Brian R. Price

Background

From 1984 to 1990 Price manufactured replica armour through a business called Thornbird Arms until he graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with a B.A. in Political Science in 1990. During his time in the Society for Creative Anachronism he founded two other small businesses: his small press Chivalry Bookshelf (which published new books from 2001 to 2007) and his importer of replica clothing, Revival Enterprises (still active). Although Price says that he "transitioned the (Revival Enterprises) business to a silent partnership in 2011 as interests shifted towards academia and sold it outright in January of 2012, once terms had been agreed", the registration for Revival Enterprises' website was renewed with his name and Alabama address as late as April 2021.

Price worked in the computer software, information technology and internet industries from 1993 to 2000. In 2006 Price entered the University of North Texas to pursue a doctorate in history.

In 2011-12 he worked in Afghanistan as a senior socio-cultural advisor for the Human Terrain System, working with NATO, American and Afghan forces. His work there focused on the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), their internal dynamics and their relationship to American and NATO forces as related to counterinsurgency theory and practice. He made use of local and oral history techniques and gathered oral histories on ANSF officers and civilians.

After receiving his PhD in May 2011, Price began in 2012 as a visiting professor at Hawai'i Pacific University, teaching primarily within the graduate program for diplomacy and military studies. Although his dissertation was on medieval history, his research came to focus on contemporary military affairs. As noted above, by November 2022 Price was an associate professor in the Department of Joint Warfighting at the Air Command and Staff College in Alabama and was no longer listed with Hawai'i Pacific University.

In 2009, Dr. Yuri Cowan, a postdoctoral Research Fellow concentrating on "nineteenth-century poetry, historiography, medievalism, and the history of the book" at Ghent University, Belgium, and a member of the William Morris Society, edited the Kelmscott edition of The Ordination of Knighthood for the "Morris Online Edition," a web-based scholarly edition of the works of William Morris published at the University of Iowa Libraries website.

In the Headnote: Introduction, Cowan accused Price of plagiarizing William Morris's translation of the Ordene de chevalerie in Price's 2001 The Chivalry Bookshelf edition:

But perhaps the most striking instance of the afterlife of this volume is a little book published by The Chivalry Bookshelf in 2001, entitled Ramon Lull’s Book of Knighthood and Chivalry and the anonymous Ordene [sic] de Chevalerie (“translated by William Caxton / Rendered into modern English by Brian R. Price”). This book is avowedly a work of enthusiasm by Price, who writes in his introduction that “with the growing convergence between students of chivalric lore, reenactors, Western martial artists, and medievalists – the time seems right to release this new version. I hope it brings much pleasurable contemplation and provokes thought along [sic] what it meant – and what it means – to be a knight” (iii). There is no reason why Price should have included both works together, except that William Morris had once done so in his Kelmscott edition of 1892–3. In fact, a close look at Price’s edition reveals that he has stolen Morris’ translation verbatim for the entire text of the Ordène, and gives Morris no credit whatsoever. Indeed, he does not mention Morris even once throughout his entire introduction, nor anywhere in the book [5]. Although Morris’ work is certainly in the public domain, Price’s appropriation of it without attribution is a decidedly unchivalrous piece of plagiarism. And yet this lately pirated edition, too, is an example of the long reach of Morris’ influence in unexpected places – as a translator, as a medievalist, and as a shaper of the canon.

[5] In his introduction, Price repeatedly emphasises the “anonymity” of the Ordène. It is possible that, owing to Morris’s rather medieval humility in not appending his own authorial name to the translation of the Ordène, Price understood the translation of the Ordène in the Kelmscott volume to be Caxton’s – suggesting at least that Morris’s medievalising idiom was convincing!

Whereas the cover of the book and the title page both name the book as "Ramon Lull's Book of Knighthood and Chivalry & the Anonymous Ordene de Chevalerie" without reference to any translators, and the endicia lists "Ramon Lull's Book of Knighthood and Chivalry/Translated by William Caxton/Rendered into modern English by Brian R. Price", the back of the hardcover dustjacket includes a paragraph crediting Morris as the translator of the Ordene de Chevalerie.

No mention is made of Morris's work on the Lull text, however, and the paperback edition does not mention Morris at all. Further, the two were included together in this enthusiast's volume because they are discussed together in the first chapter of Maurice Keen's foundational work, Chivalry (Yale University Press, 1984), a work that provided the underpinning for many of Price's early works.

On August 7, 2009, the Secretary of State of Texas forfeited the charter of the Schola Saint George (SSG) due to SSG's failure to pay its state franchise taxes and to revive its forfeited privileges within 120 days of said forfeiture while Price was serving as its registered agent. A copy of the Certificate of Forfeiture was publicly posted on February 22, 2011 during the online exchange between Price and the authors. On February 25, 2011, the new president of Schola Saint George announced that Price had tendered his resignation as president for "personal reasons."