Continues the Hiatus, 2024

Friends, Readers, Countrymen, lend me your eyes! As sadly expected, the hiatus is going to continue through October. I am making good progress on my writing, but still need to keep focusing. I am currently, I believe, on track for us to go back to normally scheduled posts in November, but I don’t want to make any promises as I want to be sure that the book comes out as strong as it possible can.

In the meantime, last month I gave you all a list of recommendations from other blogs, channels and so on, so I though this month, I might highlight a few of my favorites from the archives for those of you who haven’t plumbed the back-catalog.

Of course the all-time fan favorites on the blog are the twin Lord of the Rings series: The Battle of Helm’s Deep and theSiege of Gondor. But in case you may have missed it, we’ve also looked in a lot more detail at some of the core elements of logistics, leadership and command that I could only touch on briefly in those series, namely:

• The series of Logistics and Foraging, Logistics, How Did They Do It in three parts: (I, II, III)

• A more detailed discussion of how fast armies move and why.

• A discussion on fortifications and sieges throughout the eras in five parts: (I, II, III, IV, V)

• And a discussion on the limitations of pre-industrial battlefield command in three-ish parts: (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc)

One of my favorite series to have written here was The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, a series looking at identity, diversity, bigotry and the roots of Roman success in five parts: (I, II, III, IV, V). This series has become, sadly, I think, more relevant in the three years since I wrote it, as skewed visions of Rome have been increasingly mobilized, especially on Twitter (including by the owner of Twitter) to defend exclusionary policies – a baffling error, given that Rome is, perhaps, the most obvious and clear case of ‘diversity is strength’ in the pre-modern world.

Some of the most interesting topics, to me at least, I’ve writetn on here are the How Did They Make It series, covering agriculture (I, II, III, IV, A), ironworking (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, A) and textile manufacture (I, II, III, IVa, IVb). It is worth remembering that prior to the industrial revolution, agriculture and textile manufacture would have made up between them the overwhelming majority of economic activity: if you want to understand ancient or medieval economies, understanding cereal agriculture (grain, rice, etc.) and textiles will get you to understanding probably close to three quarters of all economic activity.

Finally, let me pull together some of the source reading we’ve done:

• Thucydides on what we’d call foreign policy realism

• Cicero on Natural Law

• Dhuoda of Uzès on values in the medieval Carolingian court

• And both ‘Antarah Ibn Shaddad and Bertran de Born on visions of elite military masculinity.

I’ll also note that these are all exercises in ‘close reading’ and we did one more exercise in close reading here, on the themes of Dune.

So if you haven’t, check those out – or suggest your own favorites from the ACOUP back-catalog in the comments and hopefully we’ll be back in November. In the meantime, here is an absolutely fantastic model of a Fletcher-class destroyer that a former student of mine made for me: