Possible future projects
edit- Note: These listings should in no way discourage any other editor from taking on these topics. Your author is slothful and dilettantish in many fields, and will probably have forgotten about two-thirds of these things within a year of this posting. He may, however, be able to aid you if you take them on.
There is relevant discussion of the matter in Bowersock's Martyrdom and Rome, Lane Fox's Pagans and Christians, and Frend's Martyrdom and Persecution. The Cambridge Ancient History, supplemented by Ste-Croix, his interlocutor [whatsisname?], and Barnes, can provide our standard framework for imperial legislation and attitudes on the Christians. We will begin with our first martyrs (Stephen, Peter, Paul; Biblical and extra-Biblical) and their antecedents (Jewish and pagan), though I believe the general consensus is that martyrdom is a genuinely new phenomenon. We can move on into discussion of the Passio Perpetuae and Pionii, the various martyrs' acts, Clement's Stromaeus, Tertullian's ad Scapulam, &c. Where will we stop? Most draw a dividing line at Decius; perhaps we will stop there too.
I know very little of Cyprian's career, though it will obviously take the foreground here. Modern works provide the framework and the limiting and exclusive lines, late 19C works supplement with textual and historiographic detail, judgment on the principals, &c. Rives (1999) is important here.
- J. B. Rives, "The Decree of Decius and the Religion of Empire", Journal of Roman Studies 89 (1999): 135–54, offers a list of the ancient sources at 135–36.
- Rives, 136 n. 4, points to J. R. Knipfing, "The Libelli of the Decian Persecution", Harvard Theological Review 16 (1923): 345–90 as the "most complete collection" of libelli, providing "texts and translations of forty-one certificates". He also notes more recent editions for four of Knipfing's libelli and three newly-discovered/published texts.
Gibbon has already been treated of in finesse by the authors of the article, but I feel it could yet stand some improvement. I may make some minor additions to the bibliography (to public domain antecedents of Patricia Craddock's biography, and to online editions of the minor works), and some assays at topical subjects in orbit about the man. We might yet have room for a "Stadial theories of history" (currently a subsection of this gentleman) or "Reception of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". I am still patiently assembling the bibliographies for such projects, so don't expect anything much anytime soon. I will continue to add notes on Gibbon's judgment on the antique subjects I cover, with some added context wherever his modern secondaries choose to put it. Pocock's Barbarism and Religion is exciting for the vastness of its field of vision—but its author is more of an adventurer than a tiller, so he does not plow the whole text through, seeing more pleasure in distant islands and vistas than in the entrails and viscera of the work itself.
- First thing to do: make some minor additions to the bibliography (to public domain antecedents of Patricia Craddock's biography, and to online editions of the minor works).
- Gibbon, Edward. The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Esq., with Memoirs of His Life and Writings, Composed by Himself: Illustrated from His Letters, with Occasional Notes and Narrative. Edited by John, Lord Sheffield. London: B. Blake, 1837. [One volume edition of the five-volume 1814 printing.] Online at Google Books. Accessed 5 November 2008.
- Holroyd, Maria Josepha. The Girlhood of Maria Josepha Holroyd (Lady Stanley of Alderley). Recorded in Letters of a Hundred Years Ago: From 1776 to 1796. 2nd ed. Edited by Jane H. Adeane. London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1897. Online at the Internet Archive. Accessed 5 November 2009.
- Gibbon, Edward. The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon. Printed verbatim from hitherto unpublished mss., with an introduction by Earl of Sheffield. London: John Murray, 1897. Online at the Internet Archive. Accessed 11 November 2009.
This is an impossible topic. Wickham moves over the thing, again and again, and builds this terrifying structure full of movable and conjectural nodules from a pointillist map of digs and texts, but he has been challenged on detail and on theory (v. the review in the New Left Review). There is no easy consensus here, and perhaps there might never be. Ward-Perkins has the grace to make blunter propositions that better admit of falsifiability, and he might be our man on the scene. It will have to deal with all sorts of archaeological/cartulary/juristic/saintly material. Ideological confrontation with Marx and Weber, maximalist and minimalist readings of the evidence. Pirenne, the historiography of the period. Geographic bodies and trade networks: Mediterranean, Po and Tiber valleys; the Rhine and the North Sea; the Black Sea and the Don, Dniester, Danube, etc.
It is queer that we don't have this yet.