The Destruction of Sennacherib

"Sea of Galilee" by Seetheholyland.net is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,

That host with their banners at sunset were seen:

Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,

That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

 

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,

And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;

And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,

And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

 

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,

But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;

And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,

And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

 

And there lay the rider distorted and pale,

With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:

And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,

The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.

 

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,

And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;

And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,

Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

~ Lord Byron (1788-1824), anthologized in Poetry by Heart

No Such Thing as Too Many Books

As the t-shirt I used to wear all the time as a teenager said, 'so many books, so little time.' (I had another one which said 'there's no such thing as too many books.') What books have caught your eye these days?

A Diptych on Affairs

One of my favourite types of posts I write on this blog are the diptychs and triptychs. In art, a diptych is a piece created on two panels--often a painting on wood, but sometimes a carving on ivory--joined together by a hinge. With the artwork inside, it opens and closes like a book. Triptychs are the same, but done in threes--they have a very large centre panel with two smaller wings, connecting to the centre panel by hinges and folding in to protect it. Both diptychs and triptychs are an important genre in medieval European religious painting, where they were used to tell stories of the Scriptures and the saints.

Originally, diptychs were a writing tablet made of two panels joined together, the standard notebook of the ancient Mediterranean. For my own purposes, I use diptych and triptych to refer to a pair or trio of poems which tell a story when read together. As homage to the diptych as a form of visual art, I like to use a photograph as a hinge between the poems. If I have taken, or can find, other photographs that continue the story, these serve as the outer panels.

 

Previous diptychs and triptychs have featured: hope, snow, snowdrops, love, the class of 2021, and negative people. Here is one on affairs.

 

A Note on Intellectuals

To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say

    Is a keen observer of life,

The word Intellectual suggests straight away

    A man who's untrue to his wife.

~ W.H. Auden, reprinted in Essential Poems for the Way We Live Now, edited by Daisy Goodwin (London, 2003) 

"Walking away" by Braiu is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

'I, being born a woman and distressed'

I, being born a woman and distressed

By all the needs and notions of my kind,

Am urged by your propinquity to find

Your person fair, and feel a certain zest

To bear your body's weight upon my breast:

So subtly is the fume of life designed,

To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,

And leave me once again undone, possessed.

Think not for this, however, the poor treason

Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,

I shall remember you with love, or season

My scorn with pity,--let me make it plain:

I find this frenzy insufficient reason

For conversation when we meet again.

 

~ Edna St Vincent Millay, reprinted in Poetry by Heart ed. Andrew Motion (London, 2016)

#AHAReads: Summer Reading Challenge

One of the professional associations of which I am a member is the American Historical Association. I joined when I was graduate student, and plan to keep paying membership because I support their advocacy for the profession, efforts to include historians working beyond academia, and support for secondary-school history teachers. I usually read their newsletter when it lands in my inbox, which is how I came across their summer reading challenge. 

Between 1 June and 5 September (Labour Day in the United States), I aim to tick off at least three items from their checklist:

• Read a “classic” of your field that you’ve never read before.
• Read a history published in the past 2 years.
• Read a piece of historical fiction (novel, story, poem, play) set in the time or place you study.
• Read a history of the place you know the most about that takes place at least a century before or after your time period of expertise.
• Read a history written by a historian who works in a day job different from your own.
• Read a history of an identity group you don’t belong to.

I'm going to try to stick with their guideline of completing one task per month but won't be holding myself to this too strictly. I am introducing three rules of my own:

• No purchasing books for the challenge
• Avoid ebooks
  
• Blog about what I read
  

So which challenges have I chosen and what am I reading?

The challenge that immediately appealed was read a “classic” of your field that you’ve never read before. One of the things I miss most about being a student is the requirement to read widely across late antique and medieval primary sources--while I read extensively for presentations and publications, this tends to have a specific objective--finding evidence of birds stealing mittens (for example)--rather than simply for curiosity or pleasure. My choice, then, is a text I've enjoyed my encounters with but don't know very well, the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus. Ammianus' Res Gestae covers the history of the Roman Empire from the first through fourth centuries, finishing with the Battle of Adrianople in 378 CE, where Gothic refugees rebelled against Roman mistreatment and defeated several legions. We only have the last eighteen out of the original thirty-one books, covering 353 to 378 CE. Ammianus was a solider, as well as a scholar, and was present at some of the battles he describes; recent scholarship has focused on his craft and subtlety as a writer.

The Res Gestae is a classic because it's such an important source for the history of the fourth century, and I'd like to know it a lot better than I do. I've enjoyed teaching bits of Ammianus in undergraduate seminars on late antique history, and have listened to some excellent talks about the messy history of making editions of his work (most notably by Gavin Kelly). The abridged Penguin Classics translation by Walter Hamilton isn't in my library, so I'll be reading the Loeb Classics translation by John C. Rolfe, which is in three volumes. My library seems to have volumes I and II; I may need to go looking for book three elsewhere. While my Latin isn't up to reading all of Ammianus untranslated, I like the fact that Loeb volumes offer English and Latin on facing pages, so I can at least get some sense of the translator's interpretative choices.

The next challenge I've chosen is to read a history published in the past 2 years. I've chosen Shelley Puhak's The Dark Queens (published in 2022), which is a biography of the Merovingian queens Brunhild and Fredegund. (This could also meet the challenge to read a history written by a historian who who works in a day job different from your own; Puhak is a professional writer.) The breathless copy of the back cover and the tagline a gripping tale of power, ambition, and murderous rivalry in early medieval France were cause for exchange of skeptical merriment among classicist and medievalist colleagues at my university. As someone who knows this period and these stories really, really well, I'm of two minds about this book.

On the one hand, I'm genuinely excited to see a major popular history of the Merovingians in print. I sometimes have trouble explaining what I study to friends and family, and having something good and readable to recommend would be amazing. On the other hand, I'm concerned that it will go for sensationalism rather than accuracy (girlboss Fredegund, shudder) and give people a misleading impression of the period. Or, it will be one of those plucky-journalist-reveals-unknown-story...that professional historians have been studying for decades. Hard Paddington bear stare at Mary of Egypt.

There's a lot happening on this cover...

As a Merovingianist and a writer, I have high hopes and high standards for this book. I'm intrigued to see what it's like.

My final choice is to read a history of an identity group you don’t belong to. In the class on Roman women I taught this semester, students asked a number of great questions about trans history in the ancient world, and that inspired me to include a book on trans history in my summer reading, C. Riley Snorton's  Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. The book blurb describes it thusly: "Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials, Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable." It seems like an important and timely book, and I'm looking forward to learning from it.

Finally, I want to mention the books that I considered reading for the challenge but which didn't make the cut, both in the category read a “classic” of your field that you’ve never read before. 

Taking the definition of 'never read' to mean 'never read cover to cover', first on this list is Chris Wickham's Framing the Early Middle Ages. I've read chapters of this book and made a doomed effort to read it all in the summer of 2009. I'll keep it on the list for the future--it would be fun to take the time to sit down and work through it properly.

Not clear from this photo but this is an absolute door-stopper of a book.

Also not on this list is Edward Gibbon--my quest to read Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire began in 2015 and continues to march ever-slowly onward, but slipping a book I am already reading into the challenge feels unsporting.

So, there's my #AHAReads summer reading! I hope it might inspire you to tackle some reading adventures of your own.