Thomas Noble, born in Chicago, Illinios, USA, in 1947. Ph.D. from Michigan State University, East Lansing. Professor of History at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
Fellow (1 September 1999 – 30 June 2000)
My original plan called for me to work on a book on the history of the papacy during the first millennium. I produced four essays/articles amounting to more than 100 pages in typescript pertaining to the period, roughly, 500 to 900. One of these I merely revised at NIAS and it has already appeared in a volume edited by Julia Smith, Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West (Brill, 2000). The others will appear in: A volume to be edited hy Frans Theuws and Mayke de Jong Topographies of Power (Brill 2001); a Festschrift for Girolamo Arnaldi (Rome, 2001); a volume in the annual Spoleto Settimana series (Spoleto, 2001). The work involved in preparing these essays permitted me to review bodies of source material and scholarly literature that I had not previously had an opportunity to study closely.
I have been working for several years on a major book dealing with controversies over religious art in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. I had hoped to have this book nearly finished when I arrived at NIAS. In fact, I still had a great deal of work to do. But I managed to finish almost all of it and I will have the manuscript ready for submission by the end of the summer. I also completed work on a set of five translations from the Latin of royal biographies written in the ninth century. I have also annotated these texts but I have not yet finished the introductory notes to each vita. I will finish these in the Autumn of 2000 and submit the volume to the press.
I also completed three additional essays: two of these, written in the autumn of 1999, have appeared or will appear in the Summer of 2000, one of them an article in The Journal of Medieval Latin and the other an essay on a volume on cultural transformations edited by Esther Cohen (Brill, 2000). Both of these essays pertain to issues raised in my images book. The other essay constitutes an introduction to a reissue by Columbia University Press of the old English translation of the Letters of St. Boniface. This appeared last spring. I also sent off for publication seven book reviews for various journals.
I delivered lectures based on my research in Utrecht, Oxford, Spoleto, and Amsterdam .