Forum | Method, Ethics, and Historiography : Opening Remarks

I am a classicist by training, and I work on the history of ancient libraries. For the past few years, I have been working out how to write an ethical history of libraries and a history of knowledge more broadly, because, to my mind, an intersectional feminist intervention is needed very badly to counter the histories classicists are writing today.

When classicists write about the history of libraries, they narrate the development of libraries as a linear succession of libraries founded by great men at a series of imperial centers in the ancient world. What they’ll typically claim is that libraries were invented at classical Athens, and then trace the history of libraries from Aristotle’s library at classical Athens, to the Library of Alexandria, to the imperial libraries at Rome, to early Christian libraries, and then down to the present day. This history creates a classical and Christian genealogy for Western Europe that goes back to all the great empires of the West.

This narrative also encodes deeply misogynist, racist, and eurocentric ideas about what constitutes knowledge and whose knowledge is authoritative: primarily texts written in a handful of languages by a narrow section of the male population, imagined to be white. This narrative is partly the product of nineteenth and twentieth-century historiography (with its invention of the Greek miracle, the birth of Western Civilization at Athens, and so forth). But parts of it also go back to antiquity, because people were already mythologizing the Library of Alexandria and coming up with explanations for how libraries developed over time.

One of the big challenges is both working against the ideological bent of our written sources and working against this huge body of scholarship with its sexist, Eurocentric ideas about what constitutes knowledge in the teleological march toward Western Civilization.

In my work, I turn unexamined universals into particulars (What if the Library of Alexandria wasn’t a universal library? What if the libraries at Athens and Rome are just a few, particular libraries?). How can we reimagine the history of libraries taking into account all the evidence at our disposal? This requires reckoning with our scholarly methodologies. How do we want to explain historical change and causation? Do we want to cling to discrete moments of great men founding libraries and this patriarchal, biological lineage that links us to the past? Or look at how ideas and institutions spread through, for example, dynamic models of consensus and convergence to form a truer and more just picture of the ancient world?

I’m excited to hear from our colleagues who are working out how to study global late antiquity, moving away from universalism and Eurocentrism. Annette Yoshiko Reed will be discussing non-hierarchical models of difference and knowledge production, and how we can integrate the study of Christianity into Global Late Antiquity. David Maldonado Rivera will consider the late antique and medieval Caribbean, and what the potential gains and potential pitfalls are for envisioning global late antiquity as a historical commons available to all. Ekaputra Tupamahu will be discussing the politics of language and the reception of Pauline text, and how we can move away from eurocentric approaches to the encounter of colonial and non-colonial languages.

Of course, our scholarship is just one part of the picture. Ideas about the past really matter outside of academia. And what people are getting from our academic disciplines is disturbing.

For a couple years now I’ve been collecting references to the Library of Alexandria, and you would not believe how widespread it is across movies, videogames, internet memes, and so forth. This is not an innocent fantasy about a universal library and democratizing knowledge. People are very attuned to the fact that it’s a Greek library and wedded to the myth that the Greeks were a superior civilization, so you see it repeated over and over that the library’s destruction set “civilization” (i.e. white, European civilization) back by a thousand years. And beyond the pop culture references, there are all these digital humanities projects now (many named after Alexandria) to collect and store data, build universal libraries, and forestall a digital dark age.

What I want to drive home is that these are the ideas our disciplines promote. I know so many white liberal academics who are perfectly happy to decry how far right extremists (who are easy to identify as the bad guys) don’t really understand the ancient world and show they’ve got the facts wrong. But what I haven’t managed to get through to my colleagues is that “those” extremists are using the exact same ideas our disciplines promote, just in more obviously hateful ways. It’s everybody; it’s us too; and so we need to reckon with the unethical messages in our disciplines and change the terms of discussion. I’m especially excited to hear from Young Richard Kim about his own experiences in social justice oriented scholarship and public outreach.

Through our panelists’ reflections on ethics, historiography, and late antique Christianity, we can together chart a path toward studying the exciting world of global late antiquity.

Alexandra Leewon Schultz is a Junior Research Fellow in Classics at Cambridge University and will be Assistant Professor of Classics at Dartmouth College starting in 2023.