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.
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There's a lot happening on this cover...
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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.
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Not clear from this photo but this is an absolute door-stopper of a book.
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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.
