Nobody can learn everything. Not only because of the limited storage capacity and processing capabilities of the internal hardware that most call the human brain, but also because it is impossible for most of us to find enough time and (affordable) teachers for any and all subject.¹ If one aims to bravely defy such seemingly immovable limitations – something that I am a big fan of, as you can imagine – and go on a never-ending quest for knowledge, it is important to find an entry point into new subjects that fall outside the scope of your earlier education or readings in your spare time. And that is where the specific genres of secondary literature that we will discuss today become useful.

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My Appreciation for Secondary Literature

It is perhaps the one thing I like more about scholarship than studying primary sources: reading secondary literature. Because the latter, believe it or not, can offer a measure of relaxation. Secondary literature is written with contemporary students and educators in mind – contrary to most primary sources, at least when studying subjects within the humanities. As such, you are taken by the hand and every minute spend with such books, lectures, or programs is filled with undiluted learning. Moreover, secondary literature often aids you in understanding the primary sources where their contents harken back to.² To understand such generously provided foreknowledge, though, one often first needs an entry into a field. Because without the basic facts about the foundations, jargon, and authoritative voices of a discipline, we may get lost – even within the secondary literature.

Luckily, there are two kinds of secondary literature that specifically aid us in this regard. In the first place, there are works on certain broad topics in which the authors subtly explain all the disciplines where they have sourced their information from along the way. In the second place, there are the works that explicitly aim to introduce a field to their audience. I will elucidate both of these genres below and illustrate my explanation with some of my own favorite pieces of secondary literature.

Implicit introductions

There are many works that primarily purport to discuss one or more broad topics, but which also – often driven by necessity and the demands of clarity – provide insights into entire (sub)fields and the primary sources that are studied therein. Not only do we acquire information on the advertised topic or topics themselves, but we simultaneously get a glimpse of the body of knowledge that props up that information. As such, you often come to this kind of secondary literature for one specific interest and leave with a lot more new interests than you had initially bargained for!

My favorite examples of this kind of secondary literature show the complexity underlying a seemingly straightforward topic. For instance, many authors within disability studies have made supplying the tribulations of everyday life with a rigorous theoretical underpinning into a veritable art form. I have, for example, acquired my first real understanding of the ideas of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu from Jacky Scully’s work on disability bioethics.³ And what I know about church history has been greatly enhanced by Anthony Kaldellis’ recent book on the history of the Eastern Roman Empire.⁴ Staying in the past, I would also argue that Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s book Silencing the Past, though it mostly focuses on power relations in the production of history – specifically as it pertains to Haiti – is so broadly informative, that it should be compulsory reading material for anyone interested in the conundrum of studying bygone eras.⁵ In all of these cases, something foundational is learned about the fields that underpin the topics discussed.

Moreover, secondary literature can also broaden the horizons of those already knowledgeable in one discipline by showing the interrelations – both existing and merely possible – between certain fields. As someone interested in the Environmental Humanities, I have noticed that studying the climate of the ancient world requires to know about the modern means of gathering climatologist knowledge. Because we use the granular contemporary data to help us explaining what proxy data about the climate of the ancient past, such as pollen and ice cores, can actually tell us. That is to say, we can compare the results of our own high tech measurements with the current state of the ice and pollen. And with that information in hand, we can subsequently approximate what similar indicators from the past might mean.⁶ And this is something no primary source from antiquity – not even iconoclasts like the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle – may teach us.⁷

It can therefore be said that any undertaking in the humanities is never a lonely affair – there is always an intersection of different realms of knowledge and the efforts of various scholars. And often these kinds of books will whet one’s appetite. But what if you want to read more about one of the (sub)fields that are visited briefly in one of these works? Luckily for you there is our second category of secondary literature, those works that explicitly aim to introduce a field to their readers.

Explicit Introductions

As everyone who has ever went to any kind of school or got taught in any other way, there are many – many! – kinds of introductory works to almost every imaginable subject. For this blog I have therefore focused on three series that can serve as an entry into numerous new fields for any interested person and give glimpses of the proverbial bleeding edge of scholarship in an accessible manner.

First up are the Very Short Introductions These small volumes are written by the world’s experts on the topic at hand.⁸ They include most, if not all, fields of science and scholarship. But through my expertise, I can at least vouch for those that concern the ancient world, historiography, and the environmental sciences specifically. One favorite, that treats a subject which may not immediately come to mind, is Dictionaries: A Very Short Introduction by Lynda Mugglestone.⁹ This book shows intriguing aspects of a craft that is so much more encompassing than you might have ever imagined when quickly browsing a dictionary.

Heftier and more expansive than our previous series, are the World Books. These collect series of essays by leading scholars in certain fields. Like The Egyptian World about ancient Egypt and The Fairy Tale World about – you guessed it – folklore from all around our, well, world.¹⁰ These books do not exactly present a comprehensive introduction to their subjects, but they do give you a solid overview and show how many interesting aspects there are to the selected worlds. The focus in these series is mainly the past, but there are a lot of surprising worlds that you might find worth a deep dive.

And last, but certainly not least: the Companion Series. At first glance, these kinds of series – as this is a format used by different publishers – employs the same formula as the World Books: a series of essays by experts on a delineated topic. But here the essays are more stringently focused on the most important aspects of a field. For example, some of the essays in A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages do expect some foreknowledge to be entirely understood.¹¹ This makes these books less accessible, but you do have a better overview of the subject and you get – depending on the date of publication – a clear idea were a discipline stands at that moment in time. Often including some miscellaneous insights. Beware of the differences between certain updated editions, though. A few of them replace essays from the earlier prints with entirely new ones that may not fit your own preferences.

Conclusion: Always Keep Reading

Let us conclude with an important difference between primary and secondary literature. One that I already alluded to above. Secondary literature may become dated. The information provided can prove to be incomplete or be superseded by new insights. Especially with the three introductory series I discussed, it is wise to watch out for those few editions that are a bit older and therefore perhaps slightly out of date. And that is another reason why it is always rewarding to just keep studying any interesting material you can get your hands on!

Hopefully these recommendations gave you a new appreciation for secondary literature, as well as avenues to find more information on topics that interest you and that you want to learn more about. Until there is a new blog on Bildungblocks next week, of course.

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References

1. Nelson Cowan, What Are the Differences between Long-Term, Short-Term, and Working Memory?”, in: Wayne S. Sossin et al (red.), Essence of Memory (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2008), p. 323-338. Richard Desjardins, Political Economy of Adult Learning Systems: Comparative Study of Strategies, Policies and Constraints (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 22; Jan Kalenda, Jitka Vaculíková & Ilona Kočvarová, “Gender Inequality in Adult Education: A Comparative Study of Four adult Learning Systems”, Cogent Education 2024, 11 (1), p. 1-2.
2. Hannah R. Rothstein, “Accessing Relevant Literature”, in: Harris Cooper et al (eds.), APA Handbook of Research Methods in Psychology – Vol. 1: Foundations, Planning, Measures, and Psychometrics (Washington: American Psychological Association, 2012), p. 133.
3. Jacky L. Scully, Disability Bioethics: Moral Bodies, Moral Difference (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), p. 64-84.
4. Anthony Kaldellis, The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024). And, in the grand tradition of Bildungblocks, I made you think about the Roman Empire again!
5. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
6. Paul Erdkamp, “A Historian’s Introduction to Paleoclimatology”, in: Paul Erdkamp, Joseph Gilbert Manning & Koenraad Verboven (eds.), Climate Change and Ancient Societies in Europe and the Near East: Diversity in Collapse and Resilience (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), p. 2, 4-5.
7. But not for a lack of trying, see: Anastasios A. Tsonis & Christos S. Zerefos, Aristotle’s Meteorologica (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2020).
8. Charlie Remy, “Oxford University Press Very Short Introductions”, The Charleston Advisor 2014, 16 (2), p. 38-41.
9. Lynda Mugglestone, Dictionaries: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
10. Toby Wilkinson (ed.), The Egyptian World (Abbingdon: Routledge, 2007); Andrew Teverson (ed.), The Fairy Tale World (Abbingdon: Routledge, 2019).
11. Rebecca Hasselbach-Andee (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2020).