Progressive Geographies

In the Institute of Historical Research library today, looking at the five volume Folger Library edition of the Works of Richard Hooker. It’s a big project – the five volumes were published between 1977 and 1990, and there are separate editors for each volume, as well as a general editor. It’s clearly the product of an enormous amount of work.

It got me thinking – again – about the importance of academic service work. This is work like editing, translating, introducing etc. that is so central to the way we read any thinker at a historical distance, and yet is so undervalued. For some people I’m writing on for this book – Bartolus of Sassoferrato and Baldus de Ubaldis – there is no modern edition of their writings, save for a few small pieces, and so I worked with fifteenth and sixteenth century editions. Even those have some editorial work, of course, but they are nothing like a full modern critical edition. Working with those made me really realise just how much we take for granted in reading a text of a historical writer; let alone if we read it in translation.

The State, Space, World collection of Henri Lefebvre’s writings Neil Brenner and I edited, and which we co-translated with Gerald Moore, was an enormous amount of work. We selected the texts, made the translations – which in most instances Gerald prepared a first draft which was then discussed line by line, word by word, by Neil and me – and did all the notes. These were not just references – although those took a huge amount of time, since Lefebvre was incredibly sloppy, and because we identified English editions whereever possible – but also editorial notes explaining who people were, which book or theory is meant, events etc. Lefebvre’s lack of precision, the obscurity of some references, the French context and the age of some of the texts usually meant this was not simple Google searching to find out.

Given all this – and I’m well aware what we did is not a full critical edition – it’s frustrating how little this kind of work is valued. It’s very poorly paid; counts for little in terms of tenure or promotion cases (one of the reasons Neil and I did that book is because we were both already promoted); and often barely recognised. It’s a bit galling for instance when authors omit editor and translator details from their reference lists…