I started writing in April, and I finished the whole thing by, I think, August.” “I basically deleted the manuscript that I had submitted. Instead of tweaking what was already written, she decided to do what good historians do and follow the sources. Krebs worried that her interpretation of the original medieval sources was, in her own words, too “out there’” So, she hedged, and she struggled, and she doubted, and wrote the book she thought she was supposed to write.Īnd then, she told us, she did something radical. But her writing didn’t fully match her research it still followed the prevailing scholarship. Krebs knew her sources ran against the dominant narrative that placed Europe as aiding a needy Ethiopia, the African kingdom desperately in search of military technology from its more sophisticated counterparts to the north. The bad news was more existential: She didn’t like the book she had written. The good news was that she had already completed the full manuscript and had secured a contract with a major academic publisher. She wasn’t terribly worried about not having things to do though, since she had her book on the history of late medieval Ethiopia to finish up. There, “next to fields of rapeseed and barley and dense old woods,” in her words, the Ruhr-University Bochum professor would wait out Germany’s lockdown. In early 2020, just as the scope and scale of the coronavirus pandemic was revealing itself, historian Verena Krebs went to spend a few months at her parents’ house in the German countryside.
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