Valediction

Folklore asserts that BMGS/JMGS was founded by Mike Keeley and Anthony Bryer in a Birmingham bar, or else by Peter Bien and Anthony Bryer in a Birmingham bar. The stable elements seem to be Bryer and the Birmingham bar. In any case, twenty-five years have passed since then. Bryer, who preferred to remain as business manager, induced the formidable Donald Nicol of King’s College London to edit BMGS (affectionately nicknamed “bum-gas”) with me as his associate editor. This Anglo-American modernist-Byzantinist collaboration continued from 1975 to 1983, published by Blackwell’s. By that time, folks at MGSA felt that our discipline had advanced sufficiently for us to manage a journal on our own. Thus Lily Macrakis and I journeyed to Blackwell’s in Oxford with a proposal; they were not amused. Then Bryer and I journeyed to Baltimore to lure Johns Hopkins into some sort of interest; that went better—indeed, for seventeen years Hopkins has provided us with a succession of totally professional editors. And the mariage de convenance between England and America ended amicably, with BMGS continuing on its own in Birmingham and with a newly invented JMGS edited by Bill McNeill taking flight in Maryland. We changed then to two issues a year and added book reviews. Later, with the great help of Jeffrey Rusten of Cornell and the valiant cooperation of Hopkins’ compositors, I was able to computerize the typesetting of Greek, ending the previous nightmare in which every γ had come out as a χ every ν as a υ, and all the breathings were facing in the wrong direction (for we then used polytonic). Next, Michael Macrakis and The Greek Font Society stepped into the act, lamenting our ugly font and making us a present of the elegant Didot, which is now employed.

For me, these twenty-five years have been quite an adventure. To work with Bill McNeill and then with his energetic successor, Ernestine Friedl, was a valuable apprenticeship. When I assumed the editorship in 1990, I then had the pleasure of collaborating first with Michael Herzfeld and afterwards with Peter Allen as associate editors, both of whom are possessed of an excellent eye for detail and a clear mind for judgment. Thankfully, the book reviews were always handled separately, initially by Mary Layoun and then by Eva Konstantellou, who despite family obligations and massive troubles at work has always been a dedicated, imaginative colleague. In addition, of course, JMGS has had a distinguished group of experts on its editorial board ready to read submissions and recommend or dissuade (we have published only about 38% of the 440 submissions received since December 1985). Many many thanks, therefore, to Margaret Alexiou, Richard Clogg, Loring Danforth, John Iatrides, Kostas Kazazis, Edmund Keeley, Mark Mazower, Nicos Mouzelis, Alexander Nehamas, Dimitris Tziovas, and Speros Vryonis. Lastly, I must mention the succession of Dartmouth students whom I have trained in copyediting, proofreading, and bibliographical research, young people who in some cases have gone into the field professionally. In particular, I remember with gratitude Kate Cohen, Jay Bruce, Erica Thrall, and Sara Zuniga.

Thinking back over my nine years as editor and fifteen before that as associate editor, I consider the most notable areas of growth to have been (1) the computerization of Greek, already mentioned, (2) the greatly increased diversity of scholarly fields represented, instead of just literature and history, which dominated at the start, and (3), perhaps most important, the large number of submissions now coming from Greece itself. Yes, these years have been an adventure—stimulating, educative, and mostly pleasurable despite the curses hurled at me occasionally by rejected authors. The real purpose of JMGS has been not just to make scholarship available in print but also to act as a kind of school for peers, offering constructive advice for improvement and always operating according to the dictates of scholarly rigor. Consequently, perhaps the journal’s most important activity is not what is seen on its pages but everything that occurs invisibly before publication. With hope and trust that this will continue, I happily turn over the editorship now to my successor, Professor Susan Buck Sutton, wishing for...