New Periodization Model Shifts Early Middle Ages Back by Forty-Two Years to Accommodate Tenure Candidate

The Early Middle Ages now begin in 468, and the evidence is a single fresh sheet pinned over the old chronology in the departmental hallway, its left edge still curling.

The shift of forty-two years passed by unanimous show of hands at a faculty meeting whose agenda listed it as "housekeeping: corridor signage." No one called for division. By the time anyone read the revised chart closely, the meeting had moved on to lighting.

What the chart accommodates is a tenure file. Dr. Marta Oyelaran's monograph, Seals, Sheriffs, and Assembly: Local Authority in the Loire, 468–512, had spent two years in a category the department has not taught since 1994. Late Antiquity, the committee's first letter explained, lay outside the appointing field. Oyelaran's response ran eleven pages and cited no historian at all; she cited catalogues. "I don't argue for a new period," she said. "I argue for a continuous supply of evidence across a boundary that was drawn before the evidence was catalogued."

The senior medievalist on the committee conceded the point in writing. "I have taught the fifth century as the wrong side of a line for twenty-six years," his report reads. "The line moved. I am told the students will not notice."

The chair, who has run the department's budget for a decade, put the matter in ledger terms. "A periodization is a purchase order with a date on it," she said. "We didn't rewrite the Middle Ages. We bought paper."

Dev's Purchase Order, submitted by the department and checked against the copy in the business office, reads as follows: forty wall charts at 6.40 each; 212 syllabus headers, reprinted in-house; one graduate handbook, revised at 310.00; exhibit label templates on loan from the public history office at no charge, returned with two fields missing. Total: 773.60. The chair's annotation on the invoice is a single word: furniture.

Edith Marrow, who keeps the department's monthly history update, has so far recorded the change in one sentence. The finding aids are a slower problem. The Loire boxes are labelled Late Antiquity on the spine and Early Medieval on the folder, and until the relabelling is done, she noted, "both periods are true in the same cabinet, which is the only place they have ever coexisted peacefully."

The seminar once advertised as Problems in Late Antiquity keeps its room, its Tuesday slot, and its entire reading list. Its title has been changed to a number. Enrolment is up.

Down the hall, a second file waits on the appointments committee's desk. Its manuscript opens in 455.

The standing order for large-format paper has been raised from six sheets a term to forty, which is, by the department's own accounting, the cheapest periodization it has ever purchased.