One does not become a specialist on Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (roughly, the third through the ninth centuries, C.E.) in order to spend a substantial amount of time dealing with live people. Consequently, truly collaborative research projects of all kinds are extremely rare in the field. When enticed to “collaborate” at all, early Medievalists will engage primarily in the scholarly equivalent of “parallel play” so common in toddlers. Generally, we will work on related themes andpublish in a single collected volume, but will not necessarily have much contact with one another in the process. And, we certainly will not promise to reach compatible conclusions.

My most fruitful collaborations have been with long-dead scribes and authors, particularly with an eighth century German nun named Gunza. I used the manuscripts which she produced in order to perpetuate some of her own values and ideas, which might otherwise have been ignored and presented them to my colleagues in ways that supported my own vision of women’s European past and my hopes for their global future. (See Felice Lifshitz, “Demonstrating Gun(t)za: Women, Manuscripts, and the Question of Historical ‘Proof ’” in Vom Nutzen des Schreibens. Soziales Gedächtnis, Herrschaft und Besitz eds. Walter Pohl and Paul
Herold (Vienna, 2002) pp. 67 – 96.)

My familiarity with women such as Gunza dates back over 20 years to my participation in a collaborative research project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, to begin a ground-breaking exploration of female Christian monasticism in medieval Europe. Until then, women religious had been almost systematically ignored, based on the assumption that their communities were neither numerous, wealthy, politically powerful, nor intellectually and theologically significant. They have since been shown to have been all those things, and more, due in part to the NEH project on “Women in Medieval Monasticism” designed and supervised by my undergraduate advisor at Barnard College, the early medievalist Suzanne Wemple. (The project has since morphed into MATRIX: A Scholarly Resource for the Study of Women’s Religious Communities from 400 to 1600 CE [http://www.monasticmatrix.org]).

Wemple hired me, at quite a good hourly rate, because I knew the languages necessary to execute the first stage of the research plan: Latin, French, German, Italian, and just enough Greek. I learned much about monastic women through my role as a research assistant on the project, which consisted of compiling a comprehensive database of women’s religious institutions. I was also introduced to one kind of student-faculty collaboration: I labored, Wemple submitted the paperwork to pay me, and we met to exchange index cards for checks.

The experience was decisive; it permitted me to glimpse a world in which one could simultaneously make a living and yet avoid having to work with anyone else, let alone on some sort of team. I subsequently enrolled in the Ph.D. program in medieval history at Columbia University. None of my formal coursework involved a research component and for my M.A. and Ph.D. theses, I chose to pursue topics far removed from my professors’ specialties. We rarely needed to see each other and never needed to work together. My penchant for parallel play made me a favored, well-funded graduate student.

In contrast to my experience at Columbia University, the graduate program in history at Florida International University has always been built around research seminars, in which students are required to do research, using original sources, under the direct supervision of professors. I learned to accept this intensified level of involvement with students. I never felt that I succeeded in teaching the students anything solid about research. Nor did I feel that the students succeeded in learning anything solid about research. The experience was simply frustrating, and it made me long for more parallel play. In Spring 2004 it was once again my turn to offer a graduate research seminar. I named the seminar “After Constantine: Christianity and Empire.”

The seminar explored the interrelationship between religion and politics in Europe and the Mediterranean between the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity (more accurately, the conversion of Christianity to Roman imperialism) and the first efflorescence of the Holy Roman Empire under Charlemagne and his immediate heirs (fourth to ninth centuries). I tried a new approach to the research component. For their individual research projects, students were required to focus on one particular type of source, connected with the saint veneration practices which had come to dominate Christian piety by the Carolingian period: lists of saints’
names, organized in calendars, martyrologies, and litanies.

There was a dual rationale for the design of the seminar. First, those very sources formed the foundation for my forthcoming book, The Name of the Saint: The Martyrology of Jerome and Access to the Sacred in Early Medieval Europe. I believed I could use my manuscript to guide the students through the intricacies of “real” research. Second, these Latin lists of names pose less of a linguistic challenge than do any other types of sources from the period. I believed that students with limited, or even with no, Latin competence would be able to conduct original research and therefore benefit from the experience and training which our graduate program strives to provide.

With this seminar, I hope I have found a formula which can work for our graduate history students. Only the final research papers and their evaluations of the course will tell. While I cannot speak for the students, I can speak for myself, specifically to say that the seminar has been the most productive collaboration of my career, not only as a teacher but as a scholar. The engaged, critical, and insightful eyes with which my students read my book manuscript have improved it immeasurably. The process of clarifying and justifying my arguments for them has been invaluable. I have also benefited from my attempts to help them articulate the nature and significance of the sources they themselves are exploring. Collaboration works. I can’t wait to do it again.