Logographer

“[T]he mob of the sluggards has so grown in numbers that unless there are at least a modest few like yourself to defend the exact use of the language of Latium from the rust of vulgar barbarisms, we shall in a short time be lamenting its extinction and annihilation, so sadly will all the bright ornaments of noble expression be dulled by the slovenliness of the mob.” — Sidonius, writing in the fifth century, to his friend Hisparius, Ep. 2.10.1. (Translation W. B. Anderson, Loeb Classical Library).

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It was a beautiful summer morning for a visit to Stanford today. There is no parking fee on Saturday, and since it’s summer, there are no crowds.

I went to Green Library to consult the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, and although I transcribed some entries directly into a text file on my computer, some entries were just too long for me to copy that way. So I took out my trusty pocket camera and, in the fashion of Cold War spies, took snapshots of some of the longer passages. This worked pretty well, I think, but you can see for yourself.

After collating the photos of the pages into a single PDF file in Acrobat Pro, I then used the OCR feature of Acrobat. Now I can select text from the scanned pages and cut and paste to my heart’s content. I’m not sure if it saved me time in the long run, but it sure seemed like it in the library. Besides, I don’t think I could have taken the PLRE out of the reading room, so photocopying didn’t seem like an option.

I also scanned some pages of Alberto Ferreiro’s supplemental bibliography on the Visigoths while I was there.

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My thesis studies are taking me back to the writings of Sidonius, a fifth-century Roman aristocrat and bishop from Gaul. Some time ago I stumbled into Joop van Waarden’s Classics Site, which is dedicated to the use of “digital techniques for research and publication” for “the study of Sidonius (or Sidonius Apollinaris, as 15th century humanist Angelo Poliziano was the first to write, arbitrarily), especially book 7 of the correspondence.” It’s a good example of the application of modern technology to historic research. The bibliography and files from van Waarden’s site are proving to be very helpful for my current research.

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It’s interesting to see the keywords for web search engines that occasionally bring people to this site. Sometimes I take a set of these terms from my web log and plug them into Google myself. I do this for two reasons, the first being to see where my site ends up in the results list. Frequently it’s on the second or third page of the results, which makes it surprising that anyone follows the link at all. The second reason is to see what other interesting things there are on the web for some of the terms.

Recently the search phrase “professor pizarro +medieval” led someone to Logographer, and, more interestingly, turned up a link to the abstract of a paper by Andrew Gillett titled “Ethnogenesis: a Contested Model of Early Medieval Europe,” published in History Compass 4 (2), 241-260.

I was already aware of the paper, having run across it in my thesis research, but I haven’t yet read it. The surprising thing about finding it now on the Blackwell Synergy site is not that it reminded me of a paper I had nearly forgotten, but that, underneath the abstract, the web page contains a link to an MP3 recording of an interview with Andrew Gillett. The interview is about 20 minutes long, and well worth a listen, especially since it is much less formal than a paper. It is interesting to hear Gillett’s extemporaneous comments on the historiography of Late Antiquity, and on the ethnogenesis debate and the relationship it has with modern notions of ethnicity.

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I’ve been working on my thesis for far too long, and now I feel more compelled than ever to finish it. Yes, I see the irony of saying this while posting something to my seldom-read blog, but there you go.

I’ve been reading the Chronicon of Hydatius, a fifth century bishop at what is now Chaves in Galicia, north-western Spain. It was fun to run this under the year 451:

A comet began to appear from 18 June; by the 29th it was visible at dawn in the eastern sky and was soon perceived after sunset in the western sky. By (16 July – 1 August) it appeared (only) in the west.

This was more than likely Halley’s comet, easily checked by remembering the 76-year cycle for the phenomenon and calculating backward from, say, 1910, when the comet made a big impression on our more recent ancestors.

These kinds of things make reading Hydatius interesting and exciting. His Chronicle comes alive, even though it lacks the rich narrative of Gregory of Tours. Hydatius may have lived nearly 1500 years ago, but only 20 visits of Halley’s separate us.

The year 451 was full of portents, as Hydatius called them. He saw a lunar eclipse on September 26. His colleague Eufronius wrote to him about other celestial events seen in Gaul around Easter. On April 4th, Hydatius himself saw the Aurora Borealis “from nightfall until almost the third hour of the night.” I thought it was remarkable that he could see the Aurora as far south as Spain, but it’s not unheard of. An astronomer on the Mediev-L mailing list pointed out this photo of the Aurora over Texas taken a few years ago.

What did these things portend for Hydatius? Well, 451 was the year in which a Roman dux named Aëtius and the Visigothic king Theoderic pushed the Huns out of Gaul at the battle of the Catalaunian Plains, recorded more memorably by Jordanes. (Theoderic lost his life in the fight.) Hydatius thought he was watching, and recording, the end of the world, an event to occur “450 years from Christ’s Ascension, i.e., on 27 May 482″ (to quote R. W. Burgess from his critical edition of the Chronicon).

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“You blame both my delay and my silence. Both these charges can be refuted: for I am coming and I am now writing. Farewell.” — Sidonius, fifth century Roman nobleman and Gallic bishop, to his friend Florentinus, Book 4.19. (Translation W. B. Anderson, Loeb Classical Library).

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An enticing book arrived at my office yesterday: Patrick Amory’s People and Identity in Ostrogothic Italy, 489–554 (Cambridge, 1997). More than any other book I’ve read in the past year, this should help me get some clarity on my thesis.

It’s difficult to express my excitement about something many people would consider a dry, boring monograph.

Now if only the semester would end, I could get to work.

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This past summer I read Michael Kulikowski’s excellent book, Late Roman Spain and Its Cities (Baltimore, 2004). I’m hoping to write a longer note on the book soon, but for now I’ll give just a few short comments. Kulikowski, like Peter Brown and others, downplays the idea of a general third century crisis. He admits that for the elite the third century was a tumultuous time, but questions whether the crisis in the imperial administration would have had the large-scale economic and social impact that many other scholars claim it did. Kulikowski looks at the archeological record first, primarily because of the lack of written sources, to try to detect signs of continuity in the urban society of late antique Spain. Starting in the fifth century, literary sources, although sparse, can begin to add to the picture. Kulikowski continues his study of Spain up to the mid-seventh century. Overall, I found Kulikowski’s claims plausible and impressively argued. The book is very well written with excellent endnotes and bibliography. I only wish I had time to write a more comprehensive review right now.

After reading Kulikowski’s book, I began reading Rachel L. Stocking’s Bishops, Councils and Consensus in the Visigothic Kingdom, 589-633 (Ann Arbor, 2000). Stocking starts her book just a few decades before the Visigothic conversion from Arian Christianity to Catholicism in 589. The events in the decade before the conversion, around 580 under king Leovigild, are fascinating. Particularly interesting was the new statement of Arian belief that acknowledged the Son as coeval with the Father (while still rejecting the Spirit as part of the Godhead). Stocking’s primary focus really begins with the famous Third Council of Toledo in 589, and she uses the extant documents of this council to illuminate the social structure of late sixth-century Spain. More on this later.

Although I’m still giving a lot of thought to these topics and trying to form a clear thesis statement, I do have two more classes to take, and those classes (and my day job) will keep me pretty busy for the remainder of the semester. In addition to some shorter works (mostly journal articles or book chapters) and some books not yet acquired, the reading list for my classes includes the following:

• A. T. Fear, Rome and Baetica: Urbanization in Southern Spain c. 50 BC-AD 150. Oxford, 1996.
• J. H. W. G. Liebescheutz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City. Oxford, 2001.
• John E. Stambaugh, The Ancient Roman City. Baltimore, 1988.
• Ernst Kantorowicz, Frederick the Second, 1194-1250. New York, 1931.
• David Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor. New York, 1992.

I need to start a new project on Peter de Venea (Piero della Vigna). I’m just getting my bearings for that work.

Don’t worry. I’ve still found time to watch some episodes of Family Guy and Entourage. It’s just blogging that hasn’t been getting much attention lately.

And more important than all of this, my wife and I still have dinner together every night, and we’ll be going to a nice restaurant for our anniversary.

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