These are the various works, great or otherwise, on which I'm currently engaged, with a few past glories at the end.
Personal Research
My main work has been for years and is still the elucidation of power structures and society in Catalonia over the late ninth, tenth and early eleventh centuries, as this area that had been the very edge of the Carolingian Empire, where Christianity met Islam, became almost by default a new and increasingly prosperous polity that would come to dominate the eastern peninsula and much of the Mediterranean. I do this by tracing connections between the holders of power and their delegates and subjects in the prolific charter evidence. This work has so far generated six published papers, several more in various stages of revision and a rook of conference and seminar papers, all of which are detailed on the Publications page. It also generated my Ph.D. thesis, "Pathways of Power in late-Carolingian Catalonia", which was submitted at the University of London in September 2005, and passed without corrections in March 2006. A revised and improved version of this is now available in the Royal Historical Society's Studies in History series under the title of Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia 880-1010: pathways of power. (Please forgive the RHS's Carolingian typo there.)
Because almost all the evidence I use for this work is transaction documents, charters as they're commonly called, and they largely survive in the original, I've become increasingly occupied as well with the particular problems and possibilities of this kind of evidence, which was in this period a private, not an official, version of events that didn't necessarily unfold as our texts would suggest. In the long-term I want to write a new introduction to these issues as a monographic article, and I want to put some of this kind of material before students in the form of a translation of a selection of the charters of the convent I've especially focussed on, Sant Joan de les Abadesses, but more immediately, I and some friends organised a series of sessions on this subject at the Leeds International Medieval Congress, and some of the papers from those are now in publication as a volume edited by myself and Allan Scott McKinley, provisionally entitled Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Diplomatic: charter critique and history from charters. We look forward to this emerging on 2013, and there may be more that we can do in this line after that.
I currently also have in preparation papers on the following more-or-less related subjects:
- the identity of the authority used and claimed by those in power on the Spanish March;
- the supposed 'feudal transformation' that the area underwent in the eleventh century, and how to advance the scholarship that has become bogged down over this issue more widely across Europe.
- a study of the seigneurial takeover of a settlement in the form of the establishment of the Catalan monastery of Sant Pere de Casserres, using documentary, archaeological and epigraphic evidence;
- the mistakenly low figures commonly used for the yields from agriculture in the Carolingian period, work in whose support I was lucky enough to receive a Travel Award from the British Academy to present it at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo;
- the operations of and importances of priests in local communities in the early medieval West;
- the fiscal underpinning of the so-called `public' authority in early medieval Catalonia and its origins; and
- the need for new theories on the social make-up and operation of frontiers in the medieval period.
I am also working on material for two other books: firstly a biographical study of Borrell II, the Count-Marquis of Barcelona at the time of the last Carolingians, whose career makes a splendid illustration of the changes in society at his time and how those in positions of power might respond to them; and lastly a comparative study of the political and patronage strategies of the various counts and rulers of the Spanish frontier as events came to favour their independence. In the long term I hope to synthesize these works into a wider account of Catalonia's social changes at the turn of the millennium as seen through the interactions and strategies of its holders of power.
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I already had a mild interest in numismatics before working for five years in the Department of Coins and Medals in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and since then I have become considerably more alive to the possibilities of money as historical evidence. This has so far got me two papers published and an article in an edited volume on digitization of medieval culture that should be out in late 2012, it will also produce a paper for a volume dedicated to the memory of Mark Blackburn now in preparation, and though I have no further plans to work in this area right now, who knows what will come up?
I have also broadened my own research westwards and have done some work investigating society in the frontier society of Asturias and León, again on the basis of the extensive charter evidence, contrasting this with the conventional depiction drawn from the Asturian chronicles. I have become especially interested in persons in the Christian community with Arabic names; there's a very large project here that I intend to try and get funding for in the future to work out how many of these people and where and why they turn up.
For my Masters I spent a year working on the political structures of Northern Britain in the very early medieval period, and I published a paper based on this old work in early 2008. I hope to return to this area in the near future and prepare a further paper for publication on the political structure in and kingship of Pictland. I remain interested in early medieval Scotland and have some much-valued contacts in the field.
I also have a good familiarity with Anglo-Saxon England and a few ideas for contributions there, but realism suggests that I shouldn't bother listing them after all this little lot...
Employment Projects
I copy-edited about half the texts for the web component of Christianization and State Formation in Northern and Central Europe c. 900-c. 1200 project at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge, which is now online here.
I constructed, redesigned and filled a database for a project entitled Mobility and Meetings of Spanish People in the Tenth Century under Professor Wendy Davies at University College London.
I was for a while involved in the ongoing Lay Archives Project, funded by the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust. As well as massing and recording data for other parts of the project, I constructed a database of known pre-900 lay documents in ecclesiastical archives, but this was not eventually used by the project authors and seven years down the line the project has produced no output at all. This is a bit sad.
While working at the Fitzwilliam Museum, I catalogued and put online the Museum's collection of Korean coins, its Roman Imperial gold & silver coins, the various items in the Watson Medals Collection, the Queens College Collection, the Wyon Collection of medals, the traders' tokens from the Mossop Collection, the Museum's entire collection of 18th and 19th-century tokens, the Rogers Collection of toy coins and the ancient coins from the Ritchie Post Collection, and I managed a team that catalogued and imaged the Chinese coins in the collection, which I then put online. More of my work there is still to be put online at time of update. I was also responsible for copy-editing the forthcoming catalogue of the Department's coins of the Mughal empire by Sanjay and Nurassa Garg, and two volumes of the Medieval European Coinage series, and for maintaining, cleaning and updating the Corpus of Early Medieval Coin-Finds and Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles databases, from which I also generated electronically the initial text for the 2006 through 2010 editions of "Coin Register" in the British Numismatic Journal.
Also while at Coins and Medals, I created a number of online resources and exhibitions:
- the Lester Watson Collection of Campaign and Gallantry Medals, which the Museum acquired on loan in 2005 for the Department's Imagery of War exhibition, which I also designed around texts written by Martin Allen
- two pages of the periodical virtual exhibition Coin of the Moment, on a gold penny of King Henry III, based on texts by Martin Allen, and on the Sea Gallantry Medal awarded to Harry Meader, which was all my own work except where otherwise credited
- the online component of the exhibition Anglo-Saxon Art in the Round, with texts by Mark Blackburn and images from Künke Auctions or by me
- a virtual exhibition entitled Antonio Rodriquez and the New Zealand Cross, which more or less explains itself and which was all my own work except where otherwise credited.
- another virtual exhibition entitled Tokens of Revolution: the propaganda coinage of Thoma Spence and his contemporaries, about the self-publicity in metal of a proto-Communist would-be revolutionary in Georgian England, again all my own work except where otherwise credited.
Anything I was able to put on the Fitzwilliam's website, especially the earlier pieces, I did so with considerable help from the Museum's Computer Manager Shaun Osborne and the Computer Assistant and later Computer Officer Dave Gunn. None of this really features in my medieval research, but I found it interesting and hope that the casual browser might do so too.