ABSTRACT
Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), the scholar famed in Roscoe’s day, as in ours, for his rediscoveries of major classical texts and for his mastery of the ancient dialogue form, knew how to craft a well-turned opening. He might comment on the difficulty of the topic, thus insinuating its importance. Or he might claim that few would credit what he was about to argue, so making the sympathetic reader feel complicit in the work. I, in contrast, have to start with a confession. I grew up within 50 miles of Liverpool but the number of times I have visited the city stands in single figures. As if that was not bad enough, I also cannot claim that in preparing this chapter I have criss-crossed Britain, searching out references from disparate archives. Instead, I have, for the most part, allowed the source material to come to me: I have called up books in the Bodleian, I have read many more online and, in one case, I bought a hard-to-find volume on the World Wide Web. Does this constitute an acceptable method of scholarship nowadays? It is a question not only with immediate relevance at a time when the ongoing information technology revolution is reconfiguring academic practice; it also touches on the perennial issue which is at the heart of what I want to investigate in this chapter: what it is to be accepted as a fellow scholar by one’s peers.
