Do you need a second pair of eyes on that book, paper, or project report? I have been editing business and academic writing since 2013. Aside from ancient world studies and medieval studies, I have experience creating software documentation and a background in academic computer science. Because of my time living in Austria, I have experience with the challenges of writing in a second language or a new field.
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Christopher Marlowe has not yet departed that that little, little span the dead are borne in mind. We remember that he wrote Dr. Faustus and Tamburlane the Great and died in a drunken quarrel over a bar bill (and perhaps because he was part of the long tradition of English writers working as spies to pay the bills). Unlike Shakespeare he had a good formal education, not just grammar-school Latin but a Master of Arts from Cambridge, and unlike Shakespeare he could not keep his subversion in the mouth of fools and madmen. His life of Tamurlane was what J.J. Abrams would have done at an early modern theatre, with overblown rhetoric, battles, love affairs, and special effects. There was even a disappointing sequel driven by crass commercialism. Its full of ancient Greek flavour because Marlowe knew much more about ancient Greeks than modern Persians (emissaries of the English East India Company would reach Shah Abbas by 1614 after Marlowe’s timely death, and Robert Shirley arrived in Iran in 1598 a decade after the play was written). Several times Marlowe’s characters accuse Tamburlane of being a shepherd which sounds like a way to get a tower of skulls with your name on it.
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Victor Davis Hanson can be a scholar when he wants to be, although since 2004 that has just been a hobby while he focused on punditry. Many people who have read his books and articles on antiquity are confused at the positions he takes, where Spartans can be admirable defenders of Freedom in the pass at Thermopylae, but despicable slave-holders at Leuctra (and there were helots at Thermopylae, and Hanson was not one of the radicals who teach that the Sparta we think we know emerged after the death of Leonidas). I know a bit about ancient Persian religion so this was always easy for me to understand. This week I have written up the way I explain it when it comes up in conversation ever since a much younger self was reading one of his trade books at the Greater Victoria Public Library Central Branch.
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Read morethere is a kind of revision of history, widely practiced today, that arises not from the opportunities but from the needs- or the passions- of our time. Basically, all research means putting questions, and historical research means putting questions to the past, preferably without torture, and trying to find answers there. The questions we put are necessarily those suggested to us by our own times and preoccupations, and these differ from generation to generation and from group to group. It is inevitable and legitimate that this should be so. What is neither legitimate nor inevitable is that not only the questions we put to the past but also the answers we find there should be determined by our present concerns and needs. This can lead, particularly under authoritarian regimes, but also in free societies under pressures of various kinds, to the falsification of the past, in order to serve some present purposes.
Bernard Lewis, “In Defense of History,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 143, no. 4 (December 1999) pp. 585-586 (573-587)
This post was scheduled late partly because I was late in writing up all the books and partially because I wanted to finish some which I left half-finished in 2024! The usual caveats about writing one of these when I read like a scholar and not like a fan of romance novels apply. John Ting calls the way academics read reading like a mongrel (picking out useful morsels and then moving on, not working all the way through). My reading was disrupted when my Tolino eReader failed in late summer. And one novel which I wanted to read did not arrive until the new year!
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Achaemenid historian John W.I. Lee did a series of lectures for The Great Courses. Right now they have a closeout sail for the DVD editions including his series on the Achaemenid Persian Empire. If you like long-form video as well as short blog posts you might want to check them out! Whereas sites like YouTube let anyone post and share whatever gets clicks, The Great Courses gets recognized experts and skilled public speakers to teach on their area of expertise. One is educational, the other sells eyeballs to advertisers and does not care whether the eyeballs look at rants about flying saucers or careful research.
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/the-persian-empire
Read moreMost grand narratives are neither wrong nor right. They violently simplify reality, or say things which are so vague that nobody can agree what would make them true or false (not quite the same as cold reading but related). They leave out alternative points of view, such as whether the Korean War was driven by international Communism or just one phase in an internal Korean conflict between nationalists and communists. But you can still check some of the facts that are used to support the big statements. Is anything in this book by economist Brad Delong flat out wrong?
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It has been more than ten years since I blogged about how I research history and archaeology and philology. The world has changed since. Some events in November and December gave me a story to share with my gentle readers again.
For my project on linen armour I am reading all the dictionaries of the Romance and Germanic languages in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE (there was scale armour backed with six layers of linen in the twelfth century BCE, but that is a different story). In November I got around to Joan Coromines‘ dictionaries of Castilian (dominant Spanish) and Catalan (other than Portugese, the Romance language which was best able to resist being assimilated into Castilian, possibly because it was similar to Occitan and people traveled back and forth along the coast between cities which used the King of France’s coins and cities which used the King of Spain’s coins). Coromines (he/him) was a philologist who spent his time in exile from Franco writing dictionaries, like Marc Bloch spent his time on the run from the Gestapo writing an Apologie pour l’histoire. Many historical dictionaries have been converted to databases and hooked up to websites, but his dictionaries have not. Somewhere in one of his works I found a reference to an inventory from 1307 in what I thought was the Revue des Linguistique Romane. And thus began an adventure!
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J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books: New York, 2022)
What can I say about Slouching Towards Utopia by blogger and economist Brad DeLong? This book is a grand narrative of the era of modern economic growth, 1870-2010. In this period incomes in many North Atlantic economies grew several percent a year for decades, and for the first time there was enough for everyone in some countries to be fed and housed and clothed and doctored. But even if all of our material needs were met and we had better entertainment than a King of Kings, we did not feel like we lived in Utopia. It is framed around a debate between Friedrich Hayek and Karl Polyani, the first arguing that people should just accept the strangeness of markets in return for wealth, and the second replying that people in fact feel that they have rights to some control over their shape and population of their community, the ability to earn a living from skills that they suffered to acquire, and who is rewarded and who punished. Deny people control over these things and they will react violently and outside the market, regardless of what theorists say that should do. But how on earth can I respond to it?
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Elisabeth Singer’s article on pavises in the Vienna Zeughaus is excellent but she wrote in ordinary Austrian German not chemical jargon. While the grammar is simple, the words include a few informal terms.
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Can’t get enough of bookandswordblog? This spring I will be teaching two short courses for the University of Victoria’s Continuing Education program. One of them is online on Tuesday 4 February from 6 to 8 pm Victoria, BC time. The price is CAD $35.70 (about USD $24). You can find more here.
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