Writing Group Check-In

Hi all --

Well, I am still being somewhat Overtaken By Events, some of which are academic, and some of which are down to a lot of odd things happening in my personal life that I will not go into here. One of the academic event is something I will come back to as soon as the paper is actually finished. I am heading off to the BL as soon as I post this.

But here is one of the things I've realized: when all the time you have for research is the summer, it's possibly not the best idea to use all of that time for a paper you might have been able to get done at home with Interlibrary loan... Also, in my case, I have to remember that reading for a paper is not the same as reading to actually read and learn. I can't read everything I want in its entirety. I wish I could. I should. But there is only so much time, and I always forget that serious reading takes practice -- and I'm out of practice most summers, because I spend most of the academic year reading for classes that are out of my strongest areas of expertise, or completely new (pirates. not doing that again...)

So expect me to write something I hope will be useful about not making the same summer (or for some people, research leave) mistakes over and over. In the meantime, maybe you could also share some ideas on that?

Thanks, and here are your last week's goals, compiled by Notorious, whose super-organized Type A personality is a godsend at the moment!

Writing group week 6 goals:

ABDMama [Draft of an article MS]: Pull sections from diss chapter to help fill out the article; work at least an hour each day.
ADM [conference paper for Leeds; revision of paper after]: finish Leeds paper…or else!
Audie [working on transitioning a dissertation chapter to an article]: reread all secondary sources and current chapter draft; map out/outline article
Dame Eleanor [Revising a conference paper into article MS]: No specific goal posted.
Digger [drafts of two book chapters]: continue working on book chapter; flesh out conference paper outline and start getting image permissions for book
Dr. Koshary [work on book MS]: finish a rough draft of chapter 4
Eileen [First draft of a dissertation chapter]: finish previous goal of 4K words on theory/quantitative data
Erika [Review-ready draft of an article MS]: 500 new words a day, plus clean up one old page per day
Firstmute [chapter draft; send out article]: Finish article draft & send to advisor.
Frog Princess [Review-ready draft of completed dissertation]: Finsh introduction & compile everything
Gillian [an article that needs writing]: Detour for final revision of Leeds paper
Godiva [First draft of diss. chap.]: Write 500 words/day
J. Otto Pohl [Complete draft of 2/3-finished book MS]: completely finish the deportation section
Jen [Revising conference paper into article MS]: finish the current section, writing 400 words each morning.
Kit: [Write the first draft of a dissertation chapter]: write 500 words a day
Matilda [Draft of a publishable paper]: small parts of three separate tasks, with deadlines for each in mind
Mel [Finish dissertation!]: Finish discussion section of chapter 4
NWGirl [Revising a conference paper into an article MS]: Finish section 1 of article & draft section 2
Sapience [diss chapter (done! ahead of schedule!) Prepare presentation of full dissertation for department]: start outlining presentation
Scatterwriter [Complete expansion/revision of an article MS]: start last passes through complete book to make sure argument is complete; begin drafting cover letter to editor
Scholastic Mama [Revising a conference paper into an article MS]: complete week 5 of WJA book
Susan [Revise & polish two chapters of a book MS]: On vacation for two weeks
Tigs [Completed diss draft]: finish the legal section of ch. 2, do a first round of edit on the culture section, and break down what else needs to be done to finish off the chapter
Travelia [Write two conference papers]: give a talk on topic at one conference; looking ahead to the following week to prepare book MS for review [NPhD: Travelia, do you want to add this MS to your overall goals?]
What Now [Polished book proposal]: trying to figure out what to do when a project is scooped
Zabeel [Draft first two sections of new article]: read three books and one article; continue daily writing goals of 3 hrs/day
Zcat abroad [write an article]: Plan out structure of article, and re-read base text for notes


Awaiting report:

Bardiac [Review-ready article MS]*
Caleb Woodbridge [MA thesis]**
Cly [revise article for publication & draft chapter for book]**
Jason [First draft of a dissertation chapter]**
Jeff [Review-ready draft of completed dissertation]*
Ms McD: Revising a conference paper into an article MS***
My Museology: redraft three dissertation chapters***
Ro [MS revision (NPhD: article?)]*

following GH

So I suppose I am both happy and semi-annoyed to find what has become an impetus for this paper laid out so clearly on p. 321 ff of Cemeteries and Society in Merovingian Gaul.

I'm in very good company, at least.

The real question is, what are we going to do about it?

An example of why I am writing this paper

"Allegations that widows took fraudulent vows in order to remain free to lead a life of sexual abandon leave no doubt that the cloistering of widows represented an integral part of the church's effort to enforce monogamy. As this program met with success and the conjugal family emerged as the basic unit of society, the function of sheltering unmarried ladies, formerly assumed by extended families, was taken over by the convents. As in other spheres of life, her too the royal family led the way. Louis the Pious not only sent his notorious sisters to nunneries but also installed his widowed mother-in-law as abbess at Chelles." SF Wemple, Women in Frankish Society, 105

Granted, Wemple is sort of old news these days. But the ghost of this sort of scholarship is alive and well, I think. There's plenty out there that contradicts this interpretation, which rests in part on a feminist reading of the role of the church in the Early Middle Ages and indeed, on a function of monogamy that may or may not have been entirely true at the time. Most importantly, I think, is a more recent idea that we see in, for example, essays in de Jong's Topographies of Power, LeJan's Femmes, pouvoir et societé, and even in Goldberg's biography of Louis the German and Althoff's work on the Ottonians. That those all assume a degree of agency that Wemple doesn't is very important. That only one of them is in English is one of the reasons that I'm writing this stupid paper: despite the fact that more and more Anglophones seem to be reading German these days, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of synthesizing going on, or at least not on a level that is reaching more 'general' audiences. We have reached a point, I think, where we are no longer explicitly arguing against older assumptions (and I am not sure that we ever really did, because that would mean -- shock! horror! -- engaging in women's or even feminist history, which might undermine our standing as real historians who work with charters and stuff). Rather, we are arguing for a much more interesting and nuanced picture of women's roles in early medieval society that is still haunted by unresolved scholarly approaches.


Or maybe not. Stay tuned.

Writing Group Check-In

Hello, WG!

Member Susan has just walked over to remind me to post so that she can update! The illustrious Notorious, PhD has kindly sent on the list of participants and their goals from last week (below), so that I can check things off as they come in. Please, everyone, don't forget to also post your goals for next week, as well as any changes to your longer-term goals.

WHAT? Changes? Well, yes. And, in fact, that's what I want to talk about this week. Well, that and how to juggle projects. The thing is, projects and priorities sometimes get shifted, either by necessity or from opportunity. So, for example, when I came back from Berks, I had been given A Job To Do, i.e., to submit my paper to a journal by today. That's something I really hadn't counted on, especially with the admin work I meant to finish when at home, that I still need to get to Superdean. So now I have three immediate projects: a paper submission; assessment reports; and my Leeds paper. Also, I'm in the UK, and need to make those things happen while juggling being a decent houseguest (rather than just someone who crashes at a friend's place), visiting family, dealing with a rather extensive commute (I'm staying somewhere between West Drayton and Uxbridge, i.e., about 75 minutes from the BL, and actually making the best use of my time in the BL.

I'm fairly sure you all have similar things happening. Some of those things are just life. I'm not going to talk about them. Instead, I am going to say a little something about juggling the writing projects in the time set aside for work. First? I'm not so good at it. I haven't got my paper ready to submit, because I really felt it was important to get a bit of a grasp on the Leeds paper first, and get myself into some sort of work routine this week. No work on Monday, because it was a flying day. But I've been trying to do reading that will benefit both projects. I think this is one of the things that many of us forget: sometimes, we can work on two things at once, if only because things are related. So on Wednesday, I opened up my Leeds paper project on Scrivener, and started a project file for the article. As I've read, I've found some things I needed to add to one, some that help for the other, some that apply to both. The general citations, notes, and tagging have gone into Zotero, and then I've added about four hundred words to the Berks paper and written about 1100 words for Leeds (although about 2/3 of that is rambly notes that won't make it into the final paper).

So yeah, trying to work on two things at once is one way of doing things. Another thing I've been doing is taking a few minutes at the end of the afternoon to take stock of what I've done, make notes for things I want to do in particular (books to order, etc.) and what I haven't got done. Then, I try to look at that list again in the morning. It's helping, I think, although not as much as I'd like. This coming week, I want to start adding to that notes on setting aside time to do certain things, so that I can make sure that projects aren't dropping off the radar.

What is both helpful and difficult here is that I have three deadlines. Today (missed, but I will be in the library tomorrow and hope to finish the draft then); next week (or my dean will kill me); and something like the 10th (because that's when I get on the train for Leeds). Keeping those in mind is also very important. So -- deadlines that can be re-scheduled sometimes; taking stock and making sure to make and log progress on each project; constant re-evaluation of each project. Let's see how it goes next week.

In the meantime, how are the rest of you doing? (I'll put a strike through last week where applicable and list what you did, and your goal for next week)

ABDMama [Draft of an article MS]: complete going through the primary and secondary sources identified this week

ADM General goal: [conference paper for Leeds; revision of paper after]; Last week's goal: work on Leeds paper added c. 400 words to Berks paper, wrote about 1100 words for Leeds, read several books on property and land transactions; Next week: [submit Berks paper w/ revisions; get a better handle on Leeds paper with detailed outline -- I'm traveling for 2-3 days, but part will be spent conferring with Magistra et Mater, who knows things about my topic, so hope to have about the same amount of writing, but much more polished and usable]


Bardiac: [Review-ready article MS*] [out of town, but wrote up a work plan] [this week: follow work plan?] NB from ADM -- a little more detail might be helpful!

Caleb Woodbridge [MA thesis]: No goal submitted for next week [NPhD: these are important to keep you accountable and moving forward]

Cly [revise article for publication & draft chapter for book]: Incorporate article changes and have skeleton of book chapter

Dame Eleanor [Revising a conference paper into article MS]: need to finish the conference paper this week, but put in 20-30 minutes a day taking notes or outlining the main project.

Digger: [drafts of two book chapters] [This week: edit chapter, incl. tables; 1 abstract written and submitted for a conference in Jan; an outline for 2nd conference paper]

Dr. Koshary [Review-ready article MS]: "slap together" narrow draft

Eileen [First draft of a dissertation chapter]: another 4k words integrating data theory, complete with clean citations

Erika: Review-ready draft of an article MS* [This week -- finish reading primary sources, add 1-2 pp of writing to draft]

Firstmute [draft of the final dissertation chapter]: (small shift in priorities) [This week -- have the article in shape to send to my advisor by Friday. I'll have a secondary goal of putting in 1 hr a day on the chapter]


Frog Princess [Review-ready draft of completed dissertation]: produce review-ready revision of current chapter, and to write a workable first draft of the introduction… thus resulting in the first complete draft of the whole dissertation [NPhD: Woot!! Go, Frogprincess!!!]

Gillian [an article that needs writing]: detour to finish Leeds paper

Godiva [First draft of diss. chap.]: Read one long narrative source

J. Otto Pohl [Complete draft of 2/3-finished book MS]:[make up for lost writing time] [NPhD suggestion: a more concrete weekly goal to help keep you on track; ADM thinks this is very necessary -- a word count meter is good, but you can have one of those without a writing group!]

Jason [First draft of a dissertation chapter]: Traveling, so will commit to squeezing in 3 writing sessions during the week, plus 90 minutes of reading each travel day; also create a daily work schedule for New Summer Place. [NPhD: hooray for having a summer writing retreat! Can we all come?]

Jeff [Review-ready draft of completed dissertation]: at workshop, but trying to revise Nth chapter

Jen [Revising conference paper into article MS]: Traveling for wedding, so goal is just to write a little every day.

Kit: [Need LT goal -- can't find it] [500 words a day]

Matilda [Draft of a publishable paper]: work through week 5 section of WYJA; working hard on the draft I was asked, which needs quite a bit of reading, and its deadline is coming. While doing these tasks, I am working continuously on my own article. I will. (Note from ADM: try to come up with concrete objectives, rather than "working hard" -- it's something that really does help when juggling projects]

NWGirl [Revising a conference paper into an article MS]: "Write first" [NPhD: sing it, sister!], with a goal of completing at least one section of the paper.

Ro [MS revision (NPhD: article?)]: Traveling, but continue readings in primary sources, writing up notes of insights gained and significant detail seen so far

Sapience [diss chapter]: work on article abstract for a book CFP and job market materials while waiting for feedback from advisor

Sara [Revision of research exam]: Read two articles & incorporate them into draft

Scatterwriter [Complete expansion/revision of an article MS]: identify more concepts to focus on and to write up at least one of them (if not more)

Scholastic Mama [Revising a conference paper into an article MS]: Read a couple of things by Abelard to fill in a gap in the evidence.

Susan [Revise & polish two chapters of a book MS]: [Last week: Complete draft of the current chapter and sketch out what needs doing on the next] [this week -- two amorphous but essential summaries of brosder bodies of information]

Tigs [Completed diss draft]: Rewrite legal section of ch. 2, and finish initial round of edits on pop culture section

Travelia [Write two conference papers]: finished most of one paper, finishing up and conferencing this week.

What Now [Polished book proposal]: idea stepped on; taking a week to regroup/rethink

Zabeel [Draft first two sections of new article]: Again, my focus is on working consistently. It's going to be a reading week -- Mon and Tues in the BL, then some close work on primary sources again working toward getting a more complete draft er... drafted.

Zcat abroad [write two articles]: Traveling [NPhd: Okay, but next week, give us a concrete goal, yes?]



Awaiting report:



Anastasia: a book chapter to write for an edited volume**

Audie: working on transitioning a dissertation chapter to an article**

Avery: Draft of an article MS***








Historydoll: Convert dissertation chapter into an article*



Mel*

Ms McD: Revising a conference paper into an article MS*

My Museology: redraft three dissertation chapters*

theswain: editing & rewriting; produce new reviews/summaries for New Year's work**


UPDATE: Hi all -- still updating goals, but have some inputted now!

Chasing the ghost of von Ranke

So I'm writing a Leeds paper about a ghost. It's the ghost of "everybody says" or "people used to say" or "common knowledge." It's a paper that came out of a few conversations, conversations where people said, "But X couldn't do Y," or,"But that wasn't supposed to happen," or, "but you can't trust this source because it: isn't what you think it is; is possibly (or is) a forgery; is not the original, but a 12th C recreation; probably didn't have that witness list (which by the way might not really be a witness list) attached to the original, etc."

So I thought, "let's try to figure out what it is we know, and what it is we don't, and who told us this stuff that is common knowledge." I thought I needed to know this because not to know it, and more importantly, not to discuss the historiography and the arguments scholars have had before sticking in my own oar, seemed shoddy work.

Then I talked to a colleague who said, "if it's old and obviously wrong, I just ignore it! Why document that someone else argued against what you are now going to demonstrate?" Well, that's a good question. I think that we need to trace the arguments a bit, if only because people like me, who are to some extent self-taught, would like a bit of help.

But the more I look at things, including articles by a single scholar that say one thing 20 years ago, then suddenly don't, and perhaps mention the reason for their change of heart in a very small footnote, the more I wonder if I have to worry quite as much.

So my paper will be methodological, and will likely focus on the evidence for what seems to have been true.

And the conclusion? History is complicated. Carolingian history is packed with people who say one thing and do another. Theory is fine, but practice often diverges from it. Basically, if you are a historian who does the job at all well, you'll use the evidence honestly, draw your conclusions, and point out where we have to use the sources with big chunks of salt, and why.

It's not going to be wie es eigentlich gewesen. But I think (or at least this is how I am justifying it to myself) that sometimes, the best we can do is present the evidence, explain why we think it means what it does and how it fits in, and admit there are big holes that other people may interpret differently. Sometimes, it's not about knowing the answers, I think. Sometimes, good history is about pointing out where and why there are questions we might not be able to answer. Or so I hope.

In the BL

Working. Glancing around the room, I see a colleague from St Andrews and someone else Historian on the Edge has mentioned a few times. And regular reader Susan should be here later.

In the meantime, reading a little Warren Brown and a lot of Wendy Davies, et al.

Must organize time, though. The problem with being here is that I just want to gorge on books that I can't normally access, and really, I need to focus on particular projects. Speaking of which, I need to look at the Leeds programme and see if I'm talking for 20 minutes or 15!

Going down to Cambridge next week to see Magistra...

Later, gang.

Let the panic begin

Well, I leave for London in two days. I have promised to finish my admin stuff Real Soon Now -- and that really means by the end of next week. I also promised a group of fairly intimidating women scholars that I would submit my paper from Berks to an Actual Journal by the end of next week. In the meanwhile, I am beginning to panic about my Leeds paper and why the hell I thought it would be a good idea. Just kill me now.

At least I will be in the place of peace that is the BL by Tuesday...

In the meantime, I am trying to get together my life, my house, and denying it all by watching Season One of Being Human.

look! another thought about charters!

hmmm. So you have a charter. Actually, you have lots of charters. And the editor of the charters has given them titles according to the names of the people who make the donation (or whatever). This makes sense... except that a lot of the donations appear to be made by trustees, who are merely passing along someone else's donation, as it were. So legally, they are the donors. Functionally, though, they sort of aren't, in the sense that monastic donations are normally made in the hopes that someone's sins will be remediated (although I came across one today that actually uses pro absolutione peccatorum). The trustee is just a middle man whose job is to fulfill someone else's wishes (or to grant permission, depending on the sort of trustee it is).

Add to that the fact that there are two different sorts of trusteeship, as far as I can tell (and is manu potestativa really a livery of seisin in the C9th and C10th?) and it makes for interesting reading. Except that I can't recall having read anything in particular that splits out donors of origin from donors who are trustees (and especially donors who are trustees whose relationships to the donors of origin are unclear, except when noted or when they are counts or other officials).

I have actually read my way through Bresslau, and Beumann, and Ewig, and any number of other godsawful German paperweights designed to tell us about such things, and I don't remember seeing much discussion of this -- but then there is a soporific quality to such reading...

So, hivemind, can you think offhand of anything that clearly articulates what we mean by 'donor' and if it takes into account donations made by trustees? More specifically, can you think of anything that talks about such things pre-11th (or even 10th) century and Frankish?

Diplomatics, the PhD, and Imposter syndrome

First, thanks to Historian on the Edge for answering my last question patiently, because it was not the smartest question ever. Still wondering about the historiography, though, and hoping that's not an obvious thing, too.

Well, I suppose it is, because I can always read the footnotes, but who keeps copies of Bresslau, et al., around the house? They aren't in my uni's library, either.

Anyway, I was thinking this morning a bit more about this whole diplomatics thing. Before I met my good friend at A Corner of Tenth Century Europe, I don't think I actually knew there was such a thing and that it had a name. I'd written a doctoral thesis for a committee that included someone who uses charters and all sorts of other legal documents, a Fellow of the MAA, and known for his work on disputes and land tenure (a bit), and I'd never heard of Diplomatics as a field. In fact, I don't think I knew that there was such a thing as a 'charter person' vel sim. I just happened to be using a single set of charters and a couple of sets of annals to talk about what they could tell us about Carolingian administration. On the way, I found that I couldn't do what I wanted to do without some understandings of onomastics (a word I didn't know, because in my head it was Namenkunde, whether Personen- or Orts-), so I read about leading names, and name-elements, and other such things. And of course, this led me to various prosopographical works (thank goodness I had already worked a bit with the PIR on a couple of papers in grad school, so the idea was not foreign to me), which I also read, used, and disagreed with at times. No really, there are bits of my thesis where I argue against both Borgolte and Mitterauer, for example.

Um.

Where am I going with this? Leeds. In the short term. I love going to Leeds. If I had to choose only one conference, that would be it. It is the conference with the highest concentration of cool and smart people who do what I want to do, and they do it really well. Leeds allows me to pretend that I'm good enough at what I do to fit in, and I love that my brain has to work really, really hard. It's the mental equivalent of a really good long bike ride or run through the woods. It makes me think I might even be able to survive a sabbatical semester amongst my UK colleagues, who are amongst the most generous people I know.

In the long term, though, Leeds scares the hell out of me. Every day is a day where I realize that there are things I have simply missed out on. Some of these things are easy to explain, I think. There are a lot of medievalists in the UK, and it's a small enough place that scholars regularly meet and present their work to each other at seminars. There are such things in the US, but we're pretty spread out. When I was an undergrad at Beachy U, there were regular visits by scholars who gave papers, and I know that such things happen in the US in places where there are enough medievalists to have regular seminars -- places like LA, and the Bay Area, and places like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. But my grad school wasn't so advantageously located. I also think I wasn't really acculturated in a way that I understood that this was what people did -- I went to such seminars and talks as were available because someone told undergraduate me I was supposed to -- but not that they served a function other than being interesting, yet somewhat passive, activities.

I know, right?

I am not sure how much of this was me being obtuse. As a postgraduate student, I largely saw research and writing as evils necessary to getting a teaching position. I think maybe this is because I never really saw my professors as scholars. They didn't really talk about it much, in the sense of process, or why they loved it, and they were all fantastic teachers. My PhD program required that we undergo teacher training, and that we teach lecture courses of our own. It was great training, and definitely played a huge part in my being employed, but it also helped to create a situation where the immediate needs of students took precedence over my research for the very beginning. I was good at teaching, and the rewards were immediate. Research, not so much.

Why not? Well, because I had no idea what I was doing. My thesis advisor is mostly an archaeologist. People still raise their eyebrows when I tell them who I worked with, because Late Antiquity is not necessarily Early Medieval, and the sorts of things that Doktorvater does are really nothing like what I do. But he and I bonded when I went to Grad U, and because of a set of freak occurrences, there was no one else to work with at the time I began to work on my thesis. We hired Fellow of MAA shortly thereafter, but I was always intimidated by him, and never had a conversation with him where I didn't feel like a complete idiot. Many years later, I realized he doesn't make eye contact with anyone, and just approaches things very different to how I do. But at the time, I couldn't see working with him. So I put together a prospectus, defended it, got a DAAD, and went off to Germany, where the only person I knew was another Late Antiquarian. He introduced me to medievalists on the faculty, but mostly, I hid and worked by myself.

I wrote my PhD in a vacuum, more or less. At first I was connected to the university, but I didn't really make friends, and felt pretty much isolated. None of the people I knew worked on anything related to what I was doing. Then I started dating X, and somehow my ties to people at the university were replaced by his friends. There was my advisor, but no connection really to "here are things happening in our field that you should know about." The more physically isolated I was, the worse my Imposter Syndrome got -- and the grounds for it seemed to be more and more realistic. The PhD finally was finished, signed off, complete -- not that it mattered, because I'd left academia at that point.

Except, of course, it turns out I didn't. I just spent a few years adding to the huge gaps in my knowledge and picking up bits of what I missed like a magpie attracted to the shiny. I expect I'm not the only person out there who has had experiences like mine, but for me, it's been really disconcerting to talk about what I do and have other people understand it and be able to give me advice. It's probably not a bad thing to have approached things as I have -- no preconceived notions, after all! And I think if I'd thought of myself as a charter person, or a diplomatics person, I'd have turned out very differently. Even now, I think of myself as a social and political historian who uses charters a lot, although the amount I think about methodology might indicate a diplomatists lurking in the shadows.

It's lurking there along with the Imposter Syndrome. Even though I am again, or still, working in relative isolation, it's at least no longer a vacuum. Now it's a balancing act: engagement, even over the internet, allows a feeling of membership in the community; membership in a community where everybody else knows so damned much* might let the imposter out of the shadows.







*and yes, I do realize that spending my time having to keep up with teaching all the non-US history my department offers (i.e., the whole world from Harappan culture till now) gives me breadth that takes away from the depth my impressive colleagues have. Doesn't make me feel less dumb, though :-)

Diplomatics, whether or not I want 'em

So I found some cool stuff on Google books today. Unfortunately, it's all 19th C German legal scholarship, which means I have no idea how useful it really is. On the one hand, it offers very clear interpretations of some of the stuff I've wondered about for a long time. On the other, I have no idea if it's correct or not (in terms of what we now understand). But there was a nice explanation of per manum clauses (once I figured out what some of the German words were), and now I just have to figure out if these were things that the early diplomatics people would have looked at.

Speaking of which, did you know that Breßlau worked with Heinrich von Trotschke for a while? I think this in part reaffirms my belief that we really can't trust ANY early German diplomatics scholarship entirely -- there's just always the lingering spectre of circular nationalistic reasoning. For example, there's the understanding of "national" law codes as being real exemplars of the values of particular people that obviously may be partially true, but is also now understood within the context of Carolingian meddling policy, I think? Or am I imagining that?

But really, what I meant to say was this:

how separable are praecarium and usufruct? That is, I understand how one could grant the latter without the former, and that sort of makes sense. I understand how one could grant the former without the latter, but it seems to me to be pointless. More importantly, I wonder how easy it was to keep such things straight among all the players.

Anecdotal History

I'm working on a paper that is likely to be a few days late in getting to the respondent (REALLY, REALLY sorry about that!). It's ostensibly on what we can see in some charters about step- relations. This has been made more difficult by the fact that I can't find the notebook that had my notes that I used for the abstract. Go me. Anyway, some things occurred to me today that I need to jot down, and here seemed as good a place as any. As I've been working, I've been worrying about whether or not the abstract and the paper will match up at all. Fortunately, whatever I write will still fit within the parameters of the session, so that panic is off.

So anyway, I might not find as much as I'd like on stepmother-stepdaughter relationships. I can stretch that to talk about stepmother-stepson relationships, and in fact I think I need to talk about those if only because most of the high-profile stepmother stories from the Carolingian period are royal and stepmother-stepson. This morning, though, I realized that I can't recall all that many mother-daughter (or mother-son) relationships in my documents. I should mention here that I am using relationships in two ways: the first is the obvious one, evidence of any familial connection; the second is the one that we infer from donations made on behalf of others. It has long been posited, and I think that this is largely correct, that donating property on the behalf of another is to some extent evidence of affection. I think that duty is perhaps also a reason, but really that is unlikely if the person for whom the donation is made is dead. I am also now wondering, though, if donating for a third party is also a way of mediating disputes or securing an uncontested release of property, i.e., "I know that my relatives really want to get their hands on this, and they are going to fight about it when I'm gone. Even though I have made provisions for this in the charter, in that they can pay a whopping sum to the monastery to get the land back, they're a bunch of greedy bastards and I don't really want that to happen. So I'm also going to put their names on it. This will put them in a position where they will really look bad if they try to regain that property."

Maybe. I'm not entirely sure I haven't read bits of that before, but will need to look that up. At any rate, I think that there needs to be some comparison to the charters in which people make donations for their mothers as well.

But anyway, it seems to me that the paper will be better if I contrast the mother vs stepmother cases. Which is probably obvious to most of you, but I tend to forget such things. In fact (and this is something that I have really got to get over) I'm like a magpie when it comes to research, going for the shiny and not thinking about framing it nearly as well as I should. Part of this is that I tend to do research only when I can concentrate on it, which is in the summer. This is really not ideal, and I must figure out how to change that, even if it only means keeping up with reading through the academic year. In years like this one, where I teach nothing medieval at all, it's especially important to make time to do this. If it weren't for blogs, I'd be absolutely lost, and most of you know I've been crap at keeping up this year. Another part may be that I am, apparently, a mental magpie, or Doug, the dog in Up, whose attention is completely taken over by the random appearance of a squirrel. Don't know if I mentioned it, but apparently, I have ADHD (inattentive). Knowing this does make me more conscious of looking for solutions and coping mechanisms, rather than beating myself up over being a magpie, at least.

What does this have to do with anecdotal history? Well, it also occurred to me this morning that I seem to be stuck in a pattern of finding cool anecdotes to write about. They are the sorts of things that fit in well with my teaching and service load, as well as my tendency to follow the shiny. I don't think they lack value, either. In fact, I think that anecdotes are what make what we do accessible to non-historians and help to demonstrate one of the real values of studying history: historians look at people, and try to understand people and why they did what they did -- and to me, this sort of inquiry is immediately valuable and transferable to how we approach our own world.

Having said that, I also want to make a concerted effort to make my anecdotes more meaningful to other historians, to add more to the larger conversation. In the meantime, I suppose I can continue honing my skills at asking awkward questions. :-)

What possessed me...?

... to work with stuff like this? Seriously, 8th C land transactions? What the HELL was I thinking? Every summer, I start to read these, and every summer, I think, "it's bad enough you decided to be a medievalist. It's bad enough you decided to be an Early Medievalist. It's bad enough that you decided to be a dime-a-dozen Carolingianist. But really, did you have to choose to read stuff like this and then get a job where you don't get a chance to practice your Latin during the year???"

This is why:

In Christi nomine ego itaque ultimus exiguusque dei servorum famulus Matto sed et ego nuncius fidelis Othelm diligenter devotus in elimosinam Iulianae dei famulae et abbatissae pro remedio animae suae ipsa mihi manu potestativa ex iure proprietatis suae in Uuangheimero marcu tradiderat. similiter et ego Matto in supra dicto loco ubi supra dicta Iuliana soror mea totum et integrum s. Bonafacio per manum Othelmes tradiderat ita et ego in villa eadem portione et ex illa quantitate quantum mihi ibidem adjacet proprietatis sicut aliis testibus perpluribus cognitum est ita et ego Matto supra dicto loco in elimosinam meam et fratris mei Megingoz et eorum quibus debitor sum sicut et illa supra dicta Iuliana soror mea per manum supra dicti Othelmes sic trado quicquid ad meam pertinet proprietatem totum et integum sic et ille Othelm nos simul trademus sicut supra dictum est in Wangheimero marcu id est illam ecclesiam et monasteriolum constructum cum illis sanctorum reliquiis et cum omni proprietate id est tam terris silvis campis pratis pascuis aquis aquarumque decursibus aedificiis domibus arialis coloniis qualiter et quomodo heredatum a parentibus et a nobis elaboratum aut exquisitum sit peculiari utriusque sexu [I think] mobilibus et immobilibus quicquid dici aut nominari queat et haec mancipia quorum haec sunt [big-ass list of mancipia]

You know, I have enough trouble making sense of this sort of stuff in current legal English. Now Latin is making me feel dumb.

*headdesk*

The 2 1/2 orders?

The 2 1/2 Orders?

Following on tenthmedieval's comment on this post, and a conversation at the massive group exam read of last week, I have some thoughts.

The conversation was about the F word at first. A group of us were talking, me, a Late Antique person, a very modern person, and two high school teachers. I mentioned the F word, and one of the high school teachers said, as they often do, "but wait, I always teach the Feudal Pyramid -- it's in the textbook! What am I supposed to tell them?" Me being me, I said, "well, really, that's a model that has been pretty much abandoned. Textbooks tend not to be written by medieval specialists, so the information is often very outdated. If it were a university course, there's a good chance that the first half would be taught by someone who was a pre-modernist, and they'd correct the misrepresentations." So we talked a bit about feudalism and Peggy Brown, and Susan Reynolds, and Chris Wickham, and manorialism, and other such things... like Duby and the Three Orders and how a feudal obligation is between members of the same social group.

Fast forward to the last post.

Because what do you do with the three orders? it doesn't really work unless 'those who pray' are really the low-level monks -- except that in the Early Middle Ages, at least, even monks tend to be not from the lower echelons of society. And if we look at the people who are at the top of the ecclesiastical food chain, so to speak, they are members of the leading families. Their brothers and fathers are comitesand duces -- and even kings. And yet we have a model that is based on lines that we see more and more to be very fluid between the first two orders. By birth, they are largely the same people. And yet, so much of the existing scholarship of the past, oh... hundred years? has created an understanding of society that means that we always seems to express some sort of surprise, or at least forceful assertion, when we find something that indicates that the interests of ecclesiastics and laity were often the same, and were intertwined. And yet, it is only logical. So where do we go from here, to get to where we can start really changing our models? Or should we?

this confuses me

This confuses me

SO I'm in the British Library, more falling asleep than working (I only got here yesterday morning, and had only three hours' sleep Tuesday night), and read something I've read over and over for years... basically, an author states that lay elites and ecclesiastical elites had similar interests. In this case, we're talking about charters. But really, is this supposed to be a surprise? Because I thought it was pretty clear by now that we are talking about the same people, by and large. Yes, ecclesiastics do have additional interests, because their allegiance is, or should be, somewhat divided.* But hasn't there been enough work done, at least for the Franks, that we can now assume that the two groups are generally related to each other by kinship, and that, especially in the cases of proprietary churches and monasteries (or royal ones), the holders of ecclesiastical office are doing it precisely because they are connected by blood to the lay elites?

Or am I missing something important?



*should be in the sense that they are supposed to be looking out for the church's property and interests, whoever their relatives.

SEMA

SEMA

Ok, folks. I've agreed to come up with something for SEMA. I can simply put in a paper, but might as well see if anybody wants to help put together a panel. Me, I think I'll be writing about women and property, but focusing on the deo sacrata. Anyway, the CFP is below. Let me know if you are interested in putting together a panel or submitting a paper!

Call for Papers

“Natural, Unnatural, & Supernatural”



36th Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Medieval Association
Roanoke, VA
November 18-20, 2010

The Thirty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Medieval Association will take place November 18-20, 2010, at the Hotel Roanoke, located in the southwest corner of Virginia in the picturesque Shenandoah Valley. Because this year’s conference coincides with the 75th anniversary of the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway, we have selected “Natural, Unnatural, & Supernatural” as its theme.

We welcome papers and panels dealing with all aspects of the Middle Ages, but we particularly encourage those examining elements of the natural, unnatural, and supernatural in the medieval world. As it does every year, the SEMA annual conference encourages submissions from all branches of medieval studies, including but not limited to history, art, science, philosophy, theology, archaeology, paleography, language, and literatures.

Proposals for entire sessions and for interdisciplinary presentations are strongly encouraged, although individual paper proposals are welcome as well. Offers to serve as session moderators are also welcome.

Papers should be no more than 20 minutes in length and sessions should consist of no more than 3 presenters and 1 moderator. If submitting a full session, please indicate the intended format of the session (formal papers, roundtable discussion, panel, and so on) and titles of all individual presentations. All proposals should be approximately 250 words and include all contact information (mailing address as well as email) of the presenter(s) and/or organizer. Proposals must include a note regarding A/V equipment needs. Email submissions are much preferred.

Email proposals by June 1 to:

sema2010 AT scholar.vt.edu

Prof. Matthew Gabriele
Dept. of Religion and Culture
Virginia Tech
342 Lane Hall (0227)
Blacksburg, VA 24061
USA

Please explore the conference website, where you'll find information on plenary speakers, accommodation, local dining, travel & maps, and local attractions.


For questions or more information about the conference please contact:

Matthew Gabriele (Virginia Tech) mgabriele AT vt.edu
Dana-Linn Whiteside (Roanoke College) whiteside AT roanoke.edu

another stock-taking post

Another Stock-Taking Post

Well, it's the end of Fall Break, a weekend where I traditionally try to get caught up on everything, and usually fail. So instead I take stock and try to organize myself for the rest of the semester so that I can have a couple of days of rest at Thanksgiving and Christmas -- providing I remember to get online and see if I can redeem some miles to go back to the Left Coast and see X, the Kid, and friends. It was a good break -- not only did I manage to get all my marking up-to-date, but I managed to drive through three states yesterday to go and see my cousin and her kid. Sadly, they are moving back West. Happily, at least they are headed back to the same town my mom and sisters live in, so at least now most of my family is located on the same coast -- or in London.

I have to say, I love living east of the Mississippi. The drive to the cousin's was wonderful (except for the drivers on a long stretch of the road, where OMG they are frakkin' crazy). The weather was nice and dry, and the colors of the leaves were gorgeous. There are lots of miles of country highway on the route, and sadly, lots of roadkill. Raccoons seemed pretty big on this trip. One skunk. Countless furry-tailed tree-rats. Possibly a ground-hog. And something really, really big. Deer meets semi-truck is my guess. And it was mostly still in the road... just...open. Yuck. And yet, I couldn't help thinking about the Gary Larson cartoon with crows using spatulas. That and what a human body might look like after getting hit by a truck and a couple of cars. Ugh.

Oh -- and I managed to work on getting rid of most of a nasty cold -- yay me!

So, right -- stock-taking.

I need to do some revamping of my classes. Or maybe take some time out to talk about why I teach the way I do. I don't lecture. I stopped lecturing a while back, when I was teaching at Jesuit U, because my evaluations indicated that the students did not like it and expect more Active Learning. Since then, most of my classes are really discussion-based. This means that students really need to be prepared to discuss and they have to be able to put things together in different ways. Now, fortunately, my program's outcomes are also kind of geared towards my kind of teaching -- they focus mainly on teaching the skills of the historian. This is problematic in its own way, but that's another post.

When my students show up, they really don't know what to expect, and most are not prepared for this sort of class. But honestly, I don't think that they would be successful in the sort of class that I took as an undergraduate. I would sometimes like to craft nice lectures and expect the students to take them, the primary source readings, and the textbook readings, integrate them, and use that information to answer solid historical questions. But that isn't going to happen in the World History survey. My students have enough trouble keeping the information in the textbooks straight. So instead, I focus on using primary sources and discussion to highlight the most important issues. It has been pretty successful so far, but I'm finding I need to do a few new things as well.

My students are not particularly good at reading essay questions. This is true for multi-part questions that, when broken down, tell the students exactly how to structure the essay, as well as the more simple-looking questions that require students to consider the question and demonstrate that they understand all the issues at stake. Since they don't read -- or understand-- the questions (and really, these are the same questions we've all asked and answered: I've even poached questions from exams I took!), they don't answer them. I can't stop giving essay exams and papers, so I'm going to have to spend a bit more time early on explaining how to write essays. Where I'm going to find that time, I'm not sure. Possibly group work -- perhaps letting them use their computers in class to work on a wiki, and workshop the opening paragraph of an essay?

Beyond that, I probably need to add a bit more structure. Hmmm. And remind the upper-division students that they are responsible for information that I haven't talked about in class, if it's something that was in the reading. And I'm still behind on making the podcasts I wanted to make for this year, and on my reading. At least that last part I can do :-)

Apart from that, I'm feeling overwhelmed this semester, and shouldn't. Departmental administration is more difficult than I had expected. There's a lot that needs doing in terms of curriculum and program revision, and getting buy-in is ... interesting. Coming up with outcomes was pretty easy, but getting people to make the leap from outcomes to coming up with assessments that really do reflect the outcomes? Different animal. Plus there's a job application to write, a search committee to serve on (touch wood it's only one -- there are a bunch of searches this year).

And then there's the writing. I've got a book I've done bugger all on in months, and an article to write, whether or not it's going into a collection a colleague is proposing. I totally botched getting in a proposal for Leeds (but if anyone finds they need a chair at the last minute, do please let me know). I have to start thinking about a panel for Big Berks. And do some background work for the professional organization I'm a member of ... oh -- and maybe actually read some books and professional journals.

So, pretty normal for an Associate Professor of History, I think. Guess I'd better figure out how to get going on all of that. Reading for tomorrow first, I guess.

Charters, did you say?

Charters, did you say?

I've been thinking about my book project, which keeps getting pushed around for things like conference papers and now possibly an abstract for an extended version of my Leeds paper to see if it can be published. In many ways, this project, the paper/article, and the next project are all pretty closely linked, which is a good thing. Even better is that they don't overlap too much, so I won't be covering lots of the same ground over and over, and citing myself ad nauseam.

But I'm having to do a fairly heavy-duty re-think about the projects, largely because a knowledgeable manuscript person offered me tons of advice, but also some very public questions, about why I was wasting my time with an edited collection from the 19th C., and one that has its failings, when the larger cartulary from which this collection and another are drawn. Because, you see, apparently there are now facsimile mss available. And of course this sort of freaks me out, because I'm supposed to be a medievalist and all, and I am now senior faculty (although a junior member of senior faculty!), and I have never dealt with real manuscripts because ... everybody uses this edition. It's been pretty standard for lots of us for a very long time. And I have a sort of contract to work specifically with that bunch of documents. I think that will not be so much of a problem, in that I can add caveats about the documents and their edited version to the final product, and then people can go and check the mss in the cartulary if they choose.

But there is another issue. Much of what I work on depends on witness lists as much as anything else in the charters. I'm not, nor have I ever claimed to be, an expert in charters -- just someone very familiar with this particular collection. And I've done a fair bit of reading in Personennamenkunde and Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsgeschichte, where witness lists are generally used as evidence. If I could (or better, if one of you could) remember, I could even cite a couple of places where I've read that witness lists are important, and that the order that the names appear is also important. Even without that, I'm pretty sure that's something people agree on. But one of the things I didn't know is that witness lists were often added at times and places other than where documents were drawn up. That's awkward. But I'm also not sure how important it is. That is, even if the names were added later, the names were added for a reason, and so we can use the evidence for either what was true, or to show what someone intended, and maybe even what people were thought to have been important to a particular case. And this is one of the cases where going to the original (for values of original) ms and checking to see if the witness list was part of the original document makes a lot of sense.

A second question is whether or not people signed themselves or whether they made a mark next to their names, or whether their names were just listed by the scribe or notary. Again, at this remove, I'm not sure how important it is. I'd have to look at a charter with a witness list made up of signatures to see if they are all in different hands -- but would I be able to tell? Also, is the lack of actual signatures evidence of anything other than local custom and/or a population that may not have written very much? Again, I'm not sure.

My final question is probably the toughest: my colleague claimed that in later versions of many cartularies, and probably mine, the compilers often discarded the witness lists on purpose. This may even have been especially true when the names of women appeared in the witness lists. Hmmm. First, I have a big bunch of charters, many of which have witness lists, and I have no way of knowing whether or not these documents ever had such an element. I think Wendy Davies said in her presentation (or someone at Leeds did) that often donations by people who weren't all that important didn't warren witness lists, because the stakes were pretty low and the power to prove a document was often weighed in favour of the receiving ecclesiastical institution. Now, many of these charters are definitely short and don't have witness lists, and don't list much in the way of donations. So I expect that we can make a reasonable assumption, other things being equal, that the donors were probably not all that important in the world of Carolingian politics.

Here's the real clicker, though. If something doesn't exist in many cases, does the lack of existence prove that documents were deliberately edited to remove the lists, or does it merely prove that there is a probably lack of evidence? And if we know that there is evidence missing, does it negate our ability to use the evidence we *do* have, as long as we use accepted forms of caveats to frame our conclusions? And where do things like notitia, when there are no supporting documents, fit in?

I'm just asking because these seem to be questions that are really important, and yet I am not sure they are so vital that we should all stop using specific source collections just because they are problematic, rather than false.

Oh. this was going to be longer, but I seem to have fallen asleep while writing. Carry on. I'll be back to re-read this and edit later!

No really, still alive

No really, still alive

Working on two posts, one about drinking the kool-aid and all that entails when it comes to the professoriate, the other about service and the range of approaches to it, from 'cant be arsed' to 'can't bear not to have a finger in every pie.'

Back soon, I promise.

Also, I need to report on conferences.

Also, Thursday is my 7th blogiversary, and I may be changing the look!

Interesting!

Interesting!

If you are bored today, check out Codex Diplomaticus Fuldensis 466.

Kind of interesting... usually, the person handing over his possessions orders the charter to be drawn up ...

Argh on the paper ...

Argh on the paper

So this may in fact be the dullest paper ever ... athough it's certainly talking about using digitized sources. Well, the ones in databases, at least.

But here's a related question: 'vestitionis' as in 'ecce hic testes illius vestitionis'...

Two very smart people have said that it's probably a livery of seizin. But did such things exist in C9 Francia? Especially in the east?