen: the philanthropic legacy of R. E. Hart (London 2013), C. Johnston & J. Hartnell, Cotton to Gold: extraordinary collections of the industrial North West (London 2015), T. Burrows & C. Johnston (edd.), Collecting the Past: collectors and their collections from the 18th to the 20th centuries (Abingdon 2019) and C. Johnston, Holding the Vision: collecting the art of the book in the industrial North West (Blackburn 2020).

4. The printed version being Morgan, “The Blackburn Psalter and the William of Devon group” in Johnston, British Book Collector, pp. 23-59.

5. Printed version McKendrick, “Contextualising the art and innovations of the Master of Edward IV in the Blackburn Hours (Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, Hart MS 20884)”, ibid. pp. 93-143.

6. In the proceedings, White’s paper is “Fragments of early Mainz printing in the R. E. Hart Collection”, ibid. pp. 145-164.

7. Published as Jackson Hase and Rebecca Darley, “Collections to Think with: Collecting, Scholarship and Belonging in the R. E. Hart Collection (Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery)” in Journal of the History of Collections Vol. 32 (Oxford 2020), pp. 369–378, DOI: 10.1093/jhc/fhz022.

8. Printed version Cantone, “Journey in the mind’s eye: the virtue and value of virtual pilgrimage” in Johnston, British Book Collector, pp. 191-212.

9. See Potten’s own report of the conference here.

10. Printed as McKitterick, “The Loyalties of a Collector” in Johnston, British Book Collector, pp. 7-21.

11. White, “Fragments of early Mainz printing”, pp. 159-164.

12. Darley, “The value of the past: heritage between local, global and national” in Johnston, British Book Collector, pp. 213-228; Johnston, “Book collecting in context: Hart and his contemporaries”, ibid. pp. 191-212.

In memory of Simon Bendall

I’m sorry as ever for a lapse in posting. Firstly I went on actual holiday, without a laptop—some day there will be pictures, because I did take a camera—and then as soon as I was back I had feverishly to read a 723-page thesis so as to be able to help examine it the following week in Barcelona, in whose airport indeed I now write this post. I had hoped to have written you something about Byzantine coinage by this time as well, and so, I suppose, I am about to do, but it’s not the thing I had hoped for and it must come first, as is unfortunately now common on this blog, because somebody died, and that somebody was Simon Bendall, Byzantine numismatist extraordinaire, whom I knew a little and so want to commemorate here. He died on 26 June after what was apparently a long illness, at the age of 82.

I’m not sure when I first heard of Simon Bendall; it’s possible that it was in citation as I read frantically to prepare for the interview that got me the job managing the coin collection at the Barber Institute. However, I heard from him very shortly after I got that job, because his ever-active networks had brought him the news of régime change and he wanted to ask me for some images for a book he was then working on, which became his Introduction to the Coinage of Trebizond, of which he later kindly gave me a copy.¹ That was an illustrative exchange for several reasons, which all help give a sense of the man, so I’ll tell them.

Firstly, I managed almost without effort to enlist him in checking over the Barber’s own initial catalogue of coins of that Byzantine splinter state, because he had once been going to catalogue them for us anyway and had been frustrated at never finding out what we actually had; as a result, to go online at some future point, there is a marked-up printout of the catalogue in the Curator’s work pile, I imagine, where I sadly had to leave it when I demitted. Secondly, yes, print-out, because Simon didn’t use e-mail, and barely used computers; the only practical way to send him a PDF was in print, and all the correspondence I had with him was actual letters, answered in longhand and in scrupulous detail in rather shorter time than I tend to manage with e-mail. Thirdly, that correspondence also got me several stories about one of my predecessors as Curator, the learned but sometimes difficult Michael Hendy, which I was later able to verify from the coin catalogue, because Simon, in his position at the coin dealer Baldwin’s, had been responsible for choosing and sending several important parts of the Byzantine collection while it was under Hendy’s care. Fourthly, it gave me vital ammunition to get the Barber to rethink its image pricing, based on full-size paintings and not really applicable to coins, that when I told him what we would have to charge him he gently pointed out that for that price he could buy an actual one of the relevant coins and photograph it himself for less money. From all this, I got the impression of a man who was a quantity, if you see what I mean.

Before long I was encountering this quantity in print, as well, because Simon was one of the people who had written about the concave fabric of later Byzantine coins, and one of the very few who had asked the important question: well, how did they do it?² And by then I was also aware that for the coinage of the last and longest-lasting dynasty of Byzantine emperors, the Palaeologans, the standard reference was by one Simon Bendall…³ And in fact, I now learn, a full bibliography of his work would have two-hundred-plus things in it, from two- or three-page notes in the little auction house periodicals we used to have to full-length monographs, because he just knew a lot, largely through his ongoing connections with those same auction houses as employee and then consultant expert. Numismatics is one of the last fields where you don’t have to be an academic to be a major contributor, and that is not least because of the demonstrable importance of the work of people like Simon.

I think I finally met Simon at the International Numismatic Congress in Taormina in 2015, and then again at a couple of meetings of the Royal Numismatic Society. Somewhere in there I must have been told the single event that got Simon onto the web other than his publications, which was the theft of his coin collection in February 2018, sadly not the only retired collector’s collection to get taken from their home that I can think of. Typically, he took it phlegmatically—I suppose he must already have been ill, because he said to me that at least it had saved him the pain of disposing of it. He had once hoped to give it to a museum, he explained, but since it had all been acquired in trade, no UK museum would now touch it; though the thieves had obviously deprived him of one of his life’s works, it did at least mean the collection had not had to be broken up and auctioned as would otherwise have happened. In another of those conversations, more cheerfully, I learnt that his childhood home (and therefore lifelong) football team, Wolverhampton Wanderers, had sent him a card signed by all the squad after he’d passed some 50-year attendance marker I wish I could now remember. Anyway, as this all suggests, he was a fount of stories, and it’s a considerable sadness that he won’t be amassing and telling any more, quite apart from all the other horrors and misfortunes of mortality. He won’t be at the next RNS party I make it to, and people will miss him. So will Byzantine numismatics in general, indeed, and so probably will Wolverhampton Wanderers, and that’s not a bad combination of mourners to have. I hope he went and remains in peace; goodbye, Simon, it was good to have known you.

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1. Simon Bendall, An introduction to the coinage of the Empire of Trebizond (London 2015).

2. Simon Bendall and David Sellwood, “The Method of Striking Scyphate Coins Using Two Obverse Dies In the Light of an Early Thirteenth Century Hoard” in Numismatic Chronicle 7th Series Vol. 18 (London 1978), pp. 93–104, and Simon Bendall, “The Double Striking of Late Byzantine Scyphate Coins” in Celator Vol. 12 (Lancaster PA 1998), pp. 20–23.

3. S. Bendall and P. J. Donald, Later Palaeologan Coinage, 1282-1453 (London 1979).