Download PDF | (Edinburgh Byzantine Studies) Alex M. Feldman - The Monotheisation of Pontic-Caspian Eurasia_ From the Eighth to the Thirteenth Century-Edinburgh University Press (2022).
313 Pages
Acknowledgements
‘Ad fontes!’ The battlecry of the historian.’
For many years, I read the acknowledgements sections of history books as a sort of mild listing of various persons involved with the author who deserved thanks and praise: little more than a list of shout-outs. Yet acknowledgements are much more than about gratitude and commendation; they are about the very intricate process by which a book — history itself — is produced.
In fact, the process of producing history depends on the contingent forces of bottom-up markets, top-down regulation, office politics and the puzzling cycles of history itself, and the product itself is sometimes capable of altering the very history it seeks to retell. It’s easy to say that ‘history is written by the winners’ — this cliché reveals little more than window dressing for a process of individual and collective memory which are as intertwined in the present as they are in the past. I suppose the production of history is as much about the personal stories of the men and women who produce it as it is about the stories they narrate. Hence, the true weight of acknowledgements.
You may not choose your family, but you can choose whether or not to internalise (or recognise) your family ethos within yourself — after all, you are as much a product as you are a producer. My grandparents (Annette and Abraham Feldman; Eudice and Hugh Mesibov) were staunch members of the Greatest and the Silent Generations — they came of age amidst the decadence of the 1920s (a decade which began with a worldwide pandemic and ended in an economic crash — the reverse of the 2010s), the misery of the 1930s and the crucible of the 1940s.
They inherited a world of chaos;they left it superior, if imperfect. After painting in the WPA, building ships, bridges and global governing structures, they became fashion designers, pharmacists, opera singers and art and art history professors — the Western middle classes. Their modernist sensibilities left them comfortable with the prosaic mid-century Western dogmas (it all began with Greece and Rome, then the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Columbus, Washington, etc.).
Yet this all began to change as my parents’ generation (Baby Boomers) came of age, as challenging the modernist archetypes (hence, postmodernism) became fashionable and some questioned whether Western civilisation itself even exists (it does). My grandmother Eudice Mesibov even left her career singing Bizet’s Carmen in Marshall-planned post-war European opera halls to write a doctorate arguing that the second commandment was not always taken seriously. It was a great work of art history — and it also revealed something else. By the time I noticed it, the last bastions of traditional Western civilisational dogma, a tiny, self-reproducing caste, preserved the product at all costs.
The story of this story (the meta-story?) commenced in the autumn of 2010, when I began my first Greek class at Roger Williams University of Rhode Island. Like many post-industrialised Western universities (specifically the liberal arts kind) in the 2010s, History, Classics, Philosophy and all the social sciences (or humanities) were haemorrhaging students, and therefore funding, since few parents allowed for such extravagance after 2008’s Big Short.
Production and consumption had become the domain of economists, not historians. I was fortunate to have parents who approved such pedagogical indulgence, but everywhere were the signs of unavoidable unravelling: economics, finance, law and business departments were ballooning with money and students were taking out exorbitant loans for vocational degrees in the faint hope that they might come in handy. Still, our consistently 15-minutes-late-for-every-class professor of Greek discouraged us from pursuing Classics as a career — there wasn’t enough room left in the bastion and most of us would need to scrape and scrounge producing or selling something else in the corporate world as the waters rose.
Returning to him after living in Athens and witnessing the turmoil caused by uncontrolled financial markets, I was told that nothing written in Greek after the era of St Augustine of Hippo and St John Chrysostom was worth reading — the Classical canon ended in the fifth century. It was his bastion and he was the department head, so that was that. I suppose his words were one of the earliest reasons for the book you're holding.
If the villain plays a major role, luck is indispensable. This project was conceived in the final stages of my MRes at the University of Birmingham (UoB) in 2013, where I had been writing a tedious argument against the conventional story of Vladimir’s baptism in 987-9 in the Crimean city of Cherson. At the time, I was reading Paul Stephenson’s Byzantium’s Balkan Frontier and wondering whether the processes and forces which define Western civilisation (Christianisation and ethnogenesis) which he was discussing in the ninth- to thirteenth-century Balkans were applicable further east into Eurasia. What would that mean for Western Civilisation? The result was a topic that got me back into UoB in 2014 to continue working with my long-time supervisor, mentor and dear friend, Archie Dunn. I thank Archie for his constant support, everlasting patience, rivers of reference letters and limitless editing ever since our first emails in 2012. I also thank my advisor, guide and the social glue who held the entire department together (the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies — CBOMGS - at UoB), Ruth Macrides, who steadfastly prodded me towards better expression in English and better reading in Greek, and who was continually patient through countless drafts of many articles with “Teutonic’ footnotes. Ruth could also grease the gears of historical production — she made ‘diasporic’ connections that allowed for publications and even my link to Edinburgh University Press (EUP). Evyapiot® mob ya, 6Aa. When she sadly passed away in 2019, CROMGS was devastated — we (and myself personally) will always feel her loss. Archie and Ruth have been almost like family to me. And they both intimately know/knew the delicate process by which history is produced.
Yet it takes more than Greek to scale a cliff. Russian did not come naturally — my ancestors had renounced the language almost as soon as they left Odessa, Riga and Antwerp for new lives in New York. Mike Berry, of Birmingham’s Centre for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies, serendipitously appeared one day as I was struggling with Russian. Over several years, he guided me through seas of Russian translations with persistence and serenity. Popa OnarogapHoctu.
Yet the story of the production of history is still more elaborate. Along the way, many others offered professional advice and correspondence. I thank Peter Rogers, Jonathan Shepard, Marek Jankowiak, Maria Vrij, Giinter Prinzing and Dionysios Stathakopoulos for their input. Peter has been a steadfast friend and guide — as much for ‘real life’ as in Byzantium; I appreciate so much all our conversations and correspondence.
Jonathan has made many recommendations, written several letters and answered many of my questions throughout this process. Marek’s input has been vital regarding comparative coinage and the movement of precious metals through ninth- to thirteenth-century Pontic-Caspian Eurasia. Maria, aside from facilitating many long hours in the UoB Barber coin study room, has generously provided much needed guidance on sixth- to eighth-century Byzantine coinage. Ever since we met in Belgrade in August 2016, Giinter has offered his reference and crucial ideas. Finally, Dionysios has been a staunch advocate with a strong sense of justice throughout the odyssey of producing history.
Friends and colleagues from everywhere, many of them long-time experts in the process of producing history — from the US, Ukraine, the Russian Federation, and everywhere in between at CBOMGS (friends who have been there through thick and thin, such as Francisco L6pez-Santos Kornberger) — must be thanked, including Florin Curta, Anthony Kaldellis, Nikita Khrapunov, Peter Golden and Ian Wood for personal communications and suggestions (and for Byzantine and Rus’ Seals, Nikita).
Special thanks go to John Haldon and Paul Stephenson, seasoned veterans of the process of producing history, who read through an original PhD thesis which went to over 600 pages, not to mention writing many reference letters. I understand that it was exhausting to read, but I didn’t want to take any chances at the viva in 2018. Without John’s and Paul’s suggestions and advocacy, this book would not be in your hands.
The homestretch began when EUP agreed to take on a relatively unknown young historian with no prior books nor fellowships. Being an impure Classicist, then a Byzantinist, dabbling in Central European, East European, Russian and Eurasian history and archaeology is not the most palatable background in a world where funding is jealously guarded and flags are firmly planted in thoroughly demarcated disciplines with self-reproducing, torch-passing fiefdoms.
Yet I must earnestly thank Carol MacDonald at EUP for taking the chance and Niels Gaul, Yannis Stouraitis, Rachel Bridgewater, Louise Hutton, Fiona Conn, Fiona Sewell, Jane Burkowski and the whole EUP review committee for their help and suggestions to improve this book. Luck reappeared early in 2020 right before the COVID-19 outbreak when I found out from Sarah Wells at the Warburg Institute at the University of London that my project had been chosen for a Yates fellowship, without which this product would have been long bogged down in the machinery of historical production. So many thanks go to Bill Sherman, Michelle O’Malley and everyone else at the Warburg. Feeling like an exile lost in a sea of ill-advised trajectories in the social sciences, I have been delighted to find refuge at the Warburg.
Finally, none of this would have been possible without the eternal support, inspiration and encouragement (even from afar) of my parents, Deborah Mesibov and Richard Feldman, my grandparents, and the rest of the Mesibov and Feldman clans — my whole family. I must also recognise my lifelong friends who rarely laughed at my career choice: Thomas, Warren, Corey, Michael, Jarred, Jonathan, Maria and Jill. And for all her patience, strength, support and faith, I thank my partner and companion, Pilar Hernandez Mateos — y toda la familia de Hernandez y Mateos, saludos grandes de la pagina.
History is a laborious product — to consume and to produce. It requires long-term, structural evaluation; its investment in the past is tantamount to its investment in the future. Yet Iam certain the era is approaching when the discipline of history, and of the social sciences generally, returns to its rightful place,” not among the last bastions of a decayed structure, awash in a sea of economic hazard, but as the lights of learning astride civilisations they’ve always been, where humans can once again take refuge trying to make sense of it all.
Alex Mesibov Feldman
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