May, 2022 Research Update

Amici!  It is now June!

As you may recall, at the end of last month I was at the annual meeting of the Society for Military History, acting as a panel chair.  That week was, as you might imagine, quite busy; my students took their final exams immediately after I got back and then it was the rush to get final grades in.  If you've only ever been on the student side of that equation, universities often give professors and TAs something like three days to grade all of the final exams, any other outstanding work and submit final grades, counted from the moment the final exam ends.

In terms of other scholarly activity, I agreed to write a pair of book reviews and have spent some time this month doing so.  For Classical Review, I was reviewing Simon Elliott's Ancient Greeks At War (Casemate, 2021).  I'll holler when the long form of that review appears, but the short version is that it is disaster.   Simon Elliott is remarkably prolific in writing books about Greek and Roman warfare but, well, frankly I'd strongly recommend avoiding all of his books.  They are invariably shot through with errors, in part because Elliott can't interact with the texts in their original language nor does he have a grasp on the archaeological evidence outside of Britain (and not much even there).

If you did want a basic primer on Greek warfare with lots of helpful illustration that wouldn't mislead you and would be far more clearly written, the book you want, by the by, is P. Connolly, Greece and Rome at War (1981) - it's still in print through various publishers.

The other book I was asked to review was Martijn A. Wijnhoven's European Mail Armour: Ringed Battle Shirts from the Iron Age, Roman Period and Early Middle Ages (2022) for Bryn Mawr Classical Review.  Once again, I'll holler when the review comes out, but Wijnhoven's book is a triumph.  I will probably talk about it on ACOUP as well, though it is hard to directly recommend due to its formidable $180 price-point (thank heavens for review copies!), but it might be something to ask your local library to try to obtain.  It really is, by far, the best overview of early mail armor out there - it's going to be the standard reference text in all languages on this topic for a long time.  If you are interesting in mail armor pre-900 or so, this book is required reading.

It's also just great for me, because Wijnhoven is interested in all of the important facets of mail I do not care much about and none of the ones I do care about, so I can build up from his work without having to 'compete' with him on any particular point.

In addition to that I also participated in a short panel through Carolina Humanities on "The Gamification of War."  Both the hour-long one-on-one interview I did and the panel itself were recorded and are freely available on YouTube, so you can check that out.  I think there was a lot that was useful in the discussion, though the actual panel I think suffered a bit from trying to incorporate both table top and video gaming, which actually having some different concerns and very different levels of cultural influence.

For my musing I suppose it is worth talking about my current medium-term plans.

As those of you who follow my Twitter know, due to changes in the university's instructional budget, the department I teach for wasn't able to renew my teaching contract and I wasn't able to line up teaching for the Fall.  That's not a catastrophe; thanks to you all (and my employed better half), I'm perfectly capable of making rent and most importantly feeding the cats.  But it does leave me in what I've decided to term by unpaid research sabbatical.

The good news is that my department, while they couldn't have me teach anything did set up an unpaid research appointment which keeps my access to university resources (most importantly the library).  That in theory lasts for three years, so there's no real ticking clock there.

My plan of course is to continue looking for a permanent academic position.  In the meantime, I intend to focus more on converting my dissertation into a book and hopefully getting it under contract with as prestigious a press as can be managed.  That's going to be a fairly big project, but a worthwhile one and I suspect, in its various component parts, it'll eat up most of the rest of the year.  The thing about recasting the dissertation is that, on the one hand, the research is basically done, but on the other hand the genre demands of the dissertation are different than those of a book.

Generally the expectation for a dissertation is one of completeness and mastery, covering everything, whereas a book needs to be a bit more focused.  So that's what I am going to be working on, which will probably demand a fair bit of restructuring.  At the same time, after four years, there are a few parts of the dissertation that need updating (for instance, I need to include Wijnhoven's book, above!).

In terms of content, the book is going to be a boiled down version of my dissertation's argument, again in two parts: first showing - mostly through an analysis of Roman, Greek, Macedonian, Gallic and Iberian military equipment - that Rome didn't just mobilize more men than their rivals in the third and second century BCE, but also more economic resources.  And then second detailing how the structure of Rome's recruitment system and its alliance system made that mobilization possible.

I'll keep you all updated on that project as it comes together!