Material Approaches to Roman Magic: A brief reflection.
On this grey spring day, a new book is blinking in the half-light and taking its first tentative steps into the world of academia. This is day for celebration, as an edited volume organised by myself and my co-conspirator Stuart McKie (OU PhD graduate, now lecturer at Manchester University) is released.
Material Approaches to Roman Magic: Occult Objects and Supernatural Substances is an edited volume consisting of ten standalone papers by a mixture of established academics, early career researchers, PhD students, and museum professionals, and weighs in at just over 100,000 words. I thought that now seems to be an ideal time to take a moment to reflect on the process, the finished product, and the experience. There is an official release party in Edinburgh tonight, at the conference, which neither of us are able to attend. Thankfully there will be contributors present to bask in the glory of their newly published work. Writing this blog is how I will be celebrating.
I’d worked as an editor before, but as solo editor, chief people wrangler, reviewer, and type-setter for the British Archaeological Report Ad Vallum: Papers on the Roman Army and Frontiers in Celebration of Dr Brian Dobson (2017). My main memory of that process was that it was a long, lonely one. That, and type-setting 16 papers into Microsoft Word complete with page numbers, headers etc. is a 21st century level of Hell. Material Approaches, affectionately known as the ‘TRAGIC’ project behind the scenes (TRAC + Magic = ….), was a much more positive experience. There are two main reasons for this: Oxbow type-set everything; I had a co-editor to work with.
The inception for this volume was in the 2015 TRAC panel “Charmed, I’m sure: Roman Magic – Old theory, new approaches”. The six original papers included in that session were:
Stuart McKie: Distraught, drained, devoured, or damned? The importance of individual creativity in Roman cursing.
Glynn Davis: Excessively charged amulets? Contextualising Roman London’s ‘Magical’ Jet and Amber
Alissa Whitmore: Fascinating Fascina – Revisiting Roman Phallic Pendants
Alessandro Quercia & Melania Cazzuolo – Fear of the dead? ‘Deviant’ burials in the Roman Northern Italy.
Idit Sagiv: Victory of good over evil? Apotropaic animal images on Roman engraved gems
Adam Parker: Making Magic Work
From this original six, Stuart’s paper on cursing and Allessandro and Melania’s paper on Deviant burials both made it into the 2016 publication of the 2015 conference proceedings where they sit next to each other. I don’t remember how it happened, but Stuart was quickly on board for co-editor duties, providing a different contribution inspired by his then almost-finished PhD on the topic. Idit’s paper was written up directly for this volume I’m glad to say, and Glynn took an element of his paper and broadened it out – his complete catalogue of the amber from London is forthcoming in the regional journal. Alissa’s subject is also retained in the final volume, though the title and some of the content was used for a paper she published in a 2017 edited volume on dress in antiquity. So far, so good then for producing academic impact from a conference session
The elephant in the room is my own contribution. Originally I had intended to try and bolt some theory together and promote a newer, contextualised approach to the material culture. Whether it worked on the day is for others to judge, but on paper it just looked like I’d bitten off more than I could chew. It took me a few months of occasionally messing around with it to realise that it simply would not work as a standalone paper and certainly not for the volume we were organising, with its material-led approaches. It was a genuine relief to park a paper that I’d found hard to write and move onto what (in my opinion) is what I’m good at – writing about objects. Thankfully, some of what I’d produced was re-worked by Dr. McKie into the introduction, for which he also draws on his own PhD work. The content I’d tried to write makes a lot more sense at the beginning than where I’d originally envisaged it as a paradigm-shifting, world-burning paper as it could never have been either of those things. The choice to write, instead about tintinnabula was drawn from my recent blog post and the experiences of writing some underpinning work on the materia magica of Roman Britain for my PhD research. They are fascinating things and, apparently, wildly understudied as a group of objects.
I’m still not 100% satisfied with my own paper in this volume, probably because it doesn’t really answer any of the questions I’d raised (but nor did it intend to!). It is probably a whole separate research project to fully investigate this topic. There are, of course, many elements of this book which I am very, very proud of. Looking at the list of contributors, the majority of those involved are not the usual big-hitters of Roman material culture/religion/magic studies, though Dasen and Wilburn can certainly be classed as such. Four of the contributors were PhD students when the process started and when they wrote their papers – I hope this volume will be helpful to the careers of these folks as they join the other ECRs from the contents page; having a PhD isn’t a pre-requisite to academic publication though it may often look that way from the outside of the subject or the outset of a research project. The authors are from different backgrounds professionally as well as personally: at least five nationalities are represented here, with a 6:4 male-female gender split. Four of us work also work outside of academia, in the museums & heritage sector.
I’m very proud of the fact that this project arose when I was an independent researcher, just someone interested in the subject. Ok I was trying to get a PhD place at the time (and now have one), but the volume was born out of an interest in the subject, pure and simple, and fuelled exponentially through the inclusion of other interested and interesting individuals. I have a hazy memory of the evening now, but remember sitting in a Leicester pub with various members of the panel drinking for hours and hours during the TRAC party the evening after the session. At that point we were actively reclaiming the “loony fringe” title that Ralph Merrifield has coined for us in the 1980s – I distinctly remember talking about that very phrase. I’m glad that it now also features in the introduction to the published volume.
Of course there were stressful moments and a few late nights of proof reading on a work-night but the darkest cloud which hung over this project, for me, was having to take the difficult decision to remove a contributor from the process. The deadlines were somewhat idealised, but Stuart and I were very accommodating to extensions as long as they did not impact the long-term results; we ended up with a staggered system of papers in, read, edited, changed, returned etc and a simple colour-coded excel spreadsheet to keep track of it all. We reached a point in the process that, despite the constant promises of a contributor to submit their paper, it was evident they were too unreliable to be part of the process and would have been many months behind the other contributors. The email I wrote explaining our situation and to, effectively, boot-out someone who may have jeopardised this project was a very difficult thing to do. I wrote it twice, edited it carefully for the correct tone and then sent a draft to the co-editor and the series editor. The author in question wasn’t happy. To paraphrase them, they returned an email saying that no work on Roman magic would be complete without a contribution on their specific subject. I did not reply, much as I’d have enjoyed angrily hammering the keys, to tell them that I agreed and that was, in fact, the point. Handily, at the same time one of the other contributors (TD) and I had organised a panel on Medicine/Magic for the 2017 TRAC conference. Having seen Nicky’s paper in this panel, we agreed to approach him for a last-minute inclusion into the project. Thankfully, he agreed and worked like an absolute Trojan to get a paper to us in a short window and then to respond to initial comments from the editors within an even shorter window to keep the book on time. The resulting volume is all the stronger for this paper.
This forced removal of a contributor came shortly after one other author withdrew from the process after talking to a PhD supervisor, so there was a point in the process when we were down to 8 papers in the book. The epilogue/round-up by Dasen was a valuable contribution that also came later in the process, partly as a result of these changes early in 2017, but also from the realisation that a collative, ‘finishing’ paper was needed for this volume to make sense as a whole. I’m glad to have had the opportunity to work with the contributors that we did, though I still have not personally met three of them in the real world. It is my fervent hope to work with many of them again on other projects.
There are a lot of transferable skills inherent in editing a book like this. Time management and team-working are the big take-homes, but personal discipline in reading and re-reading when it matters are important, as was maintaining a flexible approach to getting the work done. As no-one is paying any of us to do this, it is a feather in everyone’s caps.
I hope that the journal reviewers are kind to us, but whatever its legacy I’m pleased to have been able to help create a platform for this volume and to push a research agenda I am very interested in.
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