Talk:Alison Frantz

List of publications
I've made a few small edits to the list of publications, sufficiently explained by the edit summaries, I think. Here are few additional comments:


 * The listing for Frantz 1944 does not make it very clear that this is a review of Morgan's Corinth volume on the Byzantine pottery. It's confusing (or at least it was to me) that the "title" of this review is itself a complete bibliographical citation of Morgan's book, right down to the number of pages and figures and the price of the original edition. The style recommended by most style guides (at least on this side of the Atlantic) is to write "Review of" before the name of the publication being reviewed, without quotation marks, but that seems to be a non-starter with the WP template, which puts everything in the title field in quotes. Is there some way to suppress the quotes in a given citation? If not, I don't know what the solution is, and perhaps there isn't one. But the citation as it stands is bound to confuse some readers.
 * You're probably right: at least, I don't know of a good fix. To me, having all that bibliographic detail in the title is a good clue that the article is a review: honestly, I'm not sure it's all that important that we make clear the nature of each individual article or book. If nothing else, readers will twig quickly enough if they follow the link. UndercoverClassicist T·C 23:34, 3 February 2024 (UTC)


 * Frantz 1988 is listed in the sole author section, but that's not strictly accurate. The appendix on the post-Herulian wall was written by Travlos, and the chapter on the so-called Palace of the Giants was drafted by Travlos and revised by Homer Thompson. Not enough to list them as co-authors, I think (and everyone always cites this as Frantz alone, unless they are citing the chapter on the Palace of the Giants specifically). But perhaps worth a note ("with contributions by ..."), which is how the title page handles it.
 * EFN added to that effect. UndercoverClassicist T·C 23:34, 3 February 2024 (UTC)


 * It still seems odd to me to single out one or two of the Agora picture books for listing here, since most of them (at least the ones published before the 1980s) were illustrated almost entirely with Frantz's photographs. (The later ones, and the revised editions of the earlier ones, increasingly use images by other photographers, esp. Mauzy.) You could just as easily cite Harrison's Ancient Portraits from the Athenian Agora, or Perlzweig's (aka Binder's) Lamps from the Athenian Agora, or even Meritt's Inscriptions from the Athenian Agora, all of which are good examples of her work with different kinds of artifacts. But perhaps a better approach would be to add a line, either in the text or the list of publications, stating that her excavation photos were used in a large number of Agora picture books, and provide a link to the list at the ASCSA web site, where they can all be downloaded for free? And the same could be done for the final excavation reports, since many of early volumes in the Athenian Agora series are also illustrated by Frantz (e.g., Harrison's two sculpture volumes, all three lamp volumes, and a bunch of others), likewise listed at the ASCSA web site. I'll leave it to you to decide how best to handle it.
 * Honestly, I've listed everything I could get my hands on: I think there's something about the sheer scale of Frantz's scholarly work and influence that's worth getting across here. As below, if I've found somebody mentioning Frantz's name in connection with a book, it's here (I don't actually have access to any of these on paper, so this is all by the medium of Google searching). Following that strategy, I'll sniff out the details for those and get them into the list too. UndercoverClassicist T·C 23:34, 3 February 2024 (UTC)


 * Not sure why some of her Hesperia articles are linked to JSTOR and others to the open-access ASCSA site. Doesn't really matter, I guess, but the links should probably be standardized before you nominate this for GA (which I assume you are going to do sooner rather than later).
 * Purely a matter of what I could get my hands on: I haven't systematically checked the ASCSA site, but I've linked it when it came up after Googling the article title. If it didn't, I've used JSTOR, as long as I could find it there. May try to hunt down some more: sometimes, the bot does it. UndercoverClassicist T·C 23:34, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Cheers, Choliamb (talk) 22:58, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Choliamb. Replies above. UndercoverClassicist T·C 23:34, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Date of the church of the Holy Apostles
The footnote about the church currently reads Frantz 1971, p. 1; Mauzy 2006, p. 115. Frantz dated the church as probably tenth-century; for more recent assessments of an eleventh-century date, see Rees 2000, p. 153, and Kaldellis 2009, p. 114.. This, while not strictly inaccurate, is a little misleading, I think, since it implies that there is a significant difference between Frantz's date and the date given in other sources, and that Frantz's date has been superseded by a date based on more recent research. Neither of those things is true. The dating to the early years of the 11th century is not recent; it has been the consensus since the 1930s, and Frantz herself accepted it both in her 1954 Byzantion article about the church (add to the list of publications?) and in her 1961 picture book on the Agora in the Middle Ages. In the course of preparing the full publication of the building, she came to believe that a slightly earlier date in the final decades of the 10th century better fit the evidence. All of this (the earlier consensus, the evidence supporting a general date in the late 10th-early 11th century, and her own preference for a date in the earlier part of that range) is set out in the "Date" chapter of Agora XX, pp. 24–26. I don't know that anyone has directly engaged with her arguments since then; certainly neither Rees nor Kaldellis does, they simply repeat the traditional date, without any explanation or evaluation of the evidence, and without any indication that they are even aware of Frantz's argument. I myself have no idea whether a date near the end of the 10th century is better than one near the beginning of the 11th century; this is far outside my competence. But it would be more respectful of Frantz if the note did not imply that more recent research has led to a conclusion different from hers (in this case, her own discussion is actually the "more recent assessment"). And it would also be nice to indicate that the difference is one of two or three decades, not a century, as the current note implies. I see that in the most recent editions of the Agora guidebook (the 4th ed. in 1990 and the 5th in 2010, both edited by Camp), the date of construction is no longer given as "early 11th century", but as "around 1100 A.D." Perhaps that is the best way to express it, and just omit the discussion of the date from the note in this article altogether? Choliamb (talk) 01:08, 4 February 2024 (UTC)


 * Charalambos Bouras, Byzantine Athens, 10th–12th centuries (Routledge 2017), pp. 131–134, appears to be the only discussion of the architecture of the church in any detail since the appearance of Agora XX (as opposed to passing mentions like those in Rees and Kaldellis). His comment on the date (p. 134): "The church of the Holy Apostles was constructed after that of the Panagia at Hosios Loukas, but in close association with it. A date in the last quarter of the tenth century was proposed, and has not, to date, been contested." The footnote points to Agora XX, pp. 25–26. Choliamb (talk) 12:44, 4 February 2024 (UTC)
 * No quarrel with any of that. Have gone with "around 1100": can see an argument for going with Bouras and saying "last quarter of the C10th", but he's not exactly coming out swinging, or, strictly speaking, even advocating for that date - only saying that someone has done so and nobody has yet to argue with them! UndercoverClassicist T·C 13:08, 4 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Agreed. I'm not saying that Frantz is correct, only that her view has not (yet) been superseded by more recent research, which is what the original note seemed to imply. Ca. 1100 is a good compromise.
 * I'll be sticking my nose back out of this article now, so let me just repeat that I think it's really excellent work, and produced with amazing speed. You have a gift for these archaeological bibliographies, and Frantz certainly deserves the attention. I'm pretty familiar with her published work, but a lot of the personal information was new to me, and I really enjoyed reading it. (One parting shot: I suspect that Natalia miscopied the Princeton letter about Meteora, and that Frantz wrote "the most amazing place I have ever seen", not "the most amazing place I have even seen". You can't correct it, of course, because that's what your source says, but on the principle that one should not include information that is almost certainly wrong, maybe it would be best to choose a different passage to illustrate her enthusiasm?) Anyway, great job. Cheers, Choliamb (talk) 13:46, 4 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Choliamb (talk) 13:46, 4 February 2024 (UTC)
 * I'm going to boldly claim MOS:TYPOFIX on that one: If there is a significant error in the original, follow it with [sic] (producing [sic] ) to show that the error was not made by Wikipedia. However, insignificant spelling and typographic errors should simply be silently corrected (for example, correct basicly to basically) -- to me, the correction is so obvious that it falls into the second of those. UndercoverClassicist T·C 15:30, 4 February 2024 (UTC)