Surges of Interest

There is a cliché in academic book reviews that always makes my eyes roll and my lips curl upwards a little. It is the moment when the reviewer talks of the current boom of studies on Ptolemy’s Geography, the burgeoning field of Italian farmhouse excavation reports, the explosion of scholarship in Roman provincial dress, exciting times for students of Flavian epic, a surge of interest in late antique epigram. It is of course perfectly understandable, and I have done it myself. The reviewer wants to be positive about the dynamism of the reviewed work’s subfield, which is probably also the reviewer’s subfield, and explain to relative outsiders – who are after all far more likely to read the review than the book – why they should be interested. The reviewer can also contextualise the work at hand by paying compliments to their friends and, sometimes, lamenting the inadequacy of those who aren’t. If the review is not entirely positive, it at least balances out some of the negatives with a vague optimism. It is not just reviewers: authors do this in their introductions all the time (again I have done it myself).

Of course, the subfield may really be burgeoning and the times exciting: it is the frequency of the commonplace that makes it amusing. Perhaps we don’t hear this from those in the more stagnant subfields (in that case, the rhetoric switches to that of the ‘strangely neglected topic’); perhaps an all-round increase in scholarly production has made lots of people feel that their subfield is booming. At any rate, there are ways of measuring the warmth of allegedly hot topics with relative ease, using the search functions of the digital version of Marouzeau’s Année Philologique, at least when it comes to authors (authors are probably easier than excavation reports or dress studies because they’ll be reliably and consistently tagged in online databases). This weekend I decided to indulge a curiosity I have had for a while and spend a little time looking for statistics of boom and bust in some of the authors that interest me. Another thing that prompted me to do this was an amusing but endless series of e-mails about the multilingualism of Classical scholarship on the Liverpool Classicists mailing-list, prompting much secondary comment on social media (the best take I have seen is this one); in any case, I thought it would be interesting to look at the linguistic breakdown of scholarly booms. 

I’m looking at Ammianus Marcellinus and Sidonius: late antiquity is one of the explosion sites. In a review a couple of years ago of Jenkins’ bibliography of Ammianus, I recalled E.A. Thompson’s reflection in the introduction of The Historical Work of Ammianus Marcellinus that for every reader of his author, there were probably a thousand readers of Sallust, Livy or Tacitus. I said then that this was probably never true, commenting on the ‘great deal of attention’ since and especially in the last 30 years. At any rate, I decided that those same three earlier Roman historians would serve as good comparanda for Ammianus, and interesting in themselves, and that Ammianus was a good comparandum for Sidonius (Sidonius differs from the others in that his verse as well as his prose survives). Here is my first table, of publications, excluding reviews, on the five authors per decade (which I count from 1 to 10, so the 1930s are 1931 to 1940). The green line indicates the overall publication trend in Classics – the total entries in Année Philologique divided by 500.

Since L’Année Philologique was launched in 1924, the 1920s is three years short, giving an artificial sense of a low base. Thereafter one can see a dip in the 1940s, no doubt the effect of war, and thereafter a steady increase in both total Classical scholarship and these authors, to a level between two to three times larger than pre-war. The decade from 2011 is also under-represented, since no 2020 publications and only some 2018 and 2019 ones have been registered (some items of mine from 2018 are not yet recorded); others from earlier in the decade may also be less likely to have been added. It will be interesting to see in a few years from now whether 2011-2020 really does mark a decline or just a stabilisation. (For the exact numbers and some qualifications on the data, see the appendix at the end of this post).

We can see that Tacitus has always been the most popular of the four historians and Livy has always second. That is perhaps understandable given the range of their works – Livy in seven Oxford volumes and Tacitus with five works in three volumes. Tacitus’ lead over Livy can be explained both by the virtually unanimous admiration for the former’s stylistic and intellectual brilliance and the latter’s limitations as a factual historical source. Sallust, bolstered slightly by pseudonymous works, was long placed third, but Ammianus, who began a long way behind, drew close to Sallust in the 1960s, overtook him in the 1990s, and has not relinquished his small lead. Sidonius until the 1980s exemplifies the marginal place of late antique authors, long behind Ammianus, but there really has been a boom in this case, so that in the last decade he has overtaken both Sallust and Ammianus. Once the 26 chapters of the Edinburgh Companion to Sidonius are added to the list for 2020, the lead may be even longer. I am very glad that Sidonius has his moment in the sun (though I hope Ammianus catches up next decade).

Let’s look at the same information in a slightly different way, this time looking at each author as a proportion of overall scholarly production per decade recorded in L'Année Philologique.

This has the advantage of smoothing out the unevenness caused by incomplete data in the first and last decades. It shows that interest in the three earlier historians has remained roughly at parity, with Livy becoming proportionately more and Sallust less popular; the growth of interest in Ammianus is proportionately almost fourfold and Sidonius well over tenfold. It also suggests, interestingly, that the percentage of scholarship on the historians grew in the 1940s – even if scholarship overall declined. Is this a wartime effect? (I have written elsewhere on the relevance of Sidonius in Second World War France, though there is no significant growth in interest in that period).

So there really has by any standards been a boom in interest in late antique authors! Let us break down the details of this further, by language. Here are publications on Ammianus per decade by language:

 

Publications are predominantly Germanophone before the war (and German-speaking scholars briefly take the lead again in the 1960s). Other than that the expansion is driven by growth in Anglophone and Italian scholarship, through French is not insignificant. Still, even now less than half the total items are in English. The apparent decline in languages other than English in the last decade will probably be mitigated when all the publications of 2018-2020 are listed, though the decline of German is stark. The growth of Spanish is also notable, though this is distorted by the fact that APh barely records Spanish-language scholarship before 1990. Looking in granular detail at the last decade, one finds that several Spanish and some Italian scholars are also writing articles in English (I originally looked to see if the decline of German reflected German scholars writing in English, but it seems that Ammianus is as much out of fashion in Germany-speaking lands as he is experiencing one of those ‘surges of interest’ in Spain). The most predominant ‘other’ language over the last century (after the canonical four plus Spanish) was Latin (29 items); there are a handful of items each in Dutch, Afrikaans, Czech, Russian, and Croatian.

Here is the pattern for Sidonius.

Scholarly production is limited and piecemeal from the 1920s to the 1970s, though for understandable reasons French is usually the lead language. The notable story is the growth of Italian scholarship. Franca Ela Consolino’s ‘Codice retorico’ (1974) and Isabella Gualandri’s Furtiva lectio (1979) are normally seen as the foundations for modern literary scholarship on Sidonius, but it is not until the 1990s that Italian takes the lead. In the last, highly productive decade of Sidonius scholarship, French is currently in second place, and English third.

***

A few thoughts. First of all, and unsurprisingly, sometimes scholarship really does boom/ surge/ explode. National trends or trends within a single academic culture can lead the way. Second, I do not propose here to get into the quarrels on the Classicists’ list, but this much seems clear: it may be that more and more classical scholarship will be written in English in the coming years, but it is very far from evident that this will inevitably be the case.

Appendix

Some caveats on the source information. L'Année Philologique is not comprehensive and omits many works (a comparison with Jenkins’ Ammianus bibliography or with the bibliography on sidonapol.org would be revealing here). The lack of Spanish works before 1990 seems implausible, for example. It has some deliberate omissions (introductions of edited books are not listed as separate articles, even if they are lengthy and significant contributions). Especially in the last decades of the twentieth century, the tagging of languages is not reliable (as shown here) and so I compiled my own lists; in more recent years, 9 works on Ammianus whose titles begin with Latin elements have been miscatalogued as being in Latin (I have not reallocated them in the tables above). In the older entries there are some doublets, mostly in the case of monographs that were in two or more successive issues because new reviews had appeared since the last issue. For reasons I could not understand, the same search sometimes produced marginally different results (numbers different by one or two), but not to an extent that made a serious difference.

For tables giving figures for the charts above, see here.