I Aten’t Dead

Hey all. I know, I know, it’s been a while. I have to be honest, it’s likely to be a little longer until normal service is resumed, although normal service will be resumed at some point. Still, I thought I should explain to you where I’ve been and what’s coming up on the agenda.

As a peek behind the scenes, I write these blog posts on one big word document, which is something like 200,000 words long at this point. The last words I wrote on it, however, were back in May, when I was sitting in Dublin airport waiting to go to the Kalamazoo Medieval Congress. In the past, a few people have expressed surprise at the blog’s rate of posting; what it turns out is that when things start ramping up, this is the first and easiest thing to cut. So what ramped up? A few things. It’s been an unpleasant year personally, in ways which aren’t blog-appropriate – I’m fine, thank you, but it did slow me down somewhat. More concretely, I got given a bit more teaching than I was expecting, and preparation and delivery for that took up a lot of time. Next year I’m teaching the same course again, so hopefully having all the groundwork prepared will save a lot of time… Then, I ended up presenting at a lot of conferences thanks partly to invitations and partly because doing that helped me write my thesis so I also hoped it would help me write my book. Spoilers, that didn’t happen, but several of them were useful, as you might tell from the below. Most excitingly for you, however, I’ve been doing a lot of writing, and I’d like to spend the rest of this post telling you about it. This has some similarities to the post I did when I came back to the UK from Germany (and never has that decision seemed less prescient than recently), and uses some similar categories, so let’s get started with:

Released and forthcoming

Lots of activity here. Since I wrote that old post, both ‘Flemish Succession’ and ‘Voice of Dissent’ came about, both of which I duly mentioned to you. I have also now seen proof versions for ‘Kingship and Consent’ in The Mediaeval Journal, as well as ‘Nisi Rex’ in The Medieval Low Countries, so hopefully both will be on their way to you shortly. I have also, quite recently, sent off corrections to ‘Lehnwesen’, and the editors tell me they hope to have the volume out by the end of the year – it’ll be in German, and the translation is quite distressing, insofar as it’s a visible improvement over my English prose… Ah well, the road to getting better stretches ever onwards. Otherwise, there should be a couple of book reviews coming out soon as well.

In Progress

Again, plenty of activity – as mentioned above, my docket has been very full. First, articles, in rough order of completeness. A fully-written up version of my work on advocates got submitted to Early Medieval Europe in January, and initial reviews were basically positive but wanted some structural changes. Here, I hope to have these finished by week’s end, and I’ll keep you posted what happens next. Then, more excitingly, the now-legendary Norman sex paper was given at the Battle Conference this very year, and needs to be submitted to Anglo-Norman Studies by the end of September. Because this was originally a competition entry, though, the text currently exists in complete form – reading it out loud multiple times means that there are some bits of polishing I want to do, but this is a couple of hours’ work away from being done-done.

Then, there are no fewer than five articles in the process of being written. First, ‘Flemish Reform’: having presented at the Ecclesiastical History Society conference for several years, I decided this would be the year I’d try and get into Studies in Church History. This one is actually pretty much done bar some footnotes, and is with beta readers as I type. Second, a conference I went to in Luxembourg yeeeears ago got in touch recently to say that they were preparing the proceedings and could we please send texts by end of September. It’s a prestigious conference and a prestigious serious, so I’m thrilled to be involved with it; but unfortunately when I was invited I wasn’t sure that I would still be employed by the time it ran, and so the paper I delivered was a chapter of my thesis – and, naturally, it’s the chapter than has been made most obsolete by my subsequent research… Still, there’s a point in there, and I’ve been meaning to write about the Neustrian succession for a while, so I am in the midst of retrofitting it into something useful. Third, a worked-up version of my post about the Kriegsfahne of Queen Gerberga is mostly-done – because it doesn’t have a deadline, finishing the draft has got pushed further back, but it’s not very long so once the deadlines are dispatched it’ll be done directly. I’d like to submit it to an art history journal, but don’t know which one – suggestions in the comments!

Then there are two more a little further back on the road. ‘Church of Sens’ just needs a week or two of dedicated effort, because it’s so nearly done, but that’s been the case since last winter. ‘Earliest Cluny’ is even closer. The problem with that is that for the longest time it was, honestly, a case study in search of a point; but I gave a paper at the M6 Symposium in Liverpool which was sufficiently short that it could only be point. That was really useful, and all I need to do now is edit the top-and-tail to bring out the argument more, and then it’ll be ready for beta-reading.

Mysteries

This section has got a lot smaller since the version of this post I wrote back in May. The only entry here is ‘Social and Political Selection’, about which everything I know comes from offhand mentions on the Power Of The Bishop conference Twitter feed – that one’ll be done when it’s done. We haven’t got the peer review back yet, and given that a friend of mine was waiting four or five years for the last volume, I’m not expecting anything soon.

Parked

Of the papers I was talking about last year, ‘Archchancellors’, ‘Princely Churches’, ‘Moot Point’, and ‘Dudo’s Time’ are waiting for me to have the time and energy to deal with them. Frankly, they’ll probably not get done until the book is. Also, ‘Princely Churches’ at least is probably dead (or it’ll end up even bigger, which means it’ll end up probably as one of those little Palgrave-Pivot type volumes). Finally, and sadly, ‘Provençal Pact’ is off the docket for the moment – I presented a version of it at the IMC this year as part of the Louis The Blind Fun-Time Variety Hour, and as I wrote it up I realised that the answer I now had to the antiquarian question I initially asked was raising all kinds of much harder and more conceptual questions to which I had no good answer…

On the docket

What’s further ahead? Another four things, two with deadlines attached. I’ve been approached to write some undergrad-friendly pieces, one on the origins of Aquitaine for The History Compass and one on regionalism and late-Carolingian rule for a Routledge Companion to French history. Both of these have April deadlines but hopefully I can get ‘em done around the New Year. I got asked about Aquitaine at Kalamazoo this year, after giving ‘Stephen of Clermont’ as a paper. Given that ol’ Steve is actually on my probation list, he definitely needs writing up, and again that needs to be done before next spring. Finally, I was invited to talk at a really good conference in Poitiers back in June and gave a paper on ‘Failed Counts’ – the response was sufficiently good (and the argument sufficiently solid) that I’ve put it in to be written up. It needs a few more presentations, and a bit of East Frankish stuff would come in handy, so it won’t be done for a while, but it is on the list.

Those of you with eagle eyes will have noted one thing I haven’t talked about yet, and that is the book. Well, it got hit hard by the piling-on of stuff in Spring – I was supposed to have sample chapters to the press by the end of May, and that definitely didn’t happen. Thankfully, I was able to speak to my contact at the press in person at Kalamazoo, and they were very understanding. So, what’s happening is this: all the chapters they want currently exist in draft form. (One of the reasons I’ve been getting on with other articles is in fact because they’re all in the beta-reading stage and I can’t do much until they get back to me.) I’ve set myself a hard deadline of end of August for submission, which is just time enough to give them a bit of a polish. Otherwise, the proposed title is Kingdom and Principality in Tenth-Century France; and I’m very pleased with most of what I’ve written so far. As usual, I’ll keep you posted…

Meanwhile, I will get back to beavering away!

So what does this mean for the blog? Short version, I’ll get back to it when my deadlines have passed. I’d like to build up a bit of a backlog before I start releasing posts into the wild again, so that’ll add a couple of weeks to the ETA, but basically we’re talking, say, late October. So I will see you all then, enjoy your summers, and don’t forget to submit your papers to the strand on Non-Royal Rulership I’m putting together for IMC 2020!

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