Roman history

There is a staple criticism that is levelled at scholarship in English by Continental European reviewers, especially when they are pushed for time or short of ideas: engagement with scholarship in languages other than English is too sparse; the bibliography is largely monolingual; there is insufficient openness to debates in other historiographical traditions. To be sure, that is often a pertinent objection. But it is also a trope, and as such it is almost unfailingly lazy and unsatisfactory. Scholarship produced in non-English-speaking academic settings does not necessarily fare better. There is a widespread tendency – understandable and undesirable at the same time – to engage more intensively with work that has appeared in the same language in which one writes and teaches. Moreover, the presence of a suitably multilingual bibliography is not in itself a sign of genuine openness to what different intellectual traditions have to offer to the study of a problem: it might be a sign of scholarly diligence; in many cases, it is barely more than window-dressing.