Some of what’s been going on

Hullo again; we might be back on air…

So, if you’re still reading after all this time, I want to firstly to thank you for that; thankyou all, you are my reassurance that I have some kind of an interested public at times when this is otherwise hard to determine. Secondly, I want to say something very brief by way of outline about what was behind this hiatus; and then thirdly I want to reflect, likewise briefly, on the utility of this blog. And then I want to get another post up pronto so as to move all this depressing stuff off the top! But some kind of account, all the same, is probably required.

I can and probably should be very short about the reasons behind the hiatus, and as it happens they probably can be summarised as, in recent years (as readers here know well) I have been seeing less and less future in the life academic, at least in the UK, and have been working up side hustles. As yet, these have not been going very well, probably only an extra couple of grand a year, but to find time to make them go I cut down my hours at work at the beginning of the academic year. My workload was accordingly cut down in proportion to that reduction in hours, but, well, it doesn’t feel as if that made much difference except that now I had one fewer days in which to manage it, or else didn’t do the new stuff. The point at which I declared hiatus was roughly when January marking landed, and I’ve been trying ever since then to get out from under that and still keep the other stuff going. Various family problems or needs have also arisen – the one I reported here was the unexpected one – and in the middle of it we’ve had to give up our car which, of course, means a whole range of things become more difficult or expensive or both, not helped by the fact that my bike has been out of commission for most of that time as well and I’ve had no time to fix it. So, blogging has come a perpetual fourth in a race where only three runners can place.

Now, some of this difficulty, I admit, I have made for myself, because I’ve also been trying to keep research projects alive. I have been told both to stop this and to carry on by different people in authority, admittedly – but because no-one else outside Leeds will stop work if I do, I have nonetheless slowly been co-editing a journal issue, though my co-editor is sadly having an even worse time than I am. We’re running late, consequently, but it’s still moving. So that has also been going on behind the scenes, and when it reaches some definitive stage I will write about it on the project blog and signal that here. Alongside shepherding that to press, I now have only one article left to finish, hopefully both done by the time of the International Medieval Congress, and then I might even be able to return to Borrell!

But, when you have to overcome so many obstacles just to do that stuff, and it’s so unclear that anyone will read it when it does come out – I’m watching my H-index drop, my royalties for reproductions shrink and what few other indications there is that one has an audience dwindle likewise – it is very hard to see the point. I am of course temperamentally inclined to see the worst in everything, a known problem for which help is being sought, but why in this day and age anyone should care about my corner of tenth-century Europe, or even the other corners of the tenth century and its neighbours in which these days I take an interest, I honestly don’t know most of the time. And if I don’t, how’m I gonna convince anyone else?

Now, in time past a lot of the answer to that question has been this blog. Over the, erk, nearly eighteen years this blog has been running, it’s been a perpetual reassurance that at least some people are interested. And it still is, and I’m grateful for your readership, I am, but the sad fact is that you are a fraction of what there used to be. In fact, that fraction is about a fifth: in 2012, at its peak, this humble blog drew in 191,727 page views, and saw 641 comments. I know (I have published saying) that that is a very empty statistic, especially since half the comments will have been my replies and actually it’s sometimes been a busier conversation since then, but in 2023 the Corner got 37,617 views, total, and that on a steady downward trend from 2012 bar a drop and bounce during 2020-2021, presumably because of the pandemic.¹ I do, admittedly, now have 700+ subscribers as well, and I guess that those of them who are not selling something or just hoping I will link back are the real core audience; hi folks! And I suppose that you fine and discerning people probably rarely actually load the site, so that my stats are really only capturing second-level engagement. Still, 700+ extra page views per post, so about 3,000 a month, 36,000 a year, would not, sadly, turn back the clock very far.

So I have been thinking hard about how far this platform still serves me in my quest for public intellectualhood. By way of perspective, one of the postgraduates at Leeds runs a Substack newsletter on early medieval stuff. Their focus is trendier than mine, and they put much more time into networking on X and elsewhere than I ever would; but they publish on average between once and twice a month, and have over 30,000 subscribers. And y’see, that looks like an audience in a way that this, by now, does not. The interest is out there, but this isn’t finding it. But of course I hardly have the time to start a third blog when I can’t manage to keep up my first (or second), and neither is it clear why a new one would fare differently… (One of my colleagues also has a Substack on early medieval matters or even earlier, for example, and they have been going for a year and a half, posting weekly pretty much, and have, I understand, about 20 subscribers, no typo.² So I don’t mean to suggest that Substack is a magic bullet.)

None of this, as you see, resolves yet into an answer. But the general place I find myself is "this isn’t working", whether it be the academy, my own work in it, my side hustles or this here blog. And this has made it harder than I would have liked to break this hiatus. But still: I have a queue of stuff I wanted and mostly want to write about, and some people who want to read it, and while I definitely do need to find some more of those, you are still here and I wouldn’t wish to disappoint you! So, shortly – tomorrow, in fact, I’ve just scheduled it – something more substantive and less whiny. But I thought you ought to know at least some of what’s been going on, and when it becomes clearer what is going to go on, of course, I will let you know that too.

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1. Jonathan Jarrett, "Views, Comments and Statistics: Gauging and Engaging the Audience of Medievalist Blogging" in Literature Compass Vol. 9 no. 12 (Oxford 2012), pp. 991–995, DOI: 10.1111/lic3.12016.

2. I haven’t provided links here, against my habit, because for various reasons I can’t go into I deem it safer not to in one of these cases and therefore not fair to only in the other. But the successful one is pretty easy to discover even with such search terms as this gives you. The other one, not so much, and therein is some of the rub.

A Forgotten Effort of Decolonization?

The window behind which I was having the thoughts which begin this post is the uppermost leftermost gable in the building on the left of the neo-classical one, all of this being the Queen’s College, Oxford, and borrowed from their website

I think this story begins in Oxford, although it doesn’t stay there long. At the time I was teaching in Oxford the History syllabus’s foundation was two sets of “papers”, one in British History, covering the sceptred isles of my birth (in theory; in practice, really just England unless someone made special efforts to include the Home Nations) and one in General History (everything beyond Britain). This has now changed, to rebrand General as European and World, and I leave it to you to decide if that’s better. The point is that if you offered a General paper, which I did, the syllabus made almost anything a possible topic or area. The late lamented Mark Whittow, despite being a Byzantinist by training, regularly made his students study T’ang China for a week, because he found it fun and thought it would do them good. That could go the other way round too: I drew a particular intake of breath the first time a student took me up on having included the Mongols in my lists, but it was good for me in the end even if we did spend that week effectively competing for books so that I could mark whatever he wrote.¹

Cover of J. D. Fage (ed.), The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 2: from c. 500 BC to AD 1050 (Cambridge 1978), DOI 10.1017/CHOL9780521215923

However, I didn’t include South Asia or Africa in what I thought I could teach. I know why I generally stay off South Asia now, which is that I have become aware that there is a dense Indian historiography largely based in or reacting to a particular Indian flavour of Marxism which I’d have to master. Critical historiography and polemic therefore overlap there in such a way that it would take me a long time to get to where I could try and find my own balance without just accidentally repeating one or other side of each dispute. I am getting there, but I’m not yet.² Then, I suspect it just didn’t occur to me, as it so often seems not to to people. But I did think about including Africa, and that idea fell over pretty much at the point of assembling reading lists. I could find really very little. I asked one of my more learned and globally-minded colleagues, and they said, “Well, there’s the Cambridge History…” Now if I include here a citation for the most relevant volume of that, J. D. Fage (ed.), The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 2: from c. 500 BC to AD 1050 (Cambridge 1978), you’ll see an obvious problem here, which is: a lot has changed since 1978. You’d hope some of it had changed in African historiography, too. Granted, when I started teaching the British History papers in Oxford in 2010 I was given bibliographies written by the late lamented Patrick Wormald, retired 2001 and sadly dead 2004, so updating was in general slow; but still…

“Why is My Curriculum White” banner

Now, flash forward to the School of History, University of Leeds in 2019, whose views or positions of course are not represented by anything I write here, these being my own views only. But in that school a 2014 campaign called Why is my Curriculum White? had (still has) posters in many of our corridors and had already provoked a certain amount of pressure to respond in some way; and then a man called George Floyd got shot by police in the USA and the world’s media, social and otherwise, took fire for a while with the slogan “Black Lives Matter“.³ This was also the sort of time that what had till then been calling itself Anglo-Saxon studies also got into turmoil over its own alleged racism.⁴ And I was in charge of an ageing medieval survey module called Medieval and Renaissance Europe that was our incoming students’ first experience of university content teaching. I thought we should probably do something. I couldn’t decentre Europe, because it was in the module title and syllabus, but I tried to make it possible to look at Europe from the outside by adding comparative readings for each topic looking at the same sort of issues in other societies. With one or two topics excepted, none of my colleagues were much better placed to provide those than I was, so I had a lot of searching to do. Somewhere in the course of it, I suspect while looking for an entry-level reading about the Sogdian trading groups of Central Asia in English, I came on a PDF with an obscure file title which turned out to be part of a thing called the UNESCO History of Civilizations of Central Asia, itself part of a project called the Multiple History Series.⁵ That got me curious and set me looking for other things in that series, and that then led me to discover the existence of the UNESCO General History of Africa.⁶

Cover of the second volume of the UNESCO General History of Africa

Now if you’ve never heard of this, you’re not alone; the only other person I’ve found who has, including several historians of Africa I’ve asked about it, is my learned colleague Iona McCleery. And yet it looked like just what we needed and had needed for some time. Firstly, it covered in three volumes what the old Cambridge History covered in two, meaning more detail.⁷ Secondly, it was marginally more up-to-date, and importantly past the threshold of use of radio-carbon dating as the Cambridge History could not have been. But thirdly and most importantly to someone busily trying to diversify his reading lists so that there was at least some voice in them that wasn’t white and Anglophone, it was all written, or at worst co-written, by scholars from Africa, organised by a huge committee. So I pulled down PDFs of the volumes wherever they could be found (all legit. and above-board, I should say, just not necessarily obvious, as they might have been, say, on the UNESCO website…) and started working them into Zotero so as to be able to find them when relevant.

Cover of volume 3 of the UNESCO General History of Africa

Several interesting things became clear out of that. The first, perhaps inevitably, was how the historiography of the continent which this collection set out to detail was broken up by periodizations from elsewhere, but not a consistent elsewhere. The first part of the second volume (which is called Ancient Civilisations of Africa) is more or less Classical in focus, counting Egypt and Rome as part of Africa’s history, albeit with Nubia included in that world; but the second part of it is basically prehistoric archæology, and is where all the sub-Saharan coverage is. That gets us up to the seventh century CE, where the third volume begins, and then suddenly that stuff is fighting with Islamic history for space and loses. Then the fourth volume is basically a history of empires and begins to take on its own shape. In between Classics and Islam the only other periodizers are linguistic and material culture migration. This is, obviously I suppose, led by the evidence; where there is evidence from Greek, Carthaginian and Roman sources, and to an extent Nubian and Aksumite materials, the Classicists handled it; where there’s Arabic-language evidence the Islamicists handled it; and the archæologists did what was left, which is of course really quite a lot, but specifically they had to cover the areas not in contact with external recording civilisations. So the period divide works out disciplinary which works out geographical, and the intersections are quite hard to map.

Cover of the fourth volume of the UNESCO General History of Africa

But the other thing that I couldn’t help notice, as I grabbed at headings for tagging purposes, was the concentration of the archæological and linguistic work both on race. And by that I mean, the main research question often seems to have been: what biological category of African can we tell from this evidence moved where when? Who were they ethnically? Everything else, everything visible, was aimed at that question rather than being answers in itself. And perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising; sometimes, the political debates which were driving that scholarship are evident within the chapters.⁸ But when that work can lead to a 20-page annex reporting on a conference about the “Peopling of Ancient Egypt” that ends with a plea for UNESCO funding to allow better categorisation of ancient African peoples into races, it’s hard to think that this is what I need to make my curriculum less racist.⁹ It’s not, of course, as if these are specifically African questions: they presumably arrived in Africa directly from nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European scholarship that was also deeply, disturbingly even, interested in categorising people by “race”, including by language and material culture despite both of those obviously being things people can take or leave. And we still fight with that stuff in Europe; I found a new modern piece trying to do ethnic identification from skull measurement only the other day, in fact (though for what it’s worth, that too was about Egypt and Nubia, as well as being logically pretty much senseless).¹⁰ Usually I have to look to French or Croatian scholarship for people still doing this.¹¹ So in a forty-year-plus-old history of Africa it’s probably unreasonable to expect them to have been doing what I was hoping for in 2021; I felt a bit like a hippie gone abroad looking for enlightenment for all the wrong reasons.¹² Nonetheless, it left me with the basic quandary: what was I to do, having gone searching for the voices of those missing from the conversation, on finding they weren’t saying what I hoped? Was that actually my problem?

Now, in practical terms this was a very short-lived problem. I ran that module for only one more year, and in the most relevant reading list, which for expertise reasons needed to be focused especially on West Africa and the beginnings of the slave trade, I had room for maybe three or four readings on deeper history, and only one of them could be set as required reading. And as it happened I had already read long ago a pretty good and more recent single-chapter coverage of much of what is outline-known about that area’s development by an African scholar who subsequently did a keynote at the 2021 International Medieval Congress, so I was pretty confident it was OK.¹³ Meanwhile, I do use one or two chapters from these volumes in other reading lists where relevant, but I do do so gingerly, on the grounds that by now they are probably (indeed, hopefully) an anachronistic representation of African scholarship. It’s just that everyone else I can set is not from Africa… and when some day I have the chance to teach something a bit more like world history, this problem will arise again. Now, it may in fact be solved by the UNESCO General History of Africa, because there is apparently an update volume even now in process which will represent actually-current work on these issues. But I don’t think the particular problems I met with these volumes are why they have apparently been so thoroughly forgotten, or even a reason why they should not have set the world sufficiently alight in the 1980s as to replace the even-then-tiring Cambridge History of Africa. I think that might actually have been our problem, whether the previous one was mine or not…

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1. I got him to read David O. Morgan, The Mongols, The Peoples of Europe, 2nd edn, (Oxford 2007), though probably still in the first edition, as well as some articles, and tried to get by myself on Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 1221-1410, The Medieval World, 2nd edn (Abingdon 2018), though likewise in the first edition not that one. It just about worked…

2. For example… it’s hard for someone with my academic persuasions not to like the look of Harbans Mukhia, “Was there feudalism in Indian history?” in Journal of Peasant Studies Vol. 8 (London 1981), pp. 273–310, DOI: 10.1080/03066158108438139; but if you then happen to run across D. N. Jha (ed.), Society and Ideology in India: essays in honour of professor R.S. Sharma (New Delhi 1996), Dilip K. Chakrabarti, Colonial Indology: sociopolitics of the ancient Indian past (New Delhi 1997) or even Sadashiva Ramachandra Gowda, “The feudalism Debate in the point of view of Harbans Mukhia” in Tumbe Group of International Journals Vol. 4 (Tumkur 2021), pp. 26–29, online here, you have to admit that one view won’t be enough…

3. Why is My Curriculum White has been written about in Michael A. Peters, “Why is My Curriculum White?” in Educational Philosophy and Theory Vol. 47 (Abingdon 2015), pp. 641–646, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2015.1037227 and Michael Adrian Peters, “Why Is My Curriculum White? A Brief Genealogy of Resistance” in Jason Arday and Heidi Safia Mirza (edd.), Dismantling Race in Higher Education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy (Cham 2018), pp. 253–270, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-60261-5_14.

4. Mary Rambaran-Olm, “Misnaming the Medieval: Rejecting ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Studies” in History Workshop (4th November 2019), online here; Renato Rodrigues Da Silva, “The Uses of the ‘Anglo-Saxon Past’ between Revolutions, Imperialism and Racism” in Práticas da História: Journal on Theory, Historiography and Uses of the Past No. 12 (Lisboa 2021), pp. 129–160, DOI: 10.48487/pdh.2021.n12.24965; Mary Rambaran-Olm and Erik Wade, “What’s in a Name? The Past and Present Racism in ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Studies” in Yearbook of English Studies Vol. 52 (Cambridge 2022), pp. 135–153, DOI: 10.1353/yes.2022.0010.

5. B. A. Litvinsky, Zhang Guang-da and R. Shabani Samghabadi (edd.), The Crossroads of Civilizations, A.D. 250 to 750, UNESCO History of Civilizations of Central Asia 3 (Paris 1996), on Academia.edu here.

6. The program is discussed by Bethwell A. Ogot, “African Historiography: From colonial historiography to UNESCO’s General history of Africa” in Groniek No. 122 (Groningen 1993), pp. 71–78, online here, and Jan Vansina, “UNESCO and African Historiography” in History in Africa Vol. 20 (Cambridge 1993), pp. 337–352, DOI: 10.2307/3171979.

7. Those volumes being, respectively, G. Mokhtar (ed.), Ancient Civilizations of Africa, UNESCO General History of Africa 2 (London 1981), online here; M. El Fasi with I. Hrbek (edd.), Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century, UNESCO General History of Africa 3 (London 1988), online here; and D. T. Niane (ed.), Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, UNESCO General History of Africa 4 (London 1984), online here.

8. Clearest in Cheikh Anta Diop, “Origin of the ancient Egyptians” in Mokhtar, Ancient Civilizations, pp. 27–82 at pp. 27-40, which all deal with whether the ancient Egyptians counted as black or not. The author concludes that it has been shown that they were but the editor of the volume felt he had to contradict this in a following note, p. 51 & n. 74. Of course the debate is still a very live one: the relevant Wikipedia page is relatively polite, overall, but still has 341 notes…

10. Diop, “Origin of the ancient Egyptians”, pp. 59-78, inc. this on p. 77:

It is desirable… that an international inquiry be organized by UNESCO, either by consulting universities in a sufficient number of countries, or by consulting individual experts of international repute, or alternatively by convening a symposium, with a view to establishing very precise standards on the strictest possible scientific principles for defining races and for identifying the racial type of exhumed skeletons.

In case that sounds unlikely to have been entertained, it should be pointed out that UNESCO had already paid for the conference.

11. Stuart Tyson Smith and Michelle R. Buzon, “Cross-Frontier Interactions in Roman Europe, AD 100‒350: the graphic model applied” in Ulrike Matthies Green and Kirk E. Costion (eds), Modeling Cross-Cultural Interaction in Ancient Borderlands (Gainesville FL 2018), pp. 89-113, on JSTOR here. Their criterion for telling Egyptian from Nubian skulls is, would you believe it, variation; “Egyptian” ones vary little from some typological average and “Nubian” ones vary lots. By this logic, basically Nubians are weird Egyptians, and any Nubian in the right range would be Egyptian. And this got published.

12. Mario Šlaus, Zeljko Tomicić, Ante Uglesić and Radomir Jurić, “Craniometric relationships among medieval Central European populations: implications for Croat migration and expansion” in Croatian Medical Journal Vol. 45 (Zagreb 2004), pp. 434–444, on ResearchGate here. For France, see references in Bonnie Effros, Merovingian Mortuary Archaeology and the Making of the Early Middle Ages, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage 35 (Berkeley CA 2003), pp. 141-154, not doing it herself, I should make clear, but critiquing those who are, with gender deduced from skulls additionally in her sights over pp. 161-162.

13. Not least because decolonising our curriculum is arguably missing the biggest point of all anyway, made forcefully by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor” in Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol. 1 (Toronto 2012), pp. 1–40, online here and very important reading.

14. Innocent Pikirayi, “Gold, Black Ivory, and Houses of Stone: historical archaeology in Africa” in Martin Hall and Stephen W. Silliman (edd.), historical archaeology, Blackwell Studies in Global Archaeology 9 (Malden MA 2006), pp. 230–250.

Did the Academy ever get hacked?

Over-promised and till now undelivered, this is the blogpost I have been putting in so much work on that it ate up my last three blogging days and you’ve had only apologies to read here for ages. Once I was halfway through the work for this, the sunk costs fallacy held me to the task – but it therefore behoved me to make it worth your while to read, and I’ve tried. It’s about a book which came out in 2013, an essay volume called Hacking the Academy, which, it proudly proclaimed, was "crowd-sourced in one week" (more on that below) and was a collection of essays forecasting, planning or just wishing for a complete revision of academic and university practices in the brave new light of the Internet as it was then developing (or, given print process speeds, as it was for the most part two to three years before).¹

Although at the time I never read the book in full, there are a few bits of it which I did catch and still cite now and then, some in approval and some not, and because of this in July 2020 it occurred to me that I ought to grab it into my citation library.² In doing so I was forced for the first time at least to skim the contents and it struck me with force how badly the thing seemed to have aged. That wasn’t unexpected, of course; it’s a book about the Internet, after all. Years and years ago, like, 2009 ago, I wrote a post about a conference paper I’d just then read from 1998, taking its author’s first tentative steps into what then passed for the scholarly Internet, and the main thing I found then was that almost all of what they wrote about had since gone.³ My first impression from reconfronting Hacking the Academy nine years on was not quite that, however, but that either the things it had to say were still true, and that this was a problem because obviously they hadn’t been hacked, or else they were failed anticipations or bad ideas in the first place. And at that point I stubbed a post to do another of those appraisals about this more recent piece of technical evangelism. But then, of course, I hadn’t done the background work… So if that sounds interesting then read on; if not, another post will be along soon with photos of tourism in it that might interest you instead.

Why not syndicate with ACI?

Some time ago now, I got an e-mail from someone offering to publicise this blog for me. This happens now and then, and is usually either search engine optimisation or someone trying to launch some kind of aggregator platform that they want me reciprocally to advertise. In all these cases I decline; the blog already ranks high enough in web searches and, if it doesn’t rank as high as it used to, that’s actually good in some ways. Quite apart from the sometimes inexplicable nature of some of that traffic, it’s a pain searching for images for your teaching or blog posts and finding that the best, but still wrong, hits for what you want are things you already put on the web yourself. Anyway, this is a post about such an offer which I also declined, back in 2019, but which I had to think harder about, because it may not have been a scam as such, but I thought at the time that it was still doing things wrong in some ways, and I think I still do. But it deserves thought.

The company in question was called ACI Information Group, though it began and now still exists as Newstex, and what they offered was not being on a page of links with a hundred competitors, but something more curated, which was firstly, syndication, so that anything I posted would be passed to databases of scholarly blogging apparently being maintained by several providers, including LexisNexis and (at that time, but no longer) ProQuest, against each of whom I have slightly irrational animus. Secondly, however, and more powerfully, they would register each of my posts with a DOI (digital object identifier) so that it could more easily be cited. It was actually the second of these that deterred me. As I say, the blog is pretty findable anyway and although I have a fraction of the page-views here I once had (approximately a hundredth of the glory days of 2009-11), I have close to 800 subscribers, some whom I suspect of actually reading the thing, so my publicity machinery probably works about as well as anyone’s can who stays off Twitter, Facebook or Instagram (to name the platforms of the moment; come back in twelve years and see which of these names needs changing…) So the syndication probably wouldn’t have got me much. But they obviously thought that the treatment of my blogging as if it were a scholarly resource would attract me and it had the opposite effect, so, why?

Well, two things. Firstly there’s the economics of it, and secondly there’s the question of blogging as scholarship. Economics is easier to explain, as it’s basically the great Internet maxim, “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” Registering DOIs costs a lot of money, so the only reason it makes sense for someone to do that for me is because it makes it easier for them to sell my content to LexisNexis and ProQuest. Likewise, it only makes sense for those concerns to buy that content if they are themselves then selling subscriptions to the databases. Now, electronic subscription costs are the biggest millstone around the neck of academic information; they rise every year and if you cut them, you lose the lot, nothing on the shelf to keep, nothing except spare budget from the vanishment of information you used to have. But this case would have been especially annoying, as the content these people would have been paying for was on the web for free in the first place; all ACI and then their patrons were charging for was putting it in front of people so that those people didn’t have to find it themselves. Firstly, I’m not sure that actually would have got me any new readers; but secondly, it puts me in the position of the authors whose ancient books go onto the web for free and then wind up for sale on Amazon and so on as print-on-demand copies made from the free PDFs their printers hope people won’t find. I didn’t want to endorse that economy.

But as I say, that wasn’t actually my big objection, and the second one takes more explaining because it involves the question of whether blogging counts as scholarship.¹ Now, you might argue that anyone who will cheerfully perpetrate multi-thousand-word blog posts with twenty-plus footnotes each is in a bad place to argue that it’s not; and certainly I hope that my blogging is at least scholarly. But really, unless I’m actually writing about stuff I was researching for some other purpose, I don’t have time to research stuff that goes up here very deeply, and long-term readers will know that this sometimes catches me and I have to make corrections. But those updates and corrections never go out to susbcribed readers, who just get the initial, faulty version dropped into their feeds or INBOXes. I have occasionally done library work to substantiate a blog post, but I do try not to have to. I link to sources I would not cite in fully academic writing, and I check fewer things in general. It’s not done to the same standard.²

You might say in response to that that some of the things I’ve posted here have actually become scholarly publications, so must have been pretty like scholarship and may even have been it. But let’s look at that more closely. In 2007 I had a short conversation with Jinty Nelson about crop yields and she repeated to me something from her excellent book Charles the Bald that set me onto the question of how far I believed Georges Duby’s old story that early medieval crop yields were really poor.³ I wrote something about that here in 2010 which was the germ of the argument which became my 2019 article on the subject.⁴ But the 9-year gestation time was really important. In the course of it, I got a small grant to support presenting the research at Kalamazoo; I got important feedback there; I then read a lot more and in 2013, I think, I sent a draft off to Chris Wickham (whom I had by then met and indeed worked with), who told me other things I needed to read, which not only provided vital missing data but also led me massively to shrink a whole section of the argument about experimental archaeology. And then, of course, I actually submitted the thing and it went past expert reviewers who also made suggestions about further reading and changes. The eventual 2019 version, therefore, had had masses more packed into it, some other stuff dropped or shrunk, and had been past numerous different experts all of whom knew stuff I didn’t. It was better, it was different and I still think it’s right and one of the most important things I’ve written. And yes, it started here, but that really was only the start. The central idea is the same but the explanation of it changed hugely. I wouldn’t now want anyone citing the old blog post when they could be citing, you know, the good version. I’m not averse to having the blog in general cited, at all, but only when there’s nothing better; the main reason I footnote is so that you, the reader, might know what there is that’s better.

So what I’m essentially saying, I suppose, is that real scholarship, the stuff you can hopefully rely on, comes from possibly-years of work and emerges in conversation with others; you can’t just blag it. I’m not necessarily singing out for the efficacy of the peer review system here, about which I (like everyone who’s been through it, probably) have my doubts; but something like it needs to happen. If a writer of a scholarly proposition isn’t willing to listen to other people’s doubts and suggestions, there really isn’t any mechanism by which everyone else, or even the writer themselves, can differentiate that proposition from personal delusion. Some would doubtles argue that the academy just reinforces the delusions it likes to maintain collectively that way; but there’s got to be some checking process before something can proceed to acceptance. And when this offer was made to me, I just felt that sticking a DOI on anything I might have come up with an afternoon was cutting that pathway to acceptance too short, even if it hadn’t also meant someone else getting to charge money for work out of which I got nothing.

Furthermore, one might also want to consider what else would be in those databases that would have been the end product of all of this. My blogposts probably imitate the scholarly form too much, but others might do so too little. I’ve read some actually really good analyses on blogs I still can’t cite, because as they themselves don’t make it clear where their information comes from, I can’t be sure it’s not just repeated from somewhere else without attribution. If a huge pile of those became a searchable resource being sold to academic libraries as credible scholarship, well, anyone could be in there repeating stuff from anywhere. Curation might obviate this, but you’d never be sure without resorting to outside checks (though ordinary academic publication is getting pretty hard to filter like this anyway).⁵ Who are an electronic information company to judge whether I know what I’m talking about? Or anyone else? Of course, there is definitely still a problem, despite open access, in making the knowledge of tested and acknowledged experts available to everyone who wants it, even other experts—and companies like ProQuest have their share of blame to bear for that—but since this would be a subscription resource, it isn’t solving that problem.⁶ It’s all a bit of a threat to the idea of expertise to entertain this devil’s bargain. And without the idea of expertise, to be honest, the academy is sunk anyway; it is one of the many planks without which our ship will not sail. So when I saw someone trying to cut that plank short on my own ship, I told them no. I hope that still makes sense.

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1. Of course, I have pedigree disagreeing with others on this: see Alex Sayf Cummings and Jomathan Jarrett, “Only Typing? Informal Writing, Blogging, and the Academy” in Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki (edd.), Writing History in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor MI 2013), pp. 246–258, online here.

2. I should say that the exception to almost everything I say here about my blog is my ancient piece “Material Motivations for Participation in the First Crusade” in A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe, 13th January 2007, online here, which isn’t actually a blog post but an article I could never find a home for and put here instead. It wasn’t peer-reviewed in any sense when I posted it except that I’d asked one senior Crusaderist to look over it and he’d called it OK; but since then I’ve, rather flatteringly, had colleagues want to cite it because no-one else quite says what it says. And also, it’s open to comment, the comments are part of the 15-year record it has and I don’t intend to do anything else with it, so you may as well cite it if you want to. But for the rest of the blog, it’s either not worth citing or I’m working on a better version…

3. Janet L. Nelson, Charles the Bald (London 1992), p. 27; Georges Duby, “Le problème des techniques agricoles” in Agricoltura e mondo rurale in Occidente nell’alto medioevo, Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo 13 (Spoleto 1966), pp. 267–284; Duby, L’économie rurale et la vie des campagnes dans l’occident médiéval (France, Angleterre, Empire, IX–XV siècles) (Paris 1964), transl. Cynthia Postan as Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West (London 1968), pp. 25–27 of the translation; Duby, Guerriers et paysans, VII–XII^e siècle: premier essor de l’économie européenne (Paris 1973), transl. Howard B. Clarke as Duby, The early growth of the European economy: warriors and peasants from the seventh to the twelfth century (London 1974), pp. 25–29 of the translation.

4. Jonathan Jarrett, “Outgrowing the Dark Ages: agrarian productivity in Carolingian Europe re-evaluated” in Agricultural History Review Vol. 67 (Reading 2019), pp. 1–28.

5. Jeffrey Beall, “What I learned from predatory publishers” in Biochemia medica Vol. 27 (Zagreb 2017), pp. 273–278.

6. Nigel Vincent & Chris Wickham (edd.), Debating Open Access (London 2013), online here; Rebecca Darley, Daniel Reynolds & Chris Wickham, Open Access Journals in Humanities and Social Science: a British Academy research project (London 2014); Plan S and the History Journal Landscape, by Margot Finn, Guidance Paper (London 2019), online here.

Universities Are Not… Really Supposed to Make Money

🚨BREAKING: employers reject UCU proposals to pay 3.8% more to protect benefits.@UniversitiesUK have told us they intend to confirm the results of the employer consultation as reported below.

Email from @DrJoGrady soon.

Strike action continues on Monday. #OneOfUsAllOfUs https://t.co/ikC1FEGK3d

— UCU (@ucu) February 19, 2022

So here we go with the first of my analyses, for whatever they’re worth, of the negative characteristics of the current English university that help explain why their operations and staffing seem to have come to such a complete impasse just now. Let me start by saying that I don’t mean, by the title of this post, that I consider it illegitimate for a university to make a profit on its business. Rather, I mean that the current UK system has been set up in such a way as to make it almost impossible for a university to do that. This post is for explaining that contention, which underpins the logic of the subsequent posts and helps explain why the current strike action is achieving so little despite its continuing escalation. (Executive intransigence has got to take some of the blame as well, of course, and there are plenty of things that could be done that are more than the current nothing, but I think there is an economic explanation for why we are seeing so little exploration of that possibility.) I should say again before I begin that these are my own views and do not represent those of my exployers and that they’re only true for the UK, and to be honest, for England and Wales within the UK, though Scotland will, on present trajectory, end up here too.¹

So. There are three main sources of income for a UK university: ‘home’ student fees, research grants and international student fees, plus a certain amount of block funding from the government known as QR. The last is allocated by ranking in the infamous Research Excellence Framework, an eight-yearly count-up and grading of research outputs.² We also have to do a painstaking annual account of all our activity called TRAC (Transparent Resource Allocation and Costing) to be allowed to receive it, so the administrative burden of receiving this money is really quite high, and some have argued that it doesn’t in fact pay for itself. This must be truer at universities which win less of that funding than the ones who are ranked higher in the whole process, but has been argued even at Oxford, which is usually at or close to the top.³ So this is a difficult income to value, and the first three I mentioned are pretty clearly more important. Some, older, places, also reap quite a lot out of estate and investment revenues and there is an increasing role for alumni donations, but for most universities the big three streams are the ones I’ve outlined.

The trouble is that these streams are limited and don’t actually cover the costs towards which they are paid. At this time, tuition fees in the UK are capped at £9,250 per (undergraduate) student per year. That hasn’t changed since late on in David Cameron’s rule (remember him?). But a report by KPMG in 2019 established that the average cost of teaching a degree to the institution was just over £10,372 per student per year.⁴ Some subjects were on average a little cheaper than the fees – including history – but many were not; more than two-thirds of students were enrolled on courses which cost more than the fees. And of course, some universities put more money than others into their provision – Oxford, while I was there nearly a decade before, estimated its costs per student per year as more like £15,000, and the History Faculty sold its own library building to offset the deficit rather than adjust its teaching methods. Most places find themselves in difficulties that are different from that one. But the basic point is that universities can’t charge what their provision costs actually are, because the fees are capped, expressly to stop them from making too much money. And every now and then the government talks about reducing them, which when they’re half the sector’s income, obviously throws every financial officer in a university into a panic and people on precarious contracts lose their jobs.

As far as research goes, we’ve already seen that there are questions about whether the QR funding that supports general research activity is actually worth the cost of receipt. Of course there are external grants, and in some fields they pay for most research activity. But a report by Oxford thinktank HEPI in 2017 set out a good basis for believing that research grants don’t in fact offset the full cost of research.⁵ That is not least because they are almost never awarded with money in hand for administration, but whether the recipient university ‘top-slices’ it (thus defunding the project by that amount, and making it impossible for the researchers to do it without working partly unpaid) or not, that management cost is still being paid. Most universities are thus subsiding their research activity, presumably because they need it to look credible, but it doesn’t make them money, and no funding body is going to increase their grants to help with universities’ running costs, because they want, understandably, only to pay for the research.⁶ Once again, the university is not supposed to make money here.

Postgraduate student fees, I should add, don’t really help here unless the student is privately funded. If the funding comes from a project, it’s really research funding and works like the above. If the student obtains a scholarship, that is money the university already has, or has had allocated to it by means of what is now called a doctoral training partnership or centre for doctoral training. In these arrangements, a block of money is assigned to a group of supposedly-collaborating universities who then have to fight for it with each other on the basis of whose students look like the best prospects. It’s a microcosm of the ugly way that funding shortage turns universities into competitors, and has to be administered through a whole system of committees and meetings which chew up hours of staff time that is not, of course, paid for by the actual scholarships, which are only supposed to pay for the students’ tuition and maintenance. So even those lose universities money overall and they would actually make more by not awarding them and earning interest off the capital, except that then of course that would be taken away, because universities are not supposed to make money.

This only leaves international student fees, therefore, which because they are not a matter of public concern for the UK government can be whatever the institution likes. As a result, that HEPI report reckoned that each international student in the UK was probably subsidising research activity to the tune of £8,000 each.⁷ But Covid has obviously wrecked that market, and while it probably also for a while saved universities a load of infrastructure costs (as long as their IT set-up was ready for a challenge), that bonus is now gone and the international student market has not fully recovered.⁸ And of course, international students do not arrive equally distributed; some places have many, on certain courses at least, and some places hardly any, so even when it was fully operational this survival strategy was open only to some universities.

This, then, is the context for the proposed cuts to pensions provision, the persistent below-inflation pay offers and the refusal to acknowledge problems like workload, casualisation and the gender pay-gap. English universities struggle to pay for themselves at the best of times, because they’re not supposed to make money. One of their main sources of income has been frozen against inflation for six years (and now, in the course of writing these posts, for a further two), so the money they’re not making has got smaller, while research awards have also been cut back, especially with a whole year of inaccessibility of European funding. That revenue source is also shrinking. And none of this is secure: tuition fees have been under threat of revision downwards for years now (and still are despite the freeze), grants are obviously not guaranteed, QR funding was cut away from the arts and humanities only last year. No-one can plan more than two years ahead, let alone five, so from the top the only sensible strategy looks like accumulating a safety cushion and stockpiling revenue. But all the ways of doing that are shrinking relative to costs. With international student fees also now fewer, savings therefore have to be found somewhere, especially with the financial exhaustion of the pandemic. And since usually between half and two-thirds of a university’s budget is staff costs, the biggest savings can be made there. And saving there, of course, means paying staff less. And so we find ourselves here.

In the next of these posts I’ll argue that not only do UK universities not have very much flexibility in their income, but that the constituencies whom they serve most are not the ones who pay for their existence. That post and this present critical problems for the frequent analogy between universities and businesses, and from that other implications follow. Stay tuned!

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1. Though for the complexities of the differences between English and Scottish funding régimes, see The Comparative Funding of Higher Education Teaching in Scotland and England: A Step by Step Calculation, ELC 03-01–34 ELC (Edinburgh 2003), online here. I do realise that was a while ago but I bet it hasn’t got simpler.

2. Most thoroughly condemned in Derek Sayer, Rank Hypocrisies: The Insult of the REF, SAGE Swifts (New York City NY 2015), online here.

3. For example, Anne-Wil Harzing, “Running the REF on a rainy Sunday afternoon: Do metrics match peer review?”, White Paper in Harzing.com: Research in International Management, 2017, online here; Dorothy Bishop, “Is the benefit of the REF really worth the cost?” in Times Higher Education (THE) 28th April 2021, online here, and for Oxford, Tim Horder, “Performance Indicators” in Oxford Magazine Noughth Week, Michaelmas Term 2012, pp. 1–3. It should probably be noted that the government do have TRAC and its burdens under review.

4. Understanding costs of undergraduate provision in Higher Education, KPMG LLP, Costing study report (London 2019), online here; the figures I’ve given are not themselves in the report, but can be calculated from the figures they give per subject on p. 18.

5. How much is too much? Cross-subsidies from teaching to research in British universities, by Vicky Olive, HEPI Reports 100 (Oxford 2017), online here.

6. Though, it should be said, while they existed the Higher Education Funding Council for England seem to have accepted that top-slicing would happen to their awards and to have been fine with it, because they saw their business as keeping the whole system of universities running: see A Review of QR Funding in English HEIs: Process and Impact. Report to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) by PACEC Public and Corporate Economic Consultants and Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge, by Barry Moore, by Nil Djan Tackey, by Rod Spires, by Alan Hughes and by Alberto García Mogollón (London 2014), online here, with interested references to the different approaches taken by different universities almost throughout. Of course, now HEFCE is gone, so they proved less sustainable than the institutions they aimed to sustain.

7. Olive, How much is too much?.

8. I have to admit that the most recent figures I can find suggest that actually, the pandemic has made much less difference to student choices and enrolments than anyone expected: see Lucy Van Essen-Fishman, “The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on 2020/21 Student data” in HESA, 25th January 2022, online here, but that is only comparing with 2019/20 data, which had already been hit pretty badly by Brexit and tension with China, neither of which have gone away.

Universities Are Not…: A Series of Strike Posts

https://twitter.com/danpullinger/status/1494630783843242004

As mentioned the other day, when we went on strike again this time, somewhat despairing, I thought I would try and write down what I think is going wrong in the university sector in the UK. Now that we reach the end of those strikes, with nothing achieved and more strikes therefore announced, I feel that I should do something with the results. I don’t pretend to be the first, or probably even the hundredth, to do this, and I haven’t read most of the others to be honest, so this is probably nothing new; but some of the places it got me were new to me, so I thought it was worth an audience.¹ I wrote these all offline as one piece, then broke them into a sequence, making six posts including this one. They’re short, honest, or at least shorter than my regular posts. I intend to run them one a day starting today, and then, I promise, get back to medieval content that is safely in the past. But the present is weighing on me just now…

So. I’ve been working in the university sector for just under twenty years now, one way or another. I probably began with a fairly idealised view of what that world was, because of being a post-graduate working in the Golden Triangle of Cambridge-London-Oxford, and because of being the very last intake to be able to come through undergraduate study on grants all the way; even if I was on the breadline, I was mostly debt-free and living among and working with some of the best academic facilities in the world on a project of my own conceiving. I also started teaching in an institution like no other, where adult learners with world experience had signed up because they genuinely wanted to know about our subjects. So I had a long way down for disillusion to carry me. Nonetheless, I don’t think I’m alone in seeing a change in the sector since 2003, when I taught my first classes, and numerous opinion pieces and even some peer-reviewed literature seem to back me up.² Now I’ve been on strike again, for the umpteenth time since I got the job at Leeds five-and-a-bit years ago, over the same unresolved issues as the last three times, which remain unresolved, and consequently have been wondering quite hard what it is that I am fighting to do on better terms, and whether it is actually possible. I find I struggle to articulate what I think the 21st-century university is for, and while I might argue that a big part of its problem is that neither can the people who run or who fund it, I do at least have some fairly clear ideas about what it isn’t.

So, what follows may not be the only or even the most widely-read vision of the 21st-century university, even among those emanating from my organisation, at the moment; but what, indeed, is a university that does not speak in diverse voices? That said, it’s probably more important than usual to emphasise that these are my views only and do not represent the views or position of my employers in any way. I should also say that the series relates only to universities in the UK; I don’t know any other system from the inside and our funding regime is so peculiar that the economics that drive our system probably don’t apply anywhere else in the same way. I’m very happy to hear comparisons though! But let me see if I can put my case…

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1. A decade or so back, my default cite for this would have been Stefan Collini, What are universities for? (London 2012), but firstly I see that even then he was reviewing all the other people doing the same thing – see Stefan Collini, ‘Sold Out’ in London Review of Books Vol. 35 no. 20 (London 2013), pp. 3–12 – and secondly, sadly, it obviously didn’t convince anyone in a position to do so to change anything. Since then, of course, even the person Collini was then fighting has weighed in against what is happening, partly of course as a result of his policies, to the sector, in the form of David Willetts, A University Education (Oxford 2017), but that is hardly the point of view of a practitioner! The most recent academic thing I have in my folder of cites of this kind of thing is Resourcing Higher Education: Challenges, Choices and Consequences by Margarita Kalamova, by Simon Roy, by Cláudia Sarrico and by Thomas Weko (Paris 2020), DOI: 10.1787/735e1f44-en, but it cannot be said that I have surveyed the sector. On the other hand, when I already have a folder containing a thousand cites of woe, perhaps I shouldn’t…

2. Some significant examples: Adrian Barnett, Inger Mewburn and Sara Schroter, “Working 9 to 5, not the way to make an academic living: observational analysis of manuscript and peer review submissions over time” in British Medical Journal Vol. 367 no. 8227 (London 2019), l6460; Mark Erickson, Paul Hanna and Carl Walker, “The UK higher education senior management survey: a statactivist response to managerialist governance” in Studies in Higher Education Vol. 46 no. 11 (Abingdon 2020), pp 2134–2151; Troy A. Heffernan, “Reporting on vice-chancellor salaries in Australia’s and the United Kingdom’s media in the wake of strikes, cuts and ‘falling performance'” in International Journal of Leadership in Education Vol. 24 no. 5 (Abingdon 2021), pp. 571–587.

In celebration of the life of Susan Reynolds

It has become all too frequent a thing, as I get older and those who have helped me along my career remain the same distance older than me, that I have to put aside whatever I had meant to post on a given blog day because news reaches me that somebody who deserves celebration or memorial has sadly died, and thus it is today. Susan Reynolds, whom I feel as if I’ve mentioned on this blog a hundred times, passed away on Thursday morning, with family and friends around her, I am told. (There don’t seem to be any obituaries up yet; I have to thank Fraser McNair and David Ganz for making sure I knew.) She was 92. I am very sad about this, because I enjoyed her work and indeed her company a lot and I know I’m not alone in this, but I’ve had a couple of goes at writing this as tidings of doom, and it just won’t write like that because everything I remember of her was basically uplifting and encouraging. So I blog not to mourn Susan but to celebrate her, and I hope that if you knew her you can do likewise.

This seems to be the only photo of Susan on the Internet, and is probably from the 1980s? And more immediately it’s from the IHR website, linked through

I suppose that for most people, or rather for people who didn’t have the privilege of hanging around the Earlier Middle Ages Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in London a while, Susan Reynolds is a name one knows primarily from her books, and especially Kingdoms and Communities in Medieval Europe and the almost-infamous Fiefs and Vassals.¹ There were actually more than that, including two Variorum collections of essays and her last actual monograph, completed in 2014 when she was a mere 85, plus a plethora of useful and incisive chapters and articles I could cite, but those two books especially kept her on reading lists across the English-speaking world within quite a short space of their publication and will continue to do so for a while yet.² That’s because there are few people who could deal as well as Susan did with all the difficulties of interpreting massed textual sources by people whose thoughtworlds were a millennium removed from our own and still extract some kind of synthesis about what they did and why, often over really quite a scale. So there’s all that, the kind of scholarly legacy we might all hope to leave but must know that few of us will, but if you know Susan’s name it’s because you know some or all of that already. What might not be so obvious, without having met her or talked to her, is quite how remarkable it was that any of that came to be, because Susan’s passage through the life academic was not by any means what would now pass for normal.

Now, I’m not going to recount her life here, partly because who am I to do that and so on, but mostly because she did it herself, in an interview for the IHR in 2008, and it’s online here. The sound file is gone from there, but happily, if ironically, the Internet Archive has preserved it where the IHR’s own archive pages have not, so there you can not just read it but hear it—and you don’t have a full impression of Susan unless you know how she talked. So I very much recommend giving that a listen. But, either in text or in sound, gather in the first fifteen minutes or so, in which she laid out her scholarly biography, because it’s sort of amazing, for at least these reasons:

1. she did not get a first at undergraduate, she had no MA, no Ph. D., and her only postgraduate qualification was a diploma in archive management;
2. she was never a professor; in fact I’m not sure she was ever promoted in any of her jobs; and
3. much of her substantial work was only begun, let alone published, after she retired at age 58 from what was only her second university post; even Kingdoms and Communities only came out three years before that.

It’s easy to say to all that, well, things were different then (and she repeatedly stressed those differences in the interview), but that makes it sound as her work also dates from some distant era, whereas actually, Fiefs and Vassals came out when I was an undergraduate; Kingdoms and Communities went into its second edition just as I finished being an undergraduate; and her last book came out when I was working in Birmingham. And this was a retiree, turning out work that overthrew or updated whole subfields in ways that young ambitious scholars would have suffered greatly to achieve. In her sixties into seventies, in other words, Susan Reynolds became a whole new big thing in the field. If anyone’s life demonstrates that it’s never too late, surely this is it.

Now of course, she was an ageing lady by then and, as that interview shows, deeply conscious of having once been brighter and faster and being able to remember more. I had a couple of conversations with her where she lamented this, while I wished I were half as sharp even then. She had a reputation among attendees of the IHR seminar as a fierce questioner, and certainly she would pin anyone down on matters of what the terms used in medieval sources really meant—one of her hobby-horses, definitely, though again, the interview is very good in explaining why it matters—but I don’t think I ever saw her kick downwards, beyond that injunction to think about words. The impression I formed was that she didn’t think it was fair to attack anyone her junior, and of course by the time I knew her there weren’t many people who weren’t… The two people I saw get the full force of her critique, in fact, were John Gillingham, in person, and Rees Davies in print, and it is to be noted that she singled both of them out, in that interview, for praise as brilliant scholars; so I think she just felt that they should have known better…³

Certainly, what I mainly remember Susan for is interest and kindness. Quite early on we bonded somewhat over being the only two people in England whom each other knew to have thought about what the people called Hispani in the legislation of the Carolingian rulers actually were, in terms of status; but I used to make a point of chatting with Susan whenever I was in the IHR and saw her, partly in the hope of some delicious bon mot that could be quoted later, I admit, which I was not the only one collecting, but also because it was always interesting to talk with her and because she was always happy to be interested.⁴

The Semantic Triangle, as conceptualised by Charles Ogden and Ivor Richards and as used by Susan Reynolds, from Patricia Brenes’s In My Own Terms, linked through, where further explanation is provided

On one occasion, when she had a presentation to give in the near future in Vienna and was reckoning to use Powerpoint for the first time, in her eighties let’s remember, she asked if I could work through the software with her when I was next in London, to prevent her holding everything up and being “foolish”. I think it was me just because I was there while she was worrying about it, but we set a date anyway. By the time it came round, every other reason I’d had for being in town that day had collapsed. I went down anyway though, from Birmingham I think, because I just couldn’t face cancelling on Susan. I went straight to the IHR, found her in the tea-room, corralled an empty seminar room in which to do the computer demo, and spent ten minutes coaching her with the software and fifty fascinating minutes discussing the implications of the single diagram she’d painstakingly got onto the slide for her paper, which I have found again and which you see above. We got chucked out of the seminar room when someone actually needed it for a seminar, parted ways and I went straight back home on the train, and that was basically my day. I look back on it now as a day tremendously well-spent, and kind of an honour. The volume of essays that was dedicated to her clearly professes that it wasn’t just me who felt this way about her, either.⁵

So as I say, I tried to write this sadly, and obviously I am sad that she’s died, how could I not be? Apart from anything else, lockdown must have been tremendously hard for someone whose life was so arranged around the sociability of London academia and a regular routine of library visits, and I’m glad that at least by the time the time came people could be with her again. But I also don’t suppose she was actually finished, despite being 92; I imagine there were things she was still working on and indeed work of hers that must still be in press and will now follow her intellectual cortège, and we might wonder what else there would have been if she’d been given any more time. But despite all this, I cannot remember Susan Reynolds sadly. Tales of her will continue to delight me, her work will continue to anchor and inspire my own, and I hope I will always smile, even if sadly, to think of her. And I hope this all sort of explains why. I feel very fortunate to have known her.

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1. Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300 (Oxford 1984; 2nd edn 1997); eadem, Fiefs and Vassals: the medieval evidence reinterpreted (Oxford 1994).

2. What to select, where to start? Firstly the other two monographs, of course, Reynolds, An Introduction to the History of English Medieval Towns (Oxford 1977) and eadem, Before Eminent Domain: Toward a History of Expropriation of Land for the Common Good (Chapel Hill NC 2014), both prefigured by useful shorter pieces. After that, a top five illustrative shorter pieces might be eadem, “What Do We Mean by ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Anglo-Saxons’?” in Journal of British Studies Vol. 24 (Chicago IL 1985), pp. 395–414; eadem, “The Historiography of the Medieval State” in Michael Bentley (ed.), A Companion to Historiography (London 1997), pp. 117–138; Susan Reynolds, “Empires: a problem of comparative history” in Historical Research Vol. 79 (Oxford 2006), pp. 151–165; eadem, “Early Medieval Law in India and Europe: A Plea for Comparisons” in The Medieval History Journal Vol. 16 (New York City 2013), pp. 1–20; and eadem, “Society: hierarchy and solidarity” in Benjamin Z. Kedar and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks (edd.), The Cambridge World History, volume V: Expanding Webs of Exchange and Conflict, 500 CE–1500 CE (Cambridge 2015), pp. 94–115.

3. I can’t remember what John had done to catch Susan’s ire, but I think it must have been at his IHR presentation of the paper which became John Gillingham, “Fontenoy and After: pursuing enemies to the death in France between the ninth and the eleventh centuries” in Paul Fouracre & David Ganz (edd.), Frankland: The Franks and the World of the Early Middle Ages. Essays in Honour of Dame Jinty Nelson (Manchester 2008), pp. 242-265, which was before I began blogging. In Davies’s case the problem was caused by Rees Davies, “The Medieval State: The Tyranny of a Concept?” in Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 16 (Oxford 2003), pp. 280–300, to which cf. Susan Reynolds, “There were States in Medieval Europe: A Response to Rees Davies”, ibid. pp. 550–555. Davies’s piece was itself a critique of Reynolds, “Historiography of the Medieval State”, so it could be argued that he started it.

4. For which reason, in Jonathan Jarrett, “Settling the Kings’ Lands: aprisio in Catalonia in perspective” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 18 (Oxford 2010), pp. 320–342, you will find on p. 321 n. 2 a citation of Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, pp. 107-111, which until Cullen J. Chandler, “Between Court and Counts: Carolingian Catalonia and the aprisio grant, 778-897″ in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 11 (Oxford 2002), pp. 19–44, to which I was responding in my piece, was the only work in English in what Carolingian or Catalan aprisio might in fact be. The thanks that Susan, among others, got on p. 320 was for exactly those kinds of conversations.

5. That volume being Pauline Stafford, Janet Nelson & Jane Martindale (edd.), Law, Laity and Solidarities: Essays in honour of Susan Reynolds (Manchester 2001).

Periodical Coincidences

Here’s something a bit more light-hearted this week, or if you prefer, trivial. This builds on a very old realisation of mine of something basically meaningless, when during building up a list of things I hoped to read for my MA dissertation I clocked that the journals Viator and Britannia started in the same year, with their first issue in 1970.¹ Both Latin titles, too, but different sides of the Atlantic and basically different, though overlapping, period focuses, so it’s hard to do anything with that fact other than notice it. And there that idea rested until some way into my doctoral research, which I approached fresh from employment which had given me the dangerous idea that you could solve almost any information management problem with an Access database, as long as you didn’t mind solving it badly. And we have already seen since long ago that my instincts in these directions are rarely sanely guided…

So, what I wanted was a database into which I could transcribe my old paper lists of things I hope to read (present tense because by and large I still do hope to…) along with the somewhat crazy system I had devised of clocking their apparent importance and the number of times I’d seen them cited (which is also a measure of importance, however bad), basically an accumulating set of marginal sigla.² Well, that could be turned into a numerical score and apart from the fact that this system inevitably privileged stuff that was ancient, it was a functional way of building reading lists as far as it went. That wasn’t very far, though, really, because my old paper lists, in an effort to keep things one line long only, had only ever recorded the volume-level location of articles and chapters, not their actual titles, which might have been invaluable as keyword. Without them, however, I just new that, for example, there were lots of things I apparently needed to read in the 1986 volume of Annales but without raw memory or going and looking at it, I’d no idea what they were.³ Not my best piece of diversionary work, all told, but there we go; you don’t go building bibliographical databases by yourself in every developer’s least favourite database software if you’re a completely sensible person, do you?

Screenshot of the madness

Anyway, all this does have a point, honest. Because I didn’t have article and chapter titles in the database, when I came across what might be a new journal article, the easiest way for me to find if I had it recorded was not to search for the author’s name or the journal’s title, but to search for the combination of volume and year, which in theory should be close-to-unique. So, for that issue of Annales I’d have searched for ’41 (1986)’. But doing so reveals that also in their 41st volume that year were, probably among others, the Deutsches Archiv of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica and the Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie.⁴ Now, obviously, this isn’t really surprising: there’s hundreds and thousands of academic journals, even just in the arts and humanities, and only a couple of hundred years of journal-issuing academia in which for them all to have existed. Most of them will be crowding the newer end of that timeframe, too.⁵ Coincidences are obviously inevitable. But there are an awful lot, once you start noticing them.

Now, I am a pattern-spotting animal and, like man as a species, perhaps so evolved for it that I spot patterns that aren’t really there too easily. This leads one to start asking those always-dangerous questions that begin, “Can it be a coincidence that… ?” For example, Cambridge’s Anglo-Saxon England (not then meant to be controversial…) and the Deutsche historische Institut in Paris’s Francia (perhaps never to be controversial) both seeing first light in 1972 could be coincidence, but could also be certain constituencies of academia all feeling that their interests, perhaps looking a bit fringe in the wake of Vietnam, the hippy movement and its disintegration (remember all those campus occupations…), needed a new forum for their mutual recognition. Was there a cross-channel medievalist moment happening there?⁶ Or am I spinning hay?

Anyway, whether or not this is crazy pattern spotting, I notice two really boom years, in which I don’t see what any plausible connection could be across so wide a range of journals but something feels like it was going on. The weaker of these is 1975, in which year it seems clear that several academic networks had decided that existing fora for their kind of work were inadequate, as a result of which in one year you get Birmingham’s Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, the Jahrbuch für westdeutsche Landesgeschichte and things like Islamochristiana, Critical Inquiry, Journal of Historical Geography and Journal of Medieval History, as well as the Royal Numismatic Society’s briefly separate list of Coin Hoards. One can work towards reasons for some of these: there’s a Marxist thread linking some of those journals, and if I dug enough into their histories and first editorial boards I might find people who had bounced ideas off each other, but while you might adduce something about the general state of growth of, especially, UK academia in the 1970s, it’s hard to explain why 1975 rather than 1974 or 1976, and of course if I were interested in different journals or different fields perhaps those years would show up instead…

Still. We already drew attention to the student riots and general academic upheaval of 1968, and I can’t help wondering if something really did rattle a lot of cages at that point because the real bumper year shown up by this utterly unscientific and useless sampling method is 1970, when as well as Britannia and Viator already mentioned, the academic world was given, in no particular order:

• Cahiers de Saint-Michel de Cuxa
• Annuarium Historiae Conciliarum
• International Journal of Middle East Studies
• World Archaeology (actually 1969, on checking, but I’m not going to let mere inaccuracy stop me this far down the tunnel)
• Habis
• Journal of Interdisciplinary History
• Journal of Early Christian Studies
• Glasgow Archaeological Journal (again, actually 1969, but that is itself a coincidence, isn’t it? Or is it?)
• Estudos de Humanidades
• … and doubtless (as academics with no evidence like to say) more besides.

I can’t help but feel that something was going on, and of course, something had been. Almost certainly it is only coincidence, of course. But let me ask you: can all these coincidences really just be coincidence… ?

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1. The former for Herwig Wolfram, “The Shaping of the Early Medieval Kingdom” in Viator Vol. 1 (Berkeley CA 1970) pp. 11-20; the latter, apparently, for A. L. F. Rivet and Kenneth Jackson, “The British Section of the Antonine Itinerary” in Britannia Vol. 1 (London 1970) pp. 34-82 and Anne Robertson, “Roman Finds from Non-Roman Sites in Scotland: More Roman ‘Drift’ in Caledonia”, ibid. pp. 198-226.

2. Ironically, partly because I now actually do use better software, I can now easily produce citations on how useless citation counting is, such as Michelle L. Dion, Jane Lawrence Sumner and Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, “Gendered Citation Patterns across Political Science and Social Science Methodology Fields” in Political Analysis Vol. 26 (Cambridge 2018), pp. 312–327, DOI: 10.1017/pan.2018.12; Eric A. Fong and Allen W. Wilhite, “Authorship and citation manipulation in academic research”, ed. Lutz Bornmann in Public Library of Science One Vol. 12 (San Francisco CA 2017), e0187394, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0187394; or Jack Grove, “Quarter of citations in top journals ‘wrong or misleading'” in Times Higher Education, 16th October 2020, online here.

3. Actually, they were Dominique Iogna-Prat, “Le « baptême » du schéma des trois ordres fonctionnels : L’apport de l’école d’Auxerre dans la seconde moitié du IX^e siècle” in Annales : Économies, sociétés, civilisations Vol. 41 (Paris 1986), pp. 101-126; Michel Rouche, “La crise de l’Europe au cours de la deuxièèe moitié du VII^e siècle et la naissance des régionalismes”, ibid. pp. 347-360; Stéphane Lebecq, “Dans l’Europe du Nord des VII^e-IX^e siècles : commerce frison ou commerce franco-frison?”, ibid. pp. 361-377; Bailey K. Young, “Exemple aristocratique et mode funéraire dans la Gaule mérovingienne”, ibid. pp. 379-407; Patrick Geary, “Vivre en conflit dans une France sans État : typologie des mécanismes de règlement des conflits (1050-1200)”, trans. Jacqueline Falquvert, ibid. pp. 1107-1133 and Robert Bartlett, “Technique militaire et pouvoir politique, 900-1300”, trans. Falquevert, ibid. pp. 1135-1159. Crikey, when Annales still meant something…

4. For, respectively: Hartmut Hoffmann, “Kirche und Sklaverei im frühen Mittelalter” in Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters Vol. 42 (oops)(Hannover 1986), pp. 1-24, and Kenneth H. Jackson, “The date of the Tripartite Life of St. Patrick” in Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie Vol. 41 (Amsterdam 1986), pp. 5-45.

5. If the whole format of the academic journal is a bit strange to you at this point, here’s a confirmation that you’re not daft, it is strange, at least now: Jo Guldi, “Reinventing the Academic Journal” in Daniel J. Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt (edd.), Hacking the academy: new approaches to scholarship and teaching from digital humanities (Ann Arbor MI 2013), pp. 19–24, online here. However, it is arguable that it did make sense once: see for a lightweight intro Bonnie Swoger, “The (mostly true) origins of the scientific journal” in Scientific American 27th July 2012, online here.

6. I’m conscious that I tend to tell the history of culture in the 1960s and 1970s largely on the basis of my music collection, but I could also cite Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (London 1968) as an intimately involved primary source.

Chronicle VIII: April to June 2017

With the last component of the previously-described three month slice of my life academic now blogged, it’s time to set up the next slice, which was April, May and June of 2017. I tried writing this up the way I have done the others and then realised that, because it largely covers a vacation, it could in fact be done shorter, so here is the absolute minimalist version of my academic life in those three months, by way of signalling roughly what was going on and what the next few posts may cover!

1. Because Leeds splits its second semester either side of Easter, I’ve already told you about the modules I was teaching at this point, and there were only two weeks of them to wrap up after the Easter vacation. Furthermore, by this stage my first-year survey had someone else doing the tutorials and my second-year option had a reading week in one of the two weeks remaining, so it was down to five or six contact hours a week on average, nothing like where it had been. There was a taster lecture for an admissions open day the Saturday after teaching had stopped for everyone else, and I had to be in at 9 o’clock on a subsequent Saturday morning after the vacation to see one of my exams started, but I have to admit that that situation was worse for the students…
2. In other on-campus activity, I finally stopped doing coin cataloguing in this period. I don’t think I meant to but I just didn’t arrange going back in and then kept not doing that. Instead, my diary suggests, I was mainly in meetings or training: it has at least three times the time blocked out for such things over the period of this post as it does for teaching, though of course the teaching was packed into two weeks and the rest was not. In one of these meetings we determined that my probation would have to be extended, largely because of the disappearance of my book contract and, if only for a while as we now know, one of my articles. That at least solved something; some of the other meetings were less useful, mainly because they did not enable communication with the people that had called them. This seemed so especially when I was representing my department against library budget cuts during this period. This was in a university already embroiled in industrial dispute and building up to full-on strike action, so I guess it was symptomatic that official channels of communication were somewhat blocked. The attempt at least taught me to look for ways around them, and wider circumstances eventually saved most of the library budget, at least for a while. And of course I was working towards my teaching qualification and some of the meetings were to support that and it’s not that I think all meetings are useless. I just remember the useless ones more clearly than I do the ones that had results, apparently…
3. However, some of the meetings did have good outcomes, because they were to do with projects I was running! In the first place there was the Undergraduate Research Leadership Scheme on which I had a student working on the coin collection, and in the second place were Leeds visits that were part of the Medieval Islands project I had running with Luca Zavagno of Bilkent Universitesi. Both of these I wrote more about at the time (as just linked), so I’ll just refer you there, but they were going on in this period, it was a pleasure having Luca around for a week and that stimulated a lot of further plans, whose fruition will also be told in due season.¹
4. One thing I wasn’t doing was going to seminars, however: other than two internal work-in-progress ones, the only paper I saw given by itself was Rebecca Darley of whom we were only just speaking, who addressed the Medieval Group at Leeds on 24th April under the title ‘Seen from Across the Sea: India in the Byzantine World View’. I would never usually pass up the chance to plug a friend’s work here, but in this instance we have just been talking about it, and it was so close after the Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies where we were doing that that there was inevitable overlap, so I won’t tell it twice.²
5. However, I did make up for that by going to conferences. In fact, I went to two, one in the USA and one in China! The USA trip, squeezed into the first week of our exam season, was to the 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, as part of a Leeds posse, so that will have to be reported; there are good stories to be told. Meanwhile, the China conference is a story in itself and likewise very much worth the telling. Between the two there was also an internal workshop which I also want to talk about, because I was in it but also because it was another of those showcases of my department that seem worth sharing. And of course, though I’d have told you at the time I was unable to do any, for each of these papers I had to find time to do at least some research, so that was also beginning to happen again. One could see this brief period as the long-awaited spring after a really hard winter, perhaps. I don’t think I felt that at the time, but that’s perspective for you, isn’t it?

But still; even with the various bits of medieval tourist photography I’m going to squeeze between them, that isn’t that many posts promised. Maybe I’m getting the hang of this structure at last; maybe not. We will see! But tune in again next post for some Yorkshire medievalism and we’ll see how it goes from there.

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1. Of course, the most immediate result was our issue of al-Masāq (Vol. 31 no. 2, The World of Medieval Islands (July 2019)) but results will also be some day soon be visible in Luca’s resultant book, Beyond the Periphery: The Byzantine Insular World between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (ca. 600-850) (Amsterdam forthcoming).

2. Again, it seems worth mentioning that parts of this research at least are now (openly) available to the world as Rebecca Darley, “The Tale of the Theban Scholastikos, or Journeys in a Disconnected Sea” in Journal of Late Antiquity Vol. 12 (Baltimore ML 2019), pp. 488–518, online here, with more coming.

Rites de passage: judging a doctorate for the first time

As said last post, as 2017, when the world was quite different, rolled around, I began the year by examining my first doctorate. Pretty much as soon as the public transport started working again, in fact, I was on my way to Cambridge. Now, in fact, the thesis was fine; I’ve not yet been placed in the position of examining a thesis that wasn’t more or less OK, thankfully, and if and when I am I doubt I’ll write about it here.¹ When I say it was fine, I mean our biggest objection as examiners was that there was more in it about elephants than was strictly speaking required by the topic, but I want to reflect on the actual process a bit, just because it is a set of rituals not shared everywhere and merits reflection.

Sam Ottewill-Soulsby, discoursing on ‘”Useless Peace”: Carolingian-Umayyad Diplomacy, 810-820’, for the University of Cambridge in 2014; click through to find it as a podcast…

In the first place, my involvement in this was very much being stepped back into old networks. The person being examined was Samuel Ottewill-Soulsby, seen above, whom I had met at seminars at the Institute of Historical Research and who had also helped put on a conference three years before at which I presented. I was co-examining with someone I’d known for much longer, Dr Marios Costambeys, of the University of Liverpool but who, because of holding his doctorate from Cambridge, allowed to function as internal examiner there. Meanwhile I was the external, who has the easier job (as I now know): all the external has to do is read the thesis, write a report, sit in a room with the candidate for a couple of hours talking about their thesis, decide the judgement with the internal examiner, inform the candidate and then write up actions for the candidate if necessary, and then hand the rest over to the internal examiner for dealing with, take one’s honorarium and go home. Given the timing, I was reading Sam’s thesis over the Christmas holiday and New Year, but I have had worse tasks to take away to relatives to pore over while everyone else is celebrating the change of the calendar, and this task got much easier once it became clear that the thesis was going to be perfectly possible to pass.

Hall Court, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, photograph by Ardfern – own work, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Of course, naturally enough we had arguments and quibbles here and there. Sam’s topic was ‘Carolingian Diplomacy with the Islamic World’, which necessitated at least some examination of early medieval elephants in order to understand what would, at the time, have been understood by it when Caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd, of Arabian Nights fame, sent Charlemagne a lone bull elephant whose name was Abul ‘Abbas, this being a historical thing that actually happened between the real historical persons of those names in the late ninth century.² It just, maybe, didn’t need quite as much about elephants as Sam had put in. We advised him to cut that back and pour out his elephantine concerns in a separate article.³ I was interested in deconstructing a distinction Sam was making between diplomacy of necessity (intended to produce an outcome between the two parties) and diplomacy of prestige (intended to impress and make you look splendid but not necessarily to change anything), on the grounds that some embassies could do both; as Sam pointed out, the other option is deliberate disengagement, which can also be pursued for different reasons. Marios was interested in what Sam thought he was adding to our overall picture of the Carolingian world, to which Sam’s answer was that Charlemagne and his court were much more capable of handling contradictions in their attitudes and philosophy than our own tradition of analysis by logic and categories makes easy for us to understand; that seemed to me and still seems to me a big point, which if we could grasp properly would help us understand these worlds better. In general, to whatever we asked, Sam had good answers, which is roughly what is supposed to happen in this exercise, and we were able to pass his thesis with only a few recommended corrections, which he completed in pretty short order and thereafter, once the University bureaucracy had processed Marios’s acknowledgement of that fact, he was and is entitled to call himself Dr Ottewill-Soulsby, and richly and rightly deserved too.

The School of History, University College London

Still, it is strange to reflect upon. In 2006, in a room in University College London, I went through this same process as examinee, with quite a similar outcome (and I then got on a train to Brighton to see Clutch play with Stinking Lizaveta in support, got more than a little drunk and finally collapsed happily in what I then thought was the best company in the world, and it was really a very good day in my life).⁴ Then I went back to working in a museum for nearly five years, at last got an academic job, briefly went back into museums and then got my job at Leeds, and that last, along with having got through the process myself, now qualified me to judge whether someone else should be allowed to set out on this somewhat shaky bridge into academia, if they want to. My having some knowledge of Sam’s field was obviously also important, but it’s not the only qualification required. Consider also that, if they’ve done it right, the person being examined knows a lot more about the topic than the persons examining do; part of the job of the viva is almost to make sure of that. At the same time, it is ‘only’ an examination of a piece of written work done for a degree qualification, not a golden key to academic employment or anything. The fact that this process is the only summative assessment of a multi-year project means that the sunk costs and aspirations in it are huge but don’t change what it actually is. But nonetheless, it can mean somebody’s world. I’m very glad that the first one I was asked to do was possible to pass so uncontentiously. Thanks, Sam; you were not the only one performing a rite de passage in that room, and you made it a lot easier for both of us than it might have been…

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1. I’m now up to four, because that’s what this blog’s backlog looks like. Each will be told a little of in its due season, though, because all their respective victors deserve their time on the podium.

2. On which, apart of course from Samuel Ottewill-Soulsby, “Carolingian Diplomacy with the Islamic World” (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 2017), pp. 83-92, you could profitably see Leslie Brubaker, “The Elephant and the Ark: Cultural and Material Interchange across the Mediterranean in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries” in Dumbarton Oaks Papers Vol. 58 (Washington DC 2004), pp. 175–195, or more broadly Paul Edward Dutton, Charlemagne’s Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age (New York City 2004), pp. 43-68.

3. It must be said that no elephantine article has yet come forth, but what has is Samuel Ottewill-Soulsby, “The Camels of Charles the Bald” in Medieval Encounters Vol. 25 (Leiden 2019), pp. 263–292, if that’s any use to you instead…

4. The matter of that day then being Jonathan Jarrett, “Pathways of Power in late-Carolingian Catalonia” (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 2005), online here, as well of course as Clutch, Robot Hive / Exodus (DRT Entertainment 2005) and Stinking Lizaveta, Caught Between Worlds (At A Loss 2004), among others of their works.