I just finished Julia M. H. Smith's Europe After Rome: A New Cultural History 500-1000. It's a book that poses the urgent question, Is Smith an alien? Do people like Smith, Peter Brown and Ian Wood have an extra cerebral cortex marked "Just for History" floating in a vat in their office? Are they time travelers from the superintelligence, singularity future masquerading as medieval historians? Where do they get all this?
Whenever I finish a book I Iook up scholarly reviews of said book to see if my opinion of it agrees with the scholars' opinion. For some strange reason, my first query this afternoon turned up no reviews for Smith's book. But it did turn up her review of Carole Cusack's Conversion Among the Germanic Peoples in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History.
Awesome! The topic of Cusack's book is basically my dissertation topic.
And Smith lowered the boom on poor Carole Cusack. Cusack's book, said Smith, relies too heavily on texts in translation. Her bibliography is shockingly short on non-English secondary sources. Her conclusion, that kings had a lot to do with it, will surprise no one.
That's "Booyah!" in academeze.
This is exactly what I'd be capable of producing at this moment in my grad school career: a completely unoriginal synthesis of English-language scholarship on a selection of early Medieval texts translated from Latin. My nightmare is that this is as good as my French, German and Latin will ever get, and if I do manage to eek out a dissertation and if it ever gets turned into a book, an 800 pound gorilla like Julia Smith will squash me like a bug.
And you know what that means. That means teaching remedial English in an open door admission community college built on a former nuclear testing site--my office a cubicle demarcated by Les Nessman-like imaginary walls in a trailer where the AC wall unit always shorts out.
Or even worse. It could mean... back to the parish!
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