Author Spotlight: Tim Miller
This week, let's meet another one of our authors - Tim Miller - who has contributed several articles to Medieval World: Culture & Conflict, including book reviews!
- What have you contributed to Medieval World? An article on a well-traveled woman in the Viking age, and two articles on Jewish life in medieval Spain (a favorite topic of mine). And lately, book reviews.
- Tell us a bit about your background as an historian (education or otherwise). I have never trained or studied to be an historian. Whatever I know about archaeology, history, religion or myth has started with the need to write poems about these things first. It’s usually the topics that can’t fit into a poem that become articles. Sometimes (as with an essay published in Ancient World, on the Iron Age Vix Burial ), the poem came first and the article many years later. The Hebrew Bible is the great exemplar for me (or just the pairing of Homer and Herodotus)—that is, seeing both poetry and prose as vehicles for history, story, and meaning.
- Do you have a favourite article from the contributions already published in Medieval World? An article forthcoming in MWCC.13, on the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492.
- What do you find most valuable about this new magazine? The most valuable thing is simply MWCC’s existence! With magazines like Minerva ceasing publication, it’s even more important for MWCC and Ancient History to be around, whether for the novice or the specialist. They are also beautiful to look at, as well as a treat to read.
- What book(s) are you currently reading? Medieval English Lyrics, ed. by R. T. Davies, Images Before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864-1939, and a wonderful book published by the Whitney Museum on John Singer Sargent.
- What book(s) on medieval history and culture would you recommend to our readers? Why? While only its last third touches the Middle Ages, Barry Cunliffe’s Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and its Peoples, 8000 BC-AD 1500 is a great tour, and by the time he does get to medieval history, you understand better how it all happened; Mark Cohen’s Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages, for its careful and lucid take on a thorny topic; The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, by John Kelly, for a great example of what popular history can do.
- Tell us about your book! My 2018 book of poems, Bone Antler Stone, takes the reader from Lascaux to the Viking Age, through sections on burials, artefacts, and landscapes. It also includes a travel diary in verse from a trip to Orkney (where the attached photo was taken).
