The second time is no easier

The Second Time is No Easier

I start teaching a prep for the second time next term, i.e., in TWO WEEKS(!!!!!), and I have no effing idea what I'm doing. This is in part due to where I teach, in part due to the outcomes I've been driving for my department, which are more skills- than content-based, and in part from the resulting attempts to try to balance content and skills when I am the only damned medievalist in the department, and I am not sure what content is all that important anymore. No, seriously. This is the problem with not being able to teach one's own field very often. I seem to have lost a survey-level grasp of it and what my colleagues would consider important. (Hmmm... I have just realized I can search for syllabi online, and have done so, and haven't found a lot, but thank goodness for Jacqui Long and for Steve Muhlberger, who put up lots of sources at ORB). It doesn't help that I'm using the Innes textbook (which I like in many ways) and the newest James, so I'm sort of heading into uncharted territory. On the other hand, this means that I'm sort of caught up in the question of letting the texts dictate the shape of the course, or the ideas of what I want to teach dictate the ways I assign reading.

In my ideal world, I would have a list of topics, and then assign the readings as appropriate (and yes, I'm using primary sources -- the Rosenwein reader, possibly Tacitus, Beowulf (the dread Heaney translation, because it's in a Norton edition with good essays), Two Lives of Charlemagne, and probably some selections from the Tierney and Geary readers, as well as some stuff from the Fordham site. But my students do not have the narrative. We teach World Civ here, so there isn't a lot of time for Rome and the MA. Moreover, my students are not particularly likely to go find simple narratives for themselves, and they are also very likely to need to rely on the textbook for a narrative crutch. So somehow, I have to figure out how to balance narrative (possibly podcasts?), topical approaches, and the heavy discussion of primary sources that most of my courses rely on.

Now, this might be easy-ish if the course had worked last time, but in some ways it didn't. This was in part the composition of the class -- only two students really accepted the ideas that they were responsible for learning the narrative and that, for us pre-modern folks, a working knowledge of some basic primary sources and of types of primary sources is fundamental. Most of the people in the class saw the primary sources as being no more than those little boxes in big survey textbooks -- things that illustrate what the authors tell us, rather than the information the authors work from. I think this time, that will be less of a problem, if only because the students are all used to me and many have taken courses with me from the very beginning of their uni careers.

Still, I'm trying to work the balance, and also they sorts of assessments I'll be using. There will be a review essay, and I think a presentation each (how I'll fit those in, I'm not sure, but the topics will be biographical, I think -- Augustine, Gregory (of Tours, but maybe the Great), Bede, Boniface...suggestions?

Well, hell. I just got sidetracked by responding to some ideas about our thesis seminar syllabus, which a colleague and I have entirely re-written... what was I saying?

Oh, right. So does anybody have any brilliant ideas about this balancing act? I'm really thinking of sticking to Innes for a chronological (mostly) narrative, but taking in a break for James and then, within that chronology, pulling out some topics that I think need highlighting, and just forcing the students to work the topics into the larger narrative. Like wot I had to do.

Oh. And then there is geography. gotta work that in, too. bleargh.


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Late Antique conference blogging, part one

Late Antique conference blogging, part one

So a couple of weeks ago, I went to a Late Antiquity conference. It was much fun, and there were some good papers. Unfortunately, I missed a few good papers, too -- first because I missed my plane! and second because I decided that falling down a few steps was better than actually, you know, walking down them. But anyway, here's a summary from my notes. If you want details on authors, e-mail me:

The first paper I heard was on Evagrius of Pontus. I only caught a bit, but basicaly the argument was that Evagrius used the image of the exiled Odysseus in talking about monastic exile, and that Evagrius's letters were deliberately written in a 'this contains a secret message' kind of way, in which the intended reader would have understood three different levels of interpretation.

The seond paper was on Varro and his influence in Late Antiquity. Let's see -- we all know Augustine hates Varro, right (well, we do now!) -- and that antipathy is rooted well before Civitas Dei. Anyway, Varro's Hebdomades apparently had some effect on both of the Symmachi, especially the elder. And in general there's an influence in the late 4th C in terms of many things numerological. Oh, but we don't have any precise evidence that the Symmachi were inspired by the Hebdomades. Basically, I understood the argument to be that Symmachus' original letter collection was arranged in 7 books, like the Hebdomades, and that there is other evidence to show that the number was significant to both Symmachi, and the 10-book collection of letters we know was a later compilation.

After the break, there was a very interesting paper on Glycerios and the Dancing Virgins, in which it was argued rather well that early Christians really didn't object to dance, per se. In fact, the imagery and vocabulary of dance permeate much of early Christian writing, and there is evidence to show that virgins were considered especially well-suited to choral dance. However, in examples like that of Glycerios, who appears to have been a ne'er-do-well who led a troup of dancing virgins from town to town, we get a case where the conduct of the leader is suspect, and leads to much crankiness.

Next came one of the best papers of the conference, hands down. All about the prostitutes. Actually, it was about the shift in the perception of and rehabilitation of prostitutes as Christianity took hold. The paper argued that in pre-Christian Roman society, shame equaled social death; all prostitutes pretty much suffered this. But the focus on sin in Christianity meant that the idea of volition played an important role; one chooses to sin, and one can choose to repent and be forgiven, and be welcomed back into the fold.

This is especially problematic in a world where many prostitutes are slaves, and therefore their sins are not volitional. This situation is upsetting to many early church fathers. The presenter went on to draw parallels between Greek romances where boy meets girl, girl is cast into many misadventures, often including into a brothel, and then is rescued, virtue intact, just in time to marry the boy, and the lives of prostitute saints, where the brothel plays a part, but the prostitute is redeemed and becomes a saint. This marks a transition from the social death that accompanies shame to a partial redemption when sex is seen as a sin. I say partial redemption because all of the examples given were of women who are never really redeemed socially, and in fact seem only to regain any social status by redefining their positions by becoming anchorites, hermits, or other religious who cut themselves off from most of the rest of society. In the best example, the repentent prostitute actually dresses as a man and lives a semi-eremitic existence in the desert, so her 'redemption' comes at the cost of becoming a man, or the denial of her female sexuality, at the least.

The last paper of this, the second session I attended, was on athletics in Late Antiquity, and was also rather good. It compared athletics in Classical Greece, which often included people in the upper classes, and also allowed people who began fairly low on the social (and often economic) ladder to gain income and status, which could lead to political influence as well. Moreover, the focus of classical athletics was on glory and winning as intrinsic goods. However, by Late Antiquity (and Roman society), there was a decline in funding for civic games, and the financial prospects for athletes and the comcomitant reduction in opportunities for a rise in status and the chance of gaining political influence. As the benefits of participating in athletics declined, the sorts of people interested in participating also shifted -- as did the goals of the games. The shift was exemplified in an increase of professional athletes who worked for money and popularity (the income could still be good, but because the games were not tied to civic life in the same way, we're looking at merely a rise in economic status for very hard work), and games that focused more on providing spectacles for the masses.

And that's the first installment!