Challenging Historiographical Orthodoxy Many Times Over: An Interview with Jeremy Black
- Challenging Historiographical Orthodoxy Many Times Over:An Interview with Jeremy Black
Though he is keen not to be viewed as simply the most prolific living historian, there is no getting past the fact that Jeremy Black writes more history than anyone else. But overemphasis on the prodigious fruit of his labors misses how skillfully Black, a professor of history at the University of Exeter, looks at familiar subjects from different angles and in new contexts. No stranger to the pages of Historically Speaking, Black responded to Senior Editor Donald Yerxa's questions in December 2011.
For the record, how many books have you written?
I am not happy with the stress on the number of books. I would prefer an emphasis on intellectual ambition and scholarly range. To count works or words is also unsatisfactory because it assumes that all my works strive to the same end, which is not the case. For most of my career, I did not know how many single-author books I had published. I only counted when Roger Kain asked me over lunch whether I was "heading for a hundred." I was not sure for a second what he meant. I then guessed how many I had published, went home, counted, and discovered I was off by ten and into the early eighties. That then led me to take an interest in whether I could reach one hundred, just to see if it was possible. Since I reached that figure in 2010, I no longer keep a note of the number. But I think I have now published 106.
How do you respond to those critics who say that you write too much?
If you write a lot, it is necessary to feel that you are offering something new each time, either by reaching into new fields or by providing significantly revised accounts of existing work. I have tried to do both. I do not suggest that my goals or methods make me "better" than other academics, but I also reject the charge that writing a lot produces inherently worse work, the "too many notes" remark of Joseph II when referring to Mozart in Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus (1979).
There is no inherent reason to believe that more work is better, but the opposite is also true. And here we are up against cultural factors, the deeply ingrained idea that somehow a work that takes a long time is inherently better. That is a questionable proposition, as the key element is quality, and that does not necessarily reflect duration. What matters is the intellectual insight, the time it takes to get it right, to strike an original voice, and the fitness for purpose of the particular project.
It is also helpful to point out that publishers and journals use academic reviewers. Indeed, I sometimes wonder about the ethos of my critics. I do not so much mind the small-mindedness directed against me. But, for example, are the reviewers of the two successful articles I sent to the English Historical Review or the two I sent to The Historical Journal or those of the books I have published with Cambridge, Yale, and other publishers supposed to have used laxer standards for me than for others? Preposterous. I certainly find reviewers' comments extremely useful.
Ultimately, we can do little about backbiting. It is more productive to consider informed criticism. The lengthy review (including 150 footnotes) of my work by Reed Browning in Archives (October 2004) is the most perceptive and captures an engagement with "civic importance" that is significant, although also problematic. Browning draws attention both to problems with my work, including "uneven prose," "ambiguous locution," and abrupt endings and to "the broader importance" of the work in terms of scholarly quality and wider resonances. I would add to my problems a continued uncertainty about the nature and causes of change, although that causes a productive tension in my work.
I am very fortunate in my colleagues at Exeter and elsewhere, and feel very much part of an academic tradition in which scholars learn from each other and take the subject forward, often disagreeing but...
