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| Gentleman dressed as a medieval herald, at Leeds Royal Armouries Photo by Pickersgill Reef |
It’s nowadays normal procedure for a
historian working on a monograph to publish one or more articles on the topic
first, before the appearance of the book itself. There are good intellectual and
strategic rationales for this. Pre-book articles are a way of testing the water
(i.e. peer reaction), putting down a marker that one is moving into field x, or
even creating (ideally) anticipation and interest around a future book. There
is also, in the UK, hard academic politics behind it too: if a book project is
going to take you 5-10 years, you need to keep publishing over the lifetime of
that endeavour in order to have items to submit to the Research Excellence
Framework (REF), the government’s regular assessment of the quality of
university research, which determines departmental funding.
‘The Elusive Church' will have two pre-book articles (for all the reasons above!). Because the process of peer reviewing and publication
in humanities journals is so very slow, these articles are only now beginning
to emerge through the academic pipe work… by this stage, they feel a little bit
like ghosts.
It’s strange writing a monograph, with
these ancestor publications in the back of your mind. The 2 articles + book
have to each work as coherent individual pieces of research and historical
argument. But they also, ideally, need collectively to paint a connected and
convincing picture. The challenge it to ensure that that this corpus of work –
2 articles + 1 book - is bigger than the sum of its miscellaneous parts. At
best, those parts reinforce each other, and exist in dialogue and positive
tension with one another. At worst, they just repeat each other in a way that
diminishes them all.
So, for those with an interest in the early
Reformation, the journal articles in question - the heralds of the book - are:
- 'Forgetting
Lutheranism. Historians and the Early Reformation in
- 'High Clergy and
Printers: Anti-Reformation Polemic in the
