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Of course, summer isn’t over for another month and a half, and in northern California, the weather often feels summerish until November, but I can hardly believe that the fall semester starts in another week.Must work faster on my thesis.
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.
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.
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.
It’s time for me to get in shape again, in some manner of speaking. And being the gadget freak that I am, I bought a pair of Nike+ running shoes with an iPod Nano, and am hoping that it helps me establish (and achieve) my fitness goals. The shoes are extremely comfortable, so I certainly don’t feel like I’ve cut myself short just to get the techno stuff.
I started off using the Nike+ thing on a couple of walks in the evening with my wife. I now have one short run on record with the device too. I’m so out of shape, even a run of about 0.75 miles puts me at the limit.
The discipline of running regularly, or at least of getting regular exercise, might spill over into other parts of my life too. Take my thesis, for one thing. I have not exactly been a picture of diligent pursuit on that count. Speaking of which, I’m going to the Stanford library today to consult some reference material, including the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, the Notitia Dignitatum, and at least one volume of Alberto Ferreiro’s bibliography on the Visigoths in Gaul and Spain.
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).
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.
Maybe it’s fate that two Visigothic sources important to my thesis will soon be published in English for the first time.
In March 2006, Cambridge University Press will publish the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, edited and translated by Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof.
A less famous but more important source (to me) is Julian of Toledo’s Historia Wambae. Joaquin Martinez Pizarro’s translation will be published in October 2005 by the Catholic University of America Press. (Here’s the Amazon link.)
Amazon has my orders. I can’t wait to get my hands on these.
