tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-39102374137125515582026-06-22T12:55:04.386+01:00The Historical, Philosophical and Political Musings of an Autistic HistorianHistorian on the Edgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14069934072719158780noreply@blogger.comBlogger373125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3910237413712551558.post-79660039739653927752026-06-22T11:31:40.542+01:002026-06-22T12:55:04.386+01:00

 I was deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Professor Rosamond McKitterick a little over a week ago. Anyone with more than a few hours (at most) of exposure to early medieval history will be aware of Rosamond’s enormous contribution to the field. Her legacy is considerable and secure, and achieved – it is worth saying – in the face of some pretty unpleasant academic politicking too.

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On Bluesky there has been a little discussion of counter-factual history, sparked by a post asking what position you could defend against 20 questioners and which in turn produced answers about which were the most decisive battles in history. That in turn inevitably lurches towards counterfactuals (which is why it’s a War Studies rather than a History question), prompting a comment by Stephen

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 The ‘Lessons of History’[This post basically argues three things: that the current world crisis, rise of fascism etc cannot be attributed to insufficient awareness of the history of the mid-twentieth century; that the facts of history do not, in themselves, contain particular lessons; and that historians do not teach history as a set of lessons to be learned.]'That doesn’t make it any less

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Call for papers for session/strand at the International Medieval Congress, 7-10 July 2025:   The Reach of Politics, 5th-7th centuries How far did active participation in politics spread in late antiquity? Can we avoid dichotomous ‘top-down’ versus ‘bottom-up’ ways of thinking by conceiving of politics as a form of circuitry wherein the political flows discursively down (or out) from the

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[This is a somewhat rewritten version of a plenary lecture I gave at a conference last year on the dissolvement [sic] of kinship ties, shorn of ad libs and jokes and rendered into slightly more formal acadermic language.Essentially, I take a clause of the Pactus Legis Salicae - concerning the ritual to be followed by someone who wished to cast themselves off from their kin - as a springboard to

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This time, ah - ahIs coming like a ghost timeWhen I wrote Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, getting on for 20 years ago, I used a three-part organisation of the text: Part 1: Romans and Barbarians in an Imperial world; Part 2: A world renegotiated; Part 3: Romans and barbarians in a post-imperial world. I used the term ‘post-imperial’ for a couple of reasons. I borrowed it from Andrew

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Several problems are raised by the economic/political paradigm. As indicated last time, my aim here is not to replace them but to add a new level more concerned with ideas, attitudes or culture. To this end it’s important to note that the broad outlines of economic development sketched in Part 3 match, in general, those of the shifts in culture mapped out in Part 2, of the gradual turning away

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In the third part of these reflections we finally enter the territory of the Pirenne Thesis, and indeed of my project: the changes of the late sixth and early seventh centuries. Let’s recap. Around 530, in spite of all the developments discussed last time, in spite of the socio-cultural dislocation that had been going on since the third century, and in spite of the dramatic events of the fifth,

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In the previous post I was arguing, ultimately, that explaining ‘the end of Mediterranean unity’ is not a question of finding an ‘event’ that ruptured Mediterranean unity (the Arab conquests, Vandal Piracy, etc) as much as looking at why the features that had held it together earlier – and which had overcome those features that might militate against unity – came to an end. This post muses rather

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 Re-cap Readers of this blog will be all-too-wearily aware that I have been working on the changes that took place in western Europe between 550 and 650 for well over a decade, since I received a Leverhulme fellowship for a project called ‘The Transformations of the Year 600’ in 2009. What I thought the final outcome of that would be has been through many versions but I currently envisage

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 Don’t write a script that will take you 50 minutes to read out: this will be far too much information for the students to take in 1: Decide upon the four things you want your students to know about at the end of the lecture. Add Introduction and Conclusion 2. Make those your four main sections and assign ten minutes to each of them. Put those on the left indent of your page. (make a

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 ConclusionsThe aDNA analyses of Szólád and Collegno were combined with study of stable isotopes in the skeletons and then compared with the distribution of grave-goods. The essential overall conclusions were expressed – less than clearly – as follows:In both Szólád and Collegno this genetic structure mirrors the variation that emerges from their mortuary practices, i.e., how living members

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Method Imagine a historical study that claimed that a general north-south division was visible in, for the sake of argument, the prologues of medieval charters and that this model had predictive value, such that the geographical origin of a charter could be accurately discerned from the sequence, appearance, or non-appearance of particular phrases. This would be quite an assertion, if not

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 [This is a critique I wrote to form my part of an article I co-wrote with Prof Martial Staub (Sheffield) about genetics and archaeology. Later I cut it down, with the idea of publishing the more detailed elements as 'online supplementary materials'. It didn't get published, sadly. I think that there were two main problems: one was a significant jump in the scale and breadth of Martial's

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 [This the English original of the short piece I wrote for the German history magazine Damals. My thanks to Mischa Meier and Steffen Patzold for the invitation to participate in that issue.]Historians nowadays very rarely use the phrase ‘The Dark Ages’ to describe the period after the disintegration of the western Roman Empire. It is now understood that it wholly misrepresents the early

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[I am at a bit of a loss as to how to open The End of Western Antiquity. I essayed an alternative opening on here before. I still like that, but one of the things that I want to do in this book is, while writing about western Europe, not give the impression that this history is in some sense privileged. I want to attempt to decentre Europe while writing about it (indeed I would argue that the

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 Readers of this blog will know that I have long suffered with mental health issues, especially depression. I haven't made any secret of this, largely because I felt it was one small way of confronting the stigma which continues to be associated with mental illness.It's been a difficult decade or so for me, including a minor 'breakdown' (as it would have been called) in late 2015 and several

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[In this second part of the chapter I develop the argument that history has the same features as language in general. It is incapable of being pinned down to a single factual original simply because we retell history in language. The way history is written - even at the most basic level - is mired in linguistic and other choices that have nothing to do with fact. Again, that is just how history

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[As some of you know, I have for the last decade been trying to put together my ideas on a philosophy of history that attempts to do two things: first returning academic history to a place (if it ever had one) where it is taken seriously as an intellectual discipline rather than a bourgeois pastime or a service industry for popular entertainment; and second where it has a coherent ethical/

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[As anyone who has followed this blog since its inception (has anyone?) will know, I have long been interested in the issue of the post-imperial state in the West, and indeed whether or not the polities that existed in c.650 can be considered to be states. Having wrestled with this issue for a decade, I have finally come up with a discussion and definition with which, provisionally at least,

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There was of course an important reason for such calculation. Could you calculate when the world would end? Many theologians said no. Mankind couldn’t try to second-guess the Almighty’s divine plan. St Augustine was one who forcefully said that you should stop your counting. Some people thought that the world would last 6,000 years, so when 6,000 years since Creation were up the world would end.

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What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.Augustine of Hippo’s famous comment on time from Book 11 of his Confessions. The nature of time has remained the subject of philosophical and scientific discussion ever since. How do with think of time? As a sequence with a beginning, middle and end? Or as a cycle, with things coming around again and

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The creation of a new, martial model of masculinity in the fourth century was one way in which the mental world began to be reorganised in the late Roman period but it is very important to note that the Emperor still remained at the centre, legitimising both forms of masculinity. Nor, as I have said, did the new forms of barbarised military identity imply an actual rejection of Roman identity. As

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In [a previous lecture], I mentioned how a new martial model of masculinity appeared in the 4th century. I alluded to it again the first element of the previous lecture package, too. This doesn’t seem to me to have had the recognition it deserves, as this was a development with really profound long-term effects.I want to go back to this issue and discuss it in a little more detail. The

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In the previous [post]I discussed what I called the binary aspect of Graeco-Roman ethnography, in other words, the distinction between Roman-ness and barbarism. As we saw, this was really a pretty abstract element of thinking about the world and its organisation. In this area of thought the barbarian and the Roman were both ideals, and the barbarian ‘other’ largely existed as a counter to the

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