Sister Notorious's Home for Wayward Medievalists

Children.

Does your end-of-semester grading have you in Babylonian captivity? Are you suffering a black plague of "medieval pheasants" in your essays? A great schism between the fun person you used to be and the jaded academic you've become? What seems like a hundred years of war between you and That One Colleague (let's call him "The Black Prince")?

Sister Notorious knows your pain. And she has a solution. A retreat center. Where we can all speak in Latin and drink unaged wine and let the serfs take care of all that pesky day-to-day living stuff.  Presenting the new site of our Home for Wayward Medievalists:

Friends don't let friends drink and decorate.

This is, I swear to you, is an actual property you can buy. And it's actually a bit of a steal. And located near a stretch of the Oregon coast, which is just the thing to recall the damp of England or Brittany.  On the down side, there is everything else.¹ It's like a Renaissance Faire got drunk and took up interior decorating and forgot that there were such things as different historical eras between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. This particular decorative mode might be described as "back in the day."

Which, I think, makes it just the place for medievalists suffering from end-of-semester loopiness to retreat to. Perhaps with a cask of artisanal hypocras.²

Scroll through the photos and see for yourself. But be warned: you can't un-see it.


Happy Holidays!



¹ I will confess to loving the kitchen. Though I'm not sure that a faux-tapestry runner is the best food prep surface.

² It's only an hour or two from Portland, and even closer to Eugene, and if there aren't hipsters there brewing up mead at the very least, I'll eat my fancy medieval headdress.

Dark Ages, Nazis, and Media Relations

Hey, guess what? I just found out that our campus has a media productions team as part of its public relations team, complete with its own YouTube channel.  I found this out because I was contacted by the head of their team, referred by our Ancient Historian (who I now suspect has it in for me). This is possibly the most amusing inter-campus correspondence I've conducted to date.

First, hir query:

"Hi, Girlscholar. I was referred to you by Joe Venerable.  I would be very interested in talking with you about your research and knowledge regarding Ancient Rome, the Fall of the Roman Empire, and the subsequent Dark Ages.  I’m wondering what caused the Dark Ages? What can be learn from it today?  Is the advancement of technology without the equivalent moral and ethical advancement leading us to a similar end?  Also, is there a tie-in with Nazi Germany?"

For two days, my brain sputtered, trying to formulate a reply. A friend at another (research-oriented) campus suggested a try to turn the opportunity in my favor, so I counter-pitched the most audience-friendly ideas I could think of:

"Dear X, I'm intrigued by the idea, though I'm not sure I know enough about the transition from Rome to the Middle Ages (we don't really use "Dark Ages" anymore) to fill more than 5 minutes or so… However, if you're ever interested, I have expertise in medieval women, as well as the poly-ethnic culture of medieval Blargistan, and all sorts of unsubstantiated opinions about medievalism in popular culture (Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, etc), and I'd be happy to talk to you."

Nice, no? Measured, helpful There were even emoticons.  One will note that I tactfully left out any mention at all of Nazis -- Like a fart in church, I simply could not think of a polite way to address it. 

Then, I received a reply:

"Thanks for your response.  I think the topic is less about the Dark Ages and Rome - specifically…..and more about the reasons behind the fall of Rome and its possible parallel to Hitler’s Third Reich….was there any connection?  Could the demise of both governments be attributed to the advancement of power at the expense of the moral decay of the society?  Joe Venerable referred you, but if you don’t feel this subject would be one that you would be comfortable discussing, is there another member of your Department that you feel could address these kinds of questions?"

::sigh:: Thus endeth my first attempt at being a public intellectual.

Not literature. Not even close.

When I was packing for my trip to Italy, I knew I'd want some books for my spare time. I picked a novel by Philip K. Dick, because I like me some speculative fiction and he was one of the masters. I also got a copy of Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli: It's a memoir of his year in exile to the Basilicata region during the Mussolini years, and since that was right next door to where I would be spending my first week or so, I figured that it might be atmospheric, and a good opportunity to read one of the classics of Italian literature.

But whenever I start to make a certain amount of progress with a new language, I find it's useful to start reading light fiction -- usually historical fiction -- in the target language. [1] Even if I can't understand every word, or even every sentence, I start to catch the rhythms of the languages, and a handful of idiomatic phrases. And because it's hard to get it at the beginning, I always go for a book I've already read a couple of times in English, so I have the context. That way, if I get into a linguistically difficult passage, I can tell myself, "Oh, this is the part where they go to the market and meet the priest guy for the first time" or something similar. And so, a few days ago, I sought out an Italian version of the same book that I had previously read to help me through the late-beginner/early-intermediate stage of German and Spanish.

What is this compelling work of literature, you might ask, that you return to again, and again?

Uhmmm... it's... ummm... ::cough:: Pillars of the Earth.

I'm sorry: I didn't catch that?

Pillars of the Earth.

 What was that?

Pillars of the Earth! By Ken Follett! Okay?

I know: it's not great literature. Or any literature at all. But here are some of its advantages:

(1) It's super-absorbing narrative, if not a particularly subtle one.

(2) The vocabulary is not too difficult, and as a medievalist, some of the weirder stuff may actually be useful to me someday.

(3) Historically... I've encountered worse. Same goes for the prose. (I'm looking at you, Idalfonso Falconés).

The fact is, I have a long history with this book: I read it for the first time the summer before I graduated from college... and I realized that there was a whole set of questions about medieval history that I had yet to answer. In other words, this melodramatic doorstop of a book bears 50% of the responsibility for my decision to apply to grad school. [2]

So, I do keep returning to it. Which is why this week finds me on page 26 of the 950-page I pilastri della terra. Ed ancora mi piace.


[1] Something interesting that I've observed: Europeans are wild for historical fiction. If you go into a European bookstore (open until past midnight! awesome!), you'll find that most have an entire section for historical fiction. I can't speak to the quality, but I can tell you that people here simply devour it.

[2] The other 50% is down to a bad breakup. But I've told that story elsewhere before.

How Dragons Changed My Life

Another Damned Medievalist has a post up about the recent death of fantasy author Anne McCaffrey. I'm glad she did, and she says it beautifully. I'm just reprinting here (with a couple of small edits) my own comment that I left over at her place, because reading ADM's post made me realize how much of an effect McCaffrey's books had on me:

I read the McCaffrey's Harper Hall series when I was… oh, eleven or twelve? And I was completely taken with the young female heroine. I hadn’t thought of the “damaged outsider” angle [NB: see ADM's post for an explanation of this], but it makes complete sense.

Sure, her books are a far cry from being "great literature." But they didn't have to be. If we exclude the work of Butler and LeGuin (a bit too heady for most twelve year-olds), there wasn’t a lot of that genre at that time that featured female protagonists — and especially not female protagonists who were valued for their skills rather than their beauty. For the young adult series, you can throw in the fact that the female protagonist was a young adolescent, and you've got some pretty powerful stuff for a girl my age. When I read these books, I felt like McCaffrey was writing for me, and (though I couldn’t have articulated it this way at the time) that there might be a place in the world for an awkward and kind of homely smart girl who never new what to say, how to dress, or how to fit in.

When I tell my students how I became interested in medieval history, I tend to point to the historical fiction on the Tudors and their ilk that I purloined from my mom’s library piles. But the more I think of it, the more I believe that it began with Menolly and all those bitty fire-lizards.

So: Thanks, Anne.

In Praise of the M.A.

Oh, fer fuck's sake.

fig. 1: possibly a metaphor?**

So, some of you may have missed the comments on the post responding to a correspondent. What was supposed to be a completely minor point in my post ended up sticking in a lot of people's craws. But what got to me was that some people seemed to think that I was disparaging the M.A., when nothing could be further from the truth. So, rather than trying to write tidy prose, I'm going to present my encomium in bullet points. Perhaps some of you can add to them?

• For several years, I was a faculty presenter at my department's "So you want to go to grad school?" talk for undergraduates. At one of these, a colleague in another field told the students that the separate M.A. (as opposed to the one that's folded into Ph.D. programs here) was only for people not intending to go on to the Ph.D., and that if they were serious, they'd just apply to Ph.D. programs. I disagreed with him right away, but the main point is that this may vary by field. For subfields where you don't need extensive technical or linguistic preparation, jumping right into the Ph.D. might be feasible. For the rest of us, it's a ticket to almost certain failure.
• Time to consider is important. As at least one of my commenters pointed out, a couple more years makes for a more emotionally mature grad student. It also generally means that the person in question has really given some thought as to what they want out of grad school, why they want it, and what they're going to do to get it. The M.A. might also be a way to "try on" grad school, to make sure that you really want this. One to three years is a small investment to make in this regard. And if you can take a year off before the M.A., even, all the better.
• Ah, redemption. This was the main concern of my correspondent, and one that I can identify with. Maybe you want to get a Ph.D., but your undergraduate record isn't going to get you into the program you want. Maybe you had a degree in one discipline, but only discovered your true passion in your final year, when it was too late to change majors. Maybe, like me, you slacked off, and realized too late what you should have been doing all along. The M.A., for me, gave me the opportunity to rehabilitate my grades and reputation.***

There ya' go.


**Or possibly just the lens cover on my trusty point-and-shoot finally giving up the ghost.

***You know, I had to do the same thing just to get into a four-year college, too. Hm. Makes me wonder what hole I'm digging for myself now....

Carnivalesque LXVII!

I'm a little sorry that I volunteered to host Carnivalesque, because it's shown me how much really interesting stuff there is out there that I haven't read. As if I weren't already feeling guilty about that with books.

In any case, I got about twice as many suggestions as I could use – an embarrassment of riches! – but I saw a theme begin to emerge, and decided to run with it. So now I present to you:

Carnivalesque LXVII:
When the Ancient/Medieval and the Modern Collide,
and How to Survive the Aftermath.
Starring Indiana Jones, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama!

• First, the post that started it all: I innocently mentioned in the comments thread that I'd like to nominate it for the next Carnivalesque, and Another Damned Medievalist leapt in to ask, "Do you want to host?" Me and my big mouth. But read the post, and you'll see why. Matthew Gabriele's frustrating encounter with an amateur historian in the editorial pages of a local newspaper is not just a meditation on the Crusades and their meaning for the modern world. It's a post that raises questions about the place of the would-be public intellectual. Do our degrees, once a sign of expertise, now mean that we're the last people the public should trust to tell them about history?

• Contrawise, Michael Drout at Wormtalk and Slugspeak provides a convincing argument that medievalists and their methods perhaps shouldn't be let loose on the present.

• Isis at Medieval Silkwork puts together a modern recreation a bit of medieval technology based on manuscript illuminations – but not another freakin' trebuchet, thankyouverymuch.

• Or, going in the opposite direction: Two posts on modern technology in the service of the history of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, with cool results.

• More archaeology… sort of. Well, not really. But hey: Indiana Jones!

• It's hard to pick a post on the medieval/modern collision from Got Medieval?; probably 60% of Carl's posts would fit with this theme. So I'll just link to a nice one clearing up some misconceptions about the links between Chaucer and the modern celebration of Valentine's Day, and urge you to browse through the rest of his excellent entries at your leisure.

• Jeff Sypeck at Quid Plura concocts a beverage recipe out of a rhizome that saw its peak of popularity in the West during the Middle Ages, then sadly disappeared from our culinary repertoire. Click here to see how it turns out.

• The Dalai Lama becomes an honorary Roman, but seriously old-school. Tell me he doesn't look delighted.

And some stuff that didn't fit in, but that I just had to include:

• Some depressing stuff on the state of the supply-and-demand for medieval history Ph.D.s in the U.K.

• An interesting post on theory.

• And, making her second appearance on this edition of Carnivalesque, Judith Weingarten muses on the meaning of neolithic "venus figures" -- a post that I find interesting, since I had to lecture on this very topic only a couple of weeks ago.

And that's it! Make sure to check in at the Carnivalesque page to see who'll be hosting the next festivities, and don't forget to stop by here again on Monday the 2nd for the first meeting of our online roundtable on Judith Bennett's History Matters!

Two Carnivals for the Price of One!

Okay, folks, time is running short: I'll be posting the next on the 21st (which also happens to be my father's birthday, so: Happy Birthday, Notorious Dad!). BUT.... but, but, but... butt is what you need to get off of and SUBMIT YOUR SUGGESTIONS for the best ancient and medieval-themed blog posts of the past three months. Three whole months!

Item number two: The redoubtable Historiann and I have hatched a plan for an online roundtable (or one-book club, if you prefer) on the topic of Judith Bennett's History Matters. Each Monday in March (women's history month, you know), one historian-blogger with interests in women's history, feminism, or both will post her (I think we're all hers right now) reflections on the book, and how it has shaped our thinking in terms of research, teaching, and/or feminist praxis in an academic context. Here's the schedule:

First Monday: Me!
Second Monday: Historiann
Third Monday: Tenured Radical
Fourth Monday: Another Damned Medievalist

You'll notice that that leaves a whole fifth Monday. We may have a fifth poster (details to be announced), but we'll also be inviting all of our readers to take that Monday to post their own reflections, either on the book, or on the conversation that it's generated.

So, submit something for Carnivalesque, then go pick up a copy of Bennett's book and stop by again in March (if not sooner; you know I always love to see you) and take part in the conversation.


(Yes, I am addicted to parentheses. What of it?)

Carnivalesque LXVII: Call for Submissions!

I am pleased to announce that I will be playing host to the 47th -- this one on ancient/medieval themes** -- right here, next month. Carnivalesque, for those of you who don't know it, is a blog carnival dedicated to showcasing outstanding recent posts in premodern history.

But blog carnivals are not spectator sports! So, send me your suggestions for noteworthy posts. Nominate anything posted since the most recent ancient/medieval carnival (November 23rd) up until around February 15th (You can either suggest them in the comments for this post, or e-mail me directly at notoriousphd ~at~ mac ~dot~ com). Also, please link to this announcement from your own blogs.

What kinds of blogs/posts should be nominated? I think the Carnivalesque boilerplate says it best:

"Carnivalesque is certainly not just for academics. We welcome perspectives from a variety of fields, especially history, literary studies, archaeology, art history, philosophy - in fact, from anyone who enjoys writing about anything to do with the not-so-recent past. You can nominate your own writing and/or that of other bloggers, but please try not to nominate more than one or two posts by any author for any single edition of Carnivalesque, and limit nominations to recent posts."

Selections will be based on interest of subject matter, wit, and whatever strikes your genial hostess as kinda nifty when she reads it. Selections will also be subjective. Appeals may be submitted in writing to the proper authorities.

But there's room for all under the Carnivalesque tent, so send those posts in!


**For early modernists, Carnivalesque 46 will be an early modern one, and will be posted at Chronologi Cogitationes in late January.

"Magic Johnsons"

I've recently started following the blog "Got Medieval?" -- a chronicle of medievalism in popular culture written by an advanced grad student in medieval literature. Good stuff all around, but his most recent post ("Negative Campaigning, Medieval Style") was fantastic. My favorite part (other than his coined phrase from which this post takes its title) was this bit of analysis:

"Not every medieval woman found taking an interest in a suddenly mobile phallus should be considered a witch."

You said it, sister.

Paleographic Geekery

.

Quick update: for the last few days, I've been doing two things. First, I've been writing the introduction, then madly rearranging the parts so that I have everything introduced in the correct order. It's like one of those puzzles in the old analytical portions of the GREs, where you have to arrange seating for 6 people, but X can't sit next to Y, and Z has to be between two people taller than she is, blah blah blah...

Second, I've been going through the chapters, cleaning up all those obnoxious little square brackets. And here's where the paleographic geekery comes in (nonmedievalists, feel free to tune out here). I was looking for the name of a monastery that had to be located not too far from the town of X. I had a 150-page book listing all the known monasteries for the entire larger region, with whatever information was known about each, and a document (click on photo to enlarge -- it's in the first line there) in which the name was rendered as a word beginning with a tall letter with a squiggle through the tail, followed by...

No. Wait. This story is too boring to tell in detail. Let's just say that in a flash of paleographic insight, I suddenly realized that the letter I thought had been a "pro-" was actually an "ser-", which made me think of an obscure reference I'd seen elsewhere, and then I followed that up in the guide, and on a map, and got three kinds of rock-solid confirmation for something that had been a total mystery only three minutes earlier.

It was a small triumph, and only cleared up one of about two dozen remaining square brackets, but for a minute there, I got to feel pretty damned smart.

Outside projects

Once upon a time, as a callow young grad student, a professor whom I admired made me an offer: come work for ten hours a week as my research assistant on this nifty web project. I jumped at the chance: I could earn $100 extra a week (ask any grad student how much this can mean), and because it's related to Things Medieval, it could go on my CV. Plus, keep in mind, this was 1997, so working on a medieval web project was pretty novel, and I thought it would help when job market time came around (New media! Novel approaches to learning about the Middle Ages! She knows HTML as well as Latin!).

Fast forward to 2003. I get my Ph.D., and so am promoted from graduate assistant to assistant editor. This means that I keep working on the project, but am no longer eligible to be paid.

I have mixed feelings about Outside Project. On the one hand, it's only vaguely related to what I'm working on (say, I'm working on yams, then outside project is kale – they're both vegetables, but there's not much else overlap). As such, it's always on the back burner, because Outside Project is never going to get me tenure, or make me one thin dime. On the other hand, it is something I've been working on a long time, and I really do enjoy the people I work with, especially Project Director, who I has poured more of her time and energy into this than I thought one person actually had, and still manages to be a super-productive scholar. I even think occasionally about developing a project of my own around Outside Project, just because I've learned the resources inside and out because of it. The problem is, I have about half a dozen things I'm more interested in pursuing.

But… right now, Outside Project is undertaking Major New Initiative, and I'm more or less in charge of it. And I feel like I'm actually pulling my own weight a bit, and in a way that doesn't impinge too much on my writing time.

Speaking of which (thank you for asking!): that's coming along swimmingly. Saturday, I got another 600 words or so, and I'm counting on more tonight. I'm starting to feel like I have my shit coming together. My mantra over the past few days, no matter what I'm doing, has been "I can do this. [deep breath; more confidently:] I can do this."

Why do all that medieval stuff?

Anyone reading in the historical (and especially medieval) blogosphere over the past week or so has probably seen the meme out there on "Why teach history" (examples here, here, and here). There have been a lot of really excellent responses out there, to which I can add very little, except to say that I teach it because it's what I love. But I want to call attention to a piece in the recent issue of Perspectives, AHA President Gabrielle Spiegel's essay on "The Case for History and the Humanities."

Spiegel nicely summarizes the usual justifications: that studying the Humanities helps us to understand "what it means to be human," and the updated version of that: the emphasis on critical and reflective thinking that is central to the study of the Humanities. But then she says this:

"Given the current situation of the world, I can't think of anything more important than reaffirming the intrinsic humanity of all peoples, however different ethnically, religiously, politically, or even medically. The great and abiding task of the humanities is to cultivate appreciation for the immense variety of the ways that peoples and societies live and think. […] The humanities teach this most importantly of all the disciplines, in that they require an imaginative, not merely objective or logical, investment in their investigations."

So how does this relate to research in Medieval Studies, a field that I love, but that I sometimes feel can be a little self-indulgent? Spiegel points out that the medieval world is the West's very own historical Other, alien to our own society in many ways, yet intrinsically tied to us. As such (and this is my own musing on the subject now), it informs us that we cannot responsibly interpret our past through the lens of the present; even more importantly, we cannot take a teleological approach and assume that our present is the result of an inescapable evolutionary process. It forces us to exercise that historical imagination that Spiegel speaks of, and then – hopefully – to apply the results of that imagination to ourselves.

I would never suggest that we look to the medieval past for precise parallels or solutions to our own problems of, say, relations between church and state, between members of different religions, or between men and women. But these are persistent questions, and thinking critically about how our own historical Other addressed these issues can shock us out of presentist thinking and the sometimes disastrous complacency it can produce.

Music to Write a Book By

In my normal life, I like halfway decent music, I swear. I'm never going to be on the cutting edge of anything, but I like to think that nothing I listen to is going to cause anyone to roll their eyes. Lately, for example, the music in heaviest rotation has been the Police, Jolie Holland, Cat Power, Andres Segovia, and the Garden State soundtrack.

This all changes when I flip to my "work" folder on iTunes. There you will find not only a bit of classical music (which I don't normally listen to, but there's something wonderfully apocalyptic about a requiem mass), but also an embarrassing collection of cheesy neo-medieval music. Seriously, this stuff is the aural equivalent of reading a trashy romance novel with Fabio on the cover while attending your local Renaissance Faire. I don't know how else to describe it. It is, by all measures, Not Good Music.

And yet... somehow, as background noise it works to put me in a write-about-the-middle-ages frame of mind. Just so long as I don't actively pay attention to it, I'm fine.

I'm sure other people have less embarrassing work music. Thank god this blog is (mostly) anonymous.

A Medievalist at the Movies

My students and friends know that I love a good (awful) medieval-themed movie. Bad movies can produce great teaching moments. In my classes, I have shown bits of "Kingdom of Heaven," "Braveheart," and "The Mists of Avalon" (ugh) to name but a few. Plus, I believe that the way we imagine and reimagine the medieval over the years tells us a lot about who we are, as a society.

So it is with real delight that I note the forthcoming appearance of a new film version of Beowulf, starring... well, just about everybody.

I can't wait.