I spent part of my week adding 850+ new entries to one of my PhD project's databases. This particular spreadsheet is mapping finds of 5-7th century spearheads in England by their find sites, and I'm hoping it will be able to reveal geographic clusters of specific styles / types, which might allow me to locate production / distribution centers (or at least, communities of manufacturers who are sharing and immitating each other's work). I doubt the results will be clean enough to do a proper network analysis (spearhead types are, at the best of times, highly subjective), but I'm hoping I don't just get noise when I load it into GIS next week.

I have about 1200 more entries to go (about 2800 total) before I know for sure!

I just finished Chase Robinson's Islamic Historiography (2003), and thought it was an excellent response to the skeptics of early Islamic history (thankfully largely outvoiced at this point), as well as serving as a terrific mirror for viewing our modern discipline of historiography. (When did history become more about explaining social truths than exemplifying moral truths?) It also plays well against Fred Donner's Narratives of Islamic Origins (1998).

I'm feeling increasingly confident that the canonical hadith can illuminate the juridical concerns of their ninth-century collectors, giving us a valuable window into social contexts at the end of the period of formative Islam. I'm also increasingly convinced that no one has studied the early collectors of hadith in quite this way, although I know the field has opened and become increasingly vibrant in the last decade. So if anyone's come across a good or indispensable reading on Bukhari or his peers, pass it along!

I spent this week proof-reading my thesis. I re-read it on Monday-Thursday and now I'm grinding through the tortuously slow process of making all the corrections both myself and my (really quite patient) fiance have found. I feel kind of like dying, but I'm almost finished so that keeps me going. Also I'm going to a friend's birthday party tonight, so there's that.

I’ve finally gotten around to reading Judith Herrin’s Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (local public library came through big time!). I have really enjoyed Herrin’s style so far. Rather than presenting a singular narrative of Byzantine history, Herrin instead presents overviews of different topics with each chapter. In aiming for a more general audience, Herrin does not go too deeply into the historiography of debated topics (such as Iconoclasm), though the lack of footnotes has proved frustrating at times.

In her chapter on the Byzantine economy, Herrin makes the following claim: “The senatorial class did not involve themselves in trade. They believed, with a traditional snobbery, that higher social rank, marked by the ownership of landed estates and court position, set them apart. Those who engaged in commerce, even international trade, were despised as common and dirtied by the activity.” (pg. 150)

Whilst I would tend to agree with the gist of this, it seems a bit bold to assert that the Byzantine elite never engaged in commercial ventures, and “despised” those who did. Elites “despising” trade as a mark of commonality has a long history in Roman literature, yet this appears to have been more the ideal than reality, especially during the first several centuries A.D. Although commercial ventures did not have the same reliability in returns as land, Roman elites definitely did, to a degree, involve themselves in commercial ventures, and it seems odd that they would suddenly stop doing so post-sixth century. Is Herrin exaggerating here, or did Byzantine elites really extricate themselves from commerce?

Good timing for this. I'm reading The Jewish Alchemists by Raphael Patai.

What can people tell me about him? Good/bad reputation or bias? I don't know the author at all other than what google can tell me, but the book seems well sourced and is a fascinating read.

I'm only like 30 pages in, but it's just a wealth of information from a different perspective than the usual sort of history of alchemy narrative.

Anyone read it, or any other of Patai's works?

For a class I am teaching, I am re-reading Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for maybe the fourth or fifth time. It is always interesting to see how one gets something different out of a book each time around.

The question that came to mind: do historians of other disciplines read Kuhn anymore? My impression is no, but I don't know that for sure. I have to admit that I am often unimpressed with how historians who are not historians of science deal with epistemological questions in general (how knowledge is made, how it circulates, how it changes things and is changed in turn), but as someone whose sub-discipline essentially is concerned writing about the history of knowledge it should not come as a surprise that I am more concerned with it than a lot of people! I am sure they are equally unimpressed at my lack of interest in the history of taxation or feudalism. :-)