Writing here, writing there
Coffee with Clio and the shape of 2025
Hello, hello,
Happy New Year (at least as per the Gregorian calendar)! And welcome back to Coffee with Clio.
For new subscribers and those of you who have been with me since the start, I thought this might be a good time to outline what I might get up to here in 2025.
What Coffee with Clio is (still) all about
When I started Coffee with Clio, the idea was to find people who think history is good for thinking about, whether that is (with links to some of my favourites from last year):
musings on how we interpret the evidence that survives
uses of the past in the present, both good and bad
beautiful, fascinating objects and buildings and what they tell us about being human
great books and articles you may want to read, or that you may want me to tell you about so that you don’t have to read them! You can find a list of things I’ve discussed or recommended, that I keep up-to-date as I go along here.
In 2024 I committed to writing once a week, with a new post at 7am every Friday. (I’m not a morning person, so this guarantees that I get it written at minimum the night before instead of playing chicken with the deadline).
This has seemed to work pretty well so, if you’ve enjoyed Coffee with Clio up to now, don’t worry - I’m not proposing any massive changes.
If you’re new here, welcome, and now you know roughly what the plan is:
Something new about something old, every Friday; something to sit down and take a break over. (Coffee is optional!)
This newsletter does have a paid subscription option, and I am incredibly grateful to my paid subscribers - your support means a huge amount. Coffee with Clio isn’t my livelihood, though, and over the course of 2024 I realised that I’m mainly here for writing weekly about things I find cool, and that will always be free. So don’t expect any advertising from me or pushes to ‘upgrade’. If you’re here to think about history, that’s what matters.
Please also let me know if you have questions, thoughts, suggestions or reading requests. I’m not super quick at answering comments or personal emails, but I will always get there. One of the highlights of 2024 was getting into a couple of detailed chats on here about things historical. But again, no pressure: it is fine to be here just to take a break and have a quiet read.
Incredibly, Coffee with Clio is now going out to 250 people. One is my mom (hi, mom! I love you!) and one is my own email address, but still, I’m pretty chuffed that so many of you (including you, mom!) are here. Thank you :)!
And that is about it, really.
What’s coming in 2025
Mostly, then, it is more of the same going forward with Coffee with Clio. Nevertheless, 2024 was my first full year of writing consistently and that has made me a bit clearer about how I write, why and what that means for you.
First of all, I’m a working historian but this isn’t a ‘work’ blog. Coffee with Clio feeds into and feeds from other things I’m doing but it is also where I get to do things a bit differently, whether it is reflecting in the moment on history in the news or just chatting about things I’ve read.
It can also be a place to think about how topics that are separate in my work time join up in weird and wonderful ways. It can be somewhere to draw fresh links between what I’m teaching and what I’m researching, or to reflect on conversations with colleagues and big stuff I’m always chewing at in the background. (If you're fairly new to Coffee with Clio, that mostly means coins, but not just coins!)
What I don’t write about is current politics. That doesn’t mean I’m not writing about the present. For me, one of the most powerful things about history is the new perspectives it can offer on the here and now, but I prefer to let you choose what to apply that to, when and how. After all, another really important thing about history is the chance it gives us to step back when the here and now is all a bit much.
So, with all of that laid down, what is there to look forward to in 2025?
I’m not a great one for new year’s resolutions, but I do believe in new year’s optimism and I’m excited to share with you the thoughts, ideas and sights that are on the horizon.
Travel and Inspiration
First of all, I often want to write about what I see when I’m travelling…
… and 2025 has quite a few fun travel plans in it. There are a few reasons for this.
One is that 2024 was the year I started doing freelance work with historic tours, and in 2025 I’ve got more lined up. I’m going to be in Venice in February, on the Amalfi coast of Italy in March, Türkiye in May and possibly Sicily in September.
Travelling with people who are interested in history is hugely fun and I find writing about what I’m seeing helps me to remember the details and think through my first impressions of a new place or my changing ideas about somewhere I know well.
A second reason for quite a bit of travelling this year is that, for a while, as I tried to finish my book (more on that below), I cut back on going to conferences. There’s only so many times you can tell people, ‘hey, today I’m going to tell you about this great idea that you’ll be able to read about in my book… when I finish it!’ before it gets a bit tedious.
Well, now I have finished my book (sort of)! As a result, I’m looking forward to getting stuck back into conferences. Luckily, I’ve had some really interesting invitations to speak, so I’ll definitely tell you more about those. Look forward to musings on Byzantium in world history, bilingualism and why people might use several different scripts when writing. (Spoiler: it isn’t nearly as simple as 1 script = 1 language!)
And third, my partner (also a medieval historian) and I always try to get out and do some travelling throughout the year, whether it’s a holiday or just days out nearby. And once you start looking, history is a bit like weather. There’s always some right there, just waiting for you to notice and talk about it.
So, there are reflections to come on places I’m going and places I’ve been and probably also on the process of getting there. Since 2019 I’ve travelled in Europe without flying and slow travel has opened up all kinds of wonderful historical insights before I even get where I’m going!
Travel isn’t the only thing on the horizon, though.
The Book
For about eleven years, The Book has loomed over my life. It has gone through numerous drafts and several working titles, but most of the time it was just The Book, as in ‘I’ve got to do some work on The Book this weekend’, or ‘I really need to read that for The Book’.
Sometimes it felt, deep down, as if The Book would never be finished, as if I’d bitten off more than I could chew or would simply never find the time.
And then, in October 2024, I finally finished The Book! I sent it off to a publisher, who had been patiently emailing me once a year for a decade to ask how it was going.
This, of course, doesn’t mean that The Book is actually done. Publishing is more like a zombie movie than a vampire series. There isn’t a stake through the heart and it turns to dust. Poof! You’ve published! Congratulations!
Instead, it keeps coming back, over and over again. First reviews and revisions (possibly a couple of rounds of this), then major edits for style, queries about images and captions, questions about details in the bibliography, then various stages of proofs to make sure every word and punctuation mark is right…
…and you take out your cricket bat and whack it back to the publisher, over and over again, until one day, finally, almost unbelievably, usually without even a grand finale fight scene, you make it to the closing credits and there is nothing more to whack. The reverse zombie is finally alive. The publication exists.
If that sounds exhausting, it can be, but it is also good. All of those rounds with the cricket bat are about making the end result better and I’ve always quite enjoyed the process of batting things back again and again.
There was just something about getting that first, complete manuscript of The Book into shape to start the process that was incredibly hard. And finally, it is out there, in the world.
Right now, The Book is being read by anonymous experts chosen by the publisher. They will write reports, suggesting ways to change it and make it better. I’ve also shared it with some colleagues who have generously given me feedback so I’ll also be making changes based on their advice.
2025 will, therefore, be the year of really, actually finishing The Book, and I expect there will be posts here about new things I’ll be finding out in the process but also how to tackle disagreements that my readers might have about my arguments. And, as I get closer to those closing credits, I’m looking forward to sharing a bit more about what The Book is about and why I think it matters.
Not Travel or The Book (but still cool!)
For all the years I’ve been writing The Book, I’ve also been writing quite a few others things, from articles and book chapters to encyclopaedia entries, and I’ve got a fun stack of those coming up this year too:
A collaborative article about 3rd- to 7th-century trade between the Arabian/Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean.
A really fun think-piece about barter, which I’ve already written a bit about here.
A joint article about the use of multiple scripts and languages on documents (including coins!) on the ‘Silk Road’ (including thinking about what we even mean by ‘the Silk Road’).
A reflection about ‘Byzantium beyond Byzantium’ that will be a lecture at a major conference in 2026, but that needs to be written beforehand so that the conference organisers can publish it ahead of time. I’ll definitely be brainstorming parts of that here!
That gives us a pretty broad field of things to poke around, and who even knows what lost cities or funky coins might turn up over the course of the year?
Just today, a man in Wales was refused permission to sue his local council for not letting him organise an archaeological excavation at a municipal landfill to find an old laptop that his partner accidentally threw out in 2013, that contains a digital Bitcoin wallet apparently worth about £598 million…
Imagine some future numismatist trying to wrap their head around that ‘coin hoard’.
Really looking forward to your posts in the new year! (And this one made me chuckle a few times :) )