The Whole North Into Gaul

[Flavivs Aetivs]

I just received word back, the article was not accepted.

The primary reason, as recommended by the reader, was that I sufficiently lacked use of modern literature and did not put enough work into discussing all the federates at the battle. there were a number of other things as well. I'll upload the response here.

Frankly, I would have used more if I had access to more, but sadly I did not. These books as many of you know are very expensive and I have a limited budget (although I've taken note of the mentioned authors so I can use them.)

I'm going to continue working on it now, and I will likely try and find another journal to submit it to or re-submit it to the JLA at a much later date.

I am not saddened that it wasn't accepted, I can perfectly understand and accept the changes that need to be made in order for it to be a better study.

[SPOILER]The significance of the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in 451 has become passé, and is therefore a viable candidate for new investigation. A detailed study exploring the state of the question and how an understanding of the historical issues surrounding the battle impacts our broader understanding of the Fall of Rome and the period of Late Antiquity would be most welcome and very useful. “The Whole North into Gaul” could be such an article, but in its present state it is not. I therefore recommend that the article be rejected. In the following, I will offer some comments about what the article fails to do, what it does poorly, and the things it does well.
Broadly speaking, the article simply does not do enough. The author indicates that “the intention of this article is to look at this [Jordanes’] account and offer new theories,” but falls short of that mission statement. The author furthermore indicates that the first step will be to give a general account of the battle itself, with an emphasis on “the use of a feigned retreat.” That is well enough, but there is no second step, and the article ultimately focuses solely on the tactics of this feigned retreat, with the result that discussions of the composition of forces appear as a confused tangent. In short, the article fails to deliver on its promise and misses the opportunity to address the important issues surrounding the battle while often acknowledging them only fleetingly.
Chief among these is the composition of forces, which the author does address in a small way, focusing on a few of the barbarian gentes that Jordanes mentions. What is missing here is a complete survey of the gentes involved, the problems associated with compiling such a list, and the significance – the work suggested by the title and the opening anecdote from which it is derived. A glaring omission here, for example, is a treatment of the Burgundians, whom Jordanes and Sidonious place on opposite sides of the battle – a detail that begs for source-criticism of the sort that is absent here. Any discussion of the gentes that composed the Roman and Hunnic armies is incomplete without an investigation of the federate system, the fifth-century Roman army, and barbarian identity. The author ignores these questions. Instead, the author treats federates as auxiliaries and assumes that there are “regular” legionary soldiers in the fifth-century Roman army without making a case for either contentious position, or even acknowledging that the positions are contentious. More significant is the absence of identity as a historical problem. The author takes for granted that gentes are ethnically distinct “nations,” seemingly unaware of a half-century of important scholarship from the universities of Vienna and Toronto, and even makes use of ethno-archeology (some of it quite recent, and itself guilty of ignoring the Vienna school). In fact, there is much to be done with the intersection of identity and this battle, as mentions of the battle as a significant event within the legislation of the Burgundians and Visigoths clearly indicates. Where the author does discuss the composition of the forces, however, some of the treatment of the textual problems is quite good, and work of this sort for each gens mentioned in the sources would be welcome.
The author focuses heavily on the tactics employed during the battle, but misses the opportunity to present recent research on the military tactics of the fifth-century. The author’s explanation for the use of a feigned retreat is confusing, drawing on disparate sources, and often offering details about the tactics of the Roman army without reference to any sources. The assumption that the fifth-century Roman army was composed of legionary and auxiliary forces is also a problem here. The author devotes a lot of space to coming up with a numerical value for the size of the armies involved. While it is true that both the absolute and relative size of the forces are important for understanding their behavior on the battlefield, the author seems determined to reach a set conclusion rather than engage in critical scholarship on the issue, or even to question whether such things are knowable. Discussion of the size of armies should proceed from work done by Guy Halsall, Doug Lee, and Hugh Elton, all of whom are absent from the text and the citations. Furthermore, the approach the author uses to arrive at figures for the size of forces is often based on outdated or faulty assumptions, for example when the author uses Thompson’s sixty-year-old analysis of the geography of the Pannonian plain instead of the recent study by Katalin Szende that demonstrates that in the fifth century the “plain” was in fact a series of marshes. Finally, in dealing with the issues of tactics and numbers, the author relies entirely on the account of Jordanes without engaging in any source-criticism, largely taking his account as a factual narrative. There is no mention here of Walter Goffart’s Narrators of Barbarian History or of the responses to it by European scholars. Indeed, no work of Jordanes scholarship is mentioned in the article.
Indeed, while making poor use of Jordanes and especially of the body of critical literature regarding him, the author also ignores many important sources. Sidonius, who has supplied the title of the article, does not appear frequently enough in the article, and where he does the author sometimes employs him poorly. The chief example of this comes on page 4, where the author takes as a “statement” of fact that Aetius’ bucellarii outnumbered the Roman army, missing the detail that this passage comes from a poem and was certainly not meant literally. Also missing are the various hagiographical sources that mention Attila’s Gallic campaign. While these vitae do not offer the sort of precise information the author is looking for, they do offer impressions of Attila and his army by the inhabitants of cities such as Troyes and Orleans, and should at least be mentioned. Other texts dealing with the memory of Attila are also absent, such as barbarian legislation and an important letter in the Variae of Cassiodorus. Finally, Priscus is wholly absent from the article. Surely the fact that his account does not include the battle does not render Priscus’ impressions of the Hunnic army irrelevant to this study.
Already I have mentioned several important secondary works that the author has missed, but there are other problems with the author’s use of scholarship. For one, the author mostly engages with work that is either outdated or not directed at an academic audience. Some of this derives from the dearth of serious scholarship on the Huns and this battle, but in many instances it seems that the author is simply unaware of scholarly material. For example, the author cites Peter Heather’s popular trade volume on the fall of the Roman empire and his monograph on the Goths, but does not use Heather’s scholarly articles on the Huns. The author also misses all of the recent work on Aetius and other late Roman generals, such as found in Halsall and especially in McEvoy.
If the author addresses these deficiencies and reworks the article, “The Whole North into Gaul” has the potential to become suitable for publication. A survey of all of the issues surrounding the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains would be very useful, and would serve as a very nice case study in the practical application of the last two generations of scholarship on the fall of Rome and late antique barbarians.
[/SPOILER]

EDIT: If anyone has access to some of the Authors mentioned by the reviewer, it would be much appreciated if you could tell me where to get them or (if you have a pdf or something) send me them.

Katalin Szende (An Article Likely, it must be on the Swampiness of the Hungarian Plains in this era)
Guy Halsall (Barbarian Migration and the Roman West 376-568) (Article/Book on Roman Generals?)
Dough Lee (An Article Likely)
Hugh Elton (Warfare in Roman Europe, AD 350-425) (Fifth Century Gaul: A Crisis of Identity)
Guy Halsall
McEvoy? (Not sure of the full name, likely an Article)

Others:
Walter Goffart’s Narrators of Barbarian History
Variae of Cassiodorus
Various Hagiographies dating to this era (these are for some reason difficult to find, I searched extensively)

If you can provide me with these it would be very helpful. At least the reviewer recognized that (although I was aware of a few of these and their existence) there is no access to this material without spending extraordinary sums of money.