1 Fibulae, as they’re known in the scholarly literature.
2 The volumes generated by the European Science Foundation project can perhaps stand as a metaphor for the general state of scholarship: they encompass a multiplicity of stimulating essays, but no general overview (although, of course, that was not their point).
3 The truth of this is immediately apparent in the chapters devoted to the fourth and fifth centuries in the last volume of the old Cambridge Ancient History and the first volume of the old Cambridge Medieval History, both published in the 1910s, which project the same orthodoxies about inevitable Roman decline and collapse. They remained essentially unchallenged until the 1960s.
4 In saying this, I make not the slightest criticism of projects like ‘The Transformation of the Roman World’. The aim there was to advance participants’ knowledge and understanding by exposing them to the specialized work of others and, in doing so, to enable them to do their own work better. It is that drive which its volumes reflect, and I can gratefully testify to having learned a huge amount during five happy years of participation.