A quick thought...
Sorry for the lack of blog visiting and blogging. I am away earning quick money with a marking gig at BaaRamU and trying ot get writing done. But apropos of these posts at
Tenured Radical and
Historiann, and my comment at TR's, I had a thought.
It might not be a particularly good one, but here goes.
I looked at it again, and noted that one of the fields that is supposedly in decline is economic history. And again, I was struck by how us early folk are pretty much written off, invisible, unimportant to the generalizations of what history is and what it's good for. Because, well, Chris Wickham's prize-winning
Framing the Early Middle Ages sure as hell seemed to be largely economic history to me. But then I thought, "ah, but Wickham's a Marxist historian, isn't he? and that is also that narsty non-traditional stuff."
Except, well, Marxist historiography is certainly nothing new.
Anyway, even if that's a crap argument (I've had 4 hours' sleep and travelled all day), here's my thought:
Where is this absence of traditional fields when you look at us pre-Modern types?
It doesn't exist.
Medievalists (and I'm including the Late Antique folks here) are still doing economic history, diplomatic history, military history, legal and constitutional history ... all of those things and more. And doing a booming business.
Now, I ws thinking that part of why this never seems to be the case is that most of us have to use whatever tools are in our bags to get the job done, and most of us can move around a bit, because we've had to.
But here's my other thought: to others -- including our colleagues in history, who dammit should know better -- we are medievalists. To the outside world, we don't get to classify ourselves by subfield (except for period, pretty much). Is Steve White a legal historian? Nope, he's a medievalist. Is Charlie Bowlus a military historian? Nope, he's a medievalist. Judith Bennett a social historian? Nope. She's a medievalist, too.
I should go somewhere with this, but not now.
