Studenda Mira

Last week, I went to the opening lecture of a conference on St. Augustine. My history professor, who suggested that my fellow students and I attend, leans over to me at one point, indicates a guy walking towards his seat, and says, "There's Peter Brown ." If you don't know who Peter Brown is, here's a very, very brief explanation: Up until our generation, give or take, the dominant view of the fall of Rome was that barbarian hordes descended upon the place in the 5th century and wiped out the Western empire, burying our civilization in the "Dark Ages" for the next several hundred years. In 1971, Peter Brown put out a book that focused on the Eastern empire, which fared much better during that period. He said, in essence, "yes, there were barbarians, but a lot of really cool and really important stuff (especially stuff involving the infusion of Christianity into society) happened during that time and it deserves to be studied." He referred to t...

I once had a medieval studies professor who required us to watch particular Hollywood movies as fodder for class discussion. We watched stuff like Ben-Hur and The Name of the Rose . He would open the class by asking us what we thought of the movie and would gradually segue into a lecture on the period in which the movie was set. As a teaching tool, it was genius; most people actually did watch the movies, and the resulting discussions--which the professor deftly managed to focus on the relevant historical topics as opposed to the fictional elements of the plot--were animated and interesting. Unfortunately, most other history profs I've met have turned their noses up at period movies when I've asked about them. The common complaints seem to be that the screenplays are rife with inaccuracies (certainly true) and that too many laypeople are content to consume them as documentaries (probably true). Fair enough. For my part, though, I'd rather see Jane or Dick watch King A...

I suppose I should explain what I'm doing here. I'll try to do it without writing my autobiography. About six years ago, I began studying the history of Ireland, from whence my parents came to the United States. It seemed like a culturally responsible undertaking, and there was a self-discovery angle in there, too. I bought and borrowed a lot of books on the subject. Most of them were monographs from academic presses. I discovered two things early on. The first one seems pretty obvious now. One can't really appreciate the history of Ireland without also studying a lot of the history of the rest of Europe, especially Britain. Properly studying Britain, in turn, requires one to study things like ancient Rome and medieval Europe. The second thing I discovered is that your typical Barnes & Noble doesn't carry very many popular histories of Ireland, and that the ones they do carry seem unnecessarily dry. So, a little more than two years ago, I set a long-term goal...