Going AWOL
A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon AWOL: The Ancient World on Line, a project largely managed by Charles E. Jones, who explains its purpose:
The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.
The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.
It doesn’t take long for one to be impressed, not to say overwhelmed, by the variety of investigations under way all over the world as well as by the number of scholarly publications that record their progress. Many languages, ancient and modern, are part of the project. The list of journals available on-line includes many for biblical and patristic studies.
As I know from sad (not really!) experience, each new item added to the open access list can easily tempt one away from what one is supposed to be doing. E.g,, a week or two ago, when the site took notice of the Vergil Project; or the other day, when the annuals of an association for Roman archaeology in Britain was added; ; or today when I learned of Lexicity, a site that gathers from all over the Internet useful and trustworthy materials for the study of ancient languages.
Wow! What a treasure trove. I found some lovely stuff on Aristotle immediately :-)
Interesting that the “ancient world” in the site name doesn’t include medieval Christendom. Is that terminology usual?
“Medieval” means middle time, of course. Hmm.
Yes antiquity does not include the Middle Ages. They’re “middle,” in a still too common trope, because they’re the Dark Ages between ancient light and Renaissance/Enlightenment progress.
Now that the scholars are starting to see that the origins of science, including empirical science, go all the way back to the 13th century it seems to me that the era should be re-named. In philosophy there was great development, and it was continuous with the Renaissance.
Oops — I should have said “the origins of science in the West” . . . The Muslims, of course, had made great progress in medicine, astronomy and some math. They gave the West the beginnings of Western science.
Thanks for the link. I took some Greek and Roman history courses in college and really liked them.
Anne, there’s a site I visit sometimes you might like … http://www.medievalists.net/
…can easily tempt one away from what one is supposed to be doing.
This weekend I discovered http://www.macfreedom.com .”Freedom is a simple productivity application that locks you away from the internet on Mac or Windows computers for up to eight hours at a time. At the end of your offline period, Freedom allows you back on the internet.”
As a user commented, perhaps sarcastically: “You know people pay money to have their internet blocked? Brilliant!”
Ann: But here the site notes the availability on-line of the volumes of the Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi: http://documents.irevues.inist.fr/handle/2042/751
Crystal and JAK –
Thanks for the sites. There are some other references to Thomas at the one JAK mentions. Fordham has a wealth of medieval stuff online too. Just google “Fordham medieval”. And you can get a lot of the primary sources and also some translations at the Ethereal Library. Unfortunately, I can hardly read Latin.
Thanks for the notice of AWOL on the Commonweal blog by Joseph A. Komonchak and for the very interesting comments. I do include late antiquity and early Christianity within the scope of AWOL, and will continue to do so as material on those periods emerges in the open access world. It is in fact almost impossible to keep pace with the explosion of high quality scholarly material in any discipline, and the Ancient World of Eurasia and Africa is very broad to begin with.
I welcome comment here or on any of the pages at AWOL. I read and respond to all substantive interactions.
Prof. Jones –
Thank you so much for the AWOL site. Fabulous, literally :-)
I even found a site there that teaches beginning Greek. It’s a bit late at 82 to try to start learning it, but I’ll give it a try. My father always claimed it was eazy. We’ll see :-)