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Four Years of Corruption 355
2. les auteurs ne se noient jamais dans leur
méditerranée: 17 theory and scope
We turn now from reviews that have not been written, or not
written from all the disciplinary standpoints that we had hoped
for, to the reviews as they are. Paradoxically some of the most
complimentary passages are the ones that, for us, raise the most
troubling questions about the purposes and scope of CS. Gratifyingly,
we have been seen as advancing a novel theory of
Mediterranean history: ‘a genuinely new thalassology’ (Peters
2003: 56); ‘un ouvrage phare’ (D’Hautcourt 2001: 221); ‘a
substantial new approach’ (Fentress and Fentress 2001: 203),
etc. But then, very reasonably, we are taxed with the ways in
which the enterprise thus described does not quite work, at least
as an all-embracing theory (e.g. Fentress and Fentress 2001:
210–11; Shaw 2001: 434 ff.). Perhaps we should first try to
remind our readers (and ourselves) what we thought we were
attempting.
At the very least we were, in the words of the ninth-century
author of a history of the Britons known as Nennius, ‘making a
heap’ of all that we had found. We wanted the illustrative
vignettes in the chapters and the parallel discussion of the
Bibliographical Essays to have a value independent of the arguments
advanced. At the next level up, we hoped to offer illuminating
comparisons across the various supposed divisions
between prehistory and history, history and anthropology, and
(above all) Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Our aim was to
discover on what basis one might treat ancient and medieval
Mediterranean history as a single field of enquiry and how far
an approach derived ultimately from Braudel enabled us to
cross the boundaries that scholarship seemed to have erected.
To that extent we thoroughly endorse Herzfeld’s verdict in this
volume. To think in terms of Mediterranean history is, for us,
an ‘excuse’ for ‘creating new [scholarly] alliances and agglomerations
to generate novel and interesting heuristic options’. It
is an ‘excuse’ to undermine the now, on the whole, more usual
agglomerations of European and Middle Eastern, and ancient
and medieval, historiography by (re)creating a tertium genus.
17 D’Hautcourt 221.