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Alphabet Soup 333
North Africa. In 1999, the new editorial working group
sketched out a hope to publish Arabic abstracts of papers, and
to plan ‘Special Sections’ on the Arabic-speaking world, while
admitting: ‘Accumulating the resources for these ventures, may
take time’. 21
6. covering the mediterranean
As this brief review of the four journals would suggest, while
the Mediterranean is normally taken to mean the sum of all its
parts and periods, representative coverage of the region is no
easy task. Meditarch and JMA, and to a lesser extent MHR and
the pre-modern elements of JMS, all share a bias towards the
eastern Mediterranean; they reveal a tendency to feature contributions
on Greece, the Levant, and the Aegean, or on Italy,
far more often than, say, pieces on Spain, or southern France, or
(certainly) North Africa. The Islamic Mediterranean has been
habitually under-represented. The overall situation is explicitly
recognized as a problem by JMA and JMS; MHR appears
(rightly) more comfortable with its achievement, while Meditarch
does not seem overly worried by such issues.
To return to our wider sample of periodicals, some, but not
all, exhibit similar trajectories. Mediterranean Studies (the US
version) has maintained a strong Iberian and western Mediterranean
presence (if anything, the east is under-represented);
Scripta Mediterranea can boast a number of publications in
Islamic studies. Other journals simply do not aspire to ‘full
coverage’ objectives. The website of Mediterraneo Antico, for
example, sets itself more decided chronological limits: ‘Mediterraneo
Antico, Economie, Società, Culture si propone come
luogo e strumento di riflessione critica su uno spazio materiale
e umano che ha visto realizzarsi, nella koiné greca ed ellenisticoromana,
la propria unità culturale, sociale e poi anche politica.’
The journal highlights, as a principal theme to explore, the
integration (and possibly repressive integration) of Mediterranean
cultures in this particular, Graeco-Roman epoch, as well as
the birth of mass religious movements and the transformation
21 Editorial Working Group, ‘Foreword’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies:
History, Culture and Society in the Mediterranean World 9 (1999), 148.