Oh Yeah, bombs

Oh yeah, about the bombs

What does it say about me that I heard about the first bomb as I came into the BL yesterday, and the second this morning, and basically thought, "well, that kinda sucks!"? Honestly, I'm a little disconcerted, but not as much as I am by the act that there was a mugging round the corner from LDW's last week and a fatal stabbing round the corner from my in-laws' two weeks ago. OK ... so maybe now I'll get around to making a will. But really? I'm still more worried about getting work done and keeping my job. I figure I have a better chance of being hit by a car than being hit by a bomb. Not that that's reassuring.

Pathetic, eh?

Rainy London

Rainy London

Dear everybody,

Trying to work, but am very tired today and not focused, hence blogging. If you're at the BL, I am, too. I am trying to work on both an article and a book proposal. I have only a small clue about what I'm doing. OK, maybe more than that. But anyway, I will be trying to stay away from the blogosphere while here, so I can make the best use of my time!

On the road and copyright infringement

On the road and copyright infringement

So, I'm in rainy London. Had a good day in the BL yesterday with LDW. Still trying to adjust to the time, etc.

In other news, I hope to hell that Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie sue the shit out of the Westboro Baptist Church for this little piece of perverted and twisted copyright infringement. I'm pretty much agnostic these days, but I wasn't always. As a person and as a medievalist, this kind of sick twisting of Christianity offends me deeply. I've actually read the Bible. Both Testaments. I always got the impression that Jesus was talking about a God who loves the world.

Back soon

Back soon

Sorry for the not blogging. I'm at an undisclosed location, having taken on an undisclosed extra week's work, and I think I'm like sworn to secrecy about it or something. More soon.

Required classes

Required Classes

In the comments to this post, New Kid and sqadratomagico disagreed with me on whether or not history should be a required subject. I really think that it's important enough to require -- not so much for content as for teaching people how we do history. I've argued before that history is not necessarily -- should not necessarily -- have to be relevant to our students. I think that's very true in terms making connections between, say, what the Romans did and what we do. More importantly, I think that kind of emphasis and (mis)use of historical learning lead us to the kind of thing Matt Gabriele talks about here.
So how do we teach history and not fall prey to teaching false analogies in order to make it 'relevant'? I think -- and this is just a suggestion -- that it is not so much the content that we should make relevant.

Let me 'splain -- No. It is too much. Let me sum up.* I think the information we teach in inherently relevant and interesting. But it's relevant because of the questions we ask. This is at the root of why I think history should be required, and taught in ways that try to inculcate in our students the fundamental processes of inquiry, reason, and explanation that allow students to then look at history by themselves. It's relevant because the questions that we ask and try to answer about the past are the same kinds of questions that we should be asking about the world around us. If we go a step further, we can help students to understand why, for example, neither Vietnam nor The Crusades are good comparisons for the current situation in Iraq or for the cultural conflict between Islam and the industrialized West. If we do our jobs well, I think our students should come out of our classes with the confidence to say, "Yes, I can understand that you think the Iraq War and the Vietnam War look something alike on the surface, but what about X? Y? Z? If we look at those things, we can see that they are not really that much alike. But the answers to X, Y, and Z help us to figure out what really is going on." Or something like that. To really sum up, I think that it's the way historians are taught to interrogate their sources and ask and answer questions that are the most relevant and most transferable skills we have to offer. The content is always there, and I think that we humans always want to make analogies. That need is what drives many people critique and understand the present through the past. And yeah, I think that, if more people had some decent training in history, people might be a little less complacent. It's that tension between the desire to find explanations through analogy and the discipline of picking apart those analogies for a better understanding that lies at the heart of what we do. If we teach that part better, I think we'll be doing a better job and creating a greater appreciation for history. The hard part is that really, what I'm calling history isn't what most of my students think history is. Still, the best comments on my evals come from people who praise the emphasis on primary sources. Go figure.

OTOH ... I was thinking last night that, when I taught at several campuses where history was not required, I had better students. My life was much happier when I had students who actually cared about doing well in my subject, rather than just passing a required class. These days, I have rockin' FTEs, but I also have a ton of students (depressingly, many of them are education majors) who take my classes because they have to, and see themselves as clocking time towards a piece of paper. Alas, my post on student attitudes must wait.


*Apologies to The Princess Bride and Inigo Montoya.

More on Language

More on Language

Ancarett is riffing off the post below, and it reminded me about a concomitant problem with the whole language requirement thing. FTEs and Gen.Ed./Core requirements. I think that the problem may be worse at smaller campuses where smaller also = financially strapped. For any given requirement of a course or courses in one department, another department whose courses are not required will feel hard done by. Sometimes the argument will be phrased as "but this is important in terms of a well-rounded education." And sometimes, that's true. Language certainly fits in there. But there is often pressure from above ("too many requirements mean students have too few choices, and they will leave us and go elsewhere") and from within the faculty ("why do you think your field is more important than mine"). The former argument is dodgy. The latter, just stupid. Some fields are more necessary to a Liberal Arts education than others. Because, well, there are these things we call Liberal Arts. Seven of them, as it happens. History's one of them. The social sciences? not. So I'm all for arguing that History should be required, but that non-majors should be able to satisfy a general social science requirement with Econ, Sociology, Anthro, Psych, PoliSci ... But I also do understand that people's egos are at stake.

In more practical terms, though, I think a lot of it is about funding. The pie is only so big, and smaller departments don't want their budgets diminished at the expense of something as lame as foreign languages. I've seen this happen at a couple of places. The people who side with languages? History (usually, as long as History is already required), some kinds of Lit people, International Relations, and some of the Health Care professions. One guy from the Business School (it's always a guy ... talk about gender imbalance). A cultural Anthropologist, if there is one. For the rest of the faculty, not so much support. Note: this is not true for faculty who went to really good SLACs or universities and had to learn languages themselves. They usually appreciate the value.

But as long as funding is based on enrollments, there will be problems getting meaningful language requirements.

On Language requirements

On Language Requirements

One of the things that many of us mediævalists have in common is that we're snobbish about languages. Ok, so we can't be quite as snobby as the Classicists, because, well, Greek. And some of the Late Antiquity types do Persian or some other Near Eastern language. Since I kind of hang out with those folks, though, I think I'll lump them in for the purposes of this little blog post. So for the sake of argument, let's just say that those of us whose fields of study span the era before about 1500 tend to be language snobs.

This was true in my grad program. I remember group pity extended towards the person whose Latin and French were good enough to pass the requirements, but just not good enough that s/he could work in anything other than English History, and only where OE and ME were not required. A 'lesser' degree seemed in order. Some of you may have noticed that this is gate-keeping again. Yeah, it is. Ancarett made a comment to yesterday's post that made me want to write this. That, and I'm panicking about my travels, due to start next week.

For us mediæval and earlier types, language is the test at the gate. After climbing that nasty mountainous road to a graduate program, you will meet the bridge gatekeeper, and he will say something along the lines of...

Gatekeeper: "Stop. Who would cross the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see"
The intrepid grad student will answer: "Ask me the questions, bridgekeeper. I am not afraid."
G:"What... is your name? "
IGS: "IGS"
G: "How is your Latin?"
IGS: "I will pass the exams, I promise"
G: "do you know or can you acquire a reading knowledge of French, German, and anything else demanded in the next year?"
IGS:"Yes."
G: "Right, yer in."

But then that year is up, and the conversation goes like this:
Gatekeeper: "Stop. Who would cross the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see"
The intrepid grad student will answer: "Ask me the questions, bridgekeeper. I am not afraid."
Gatekeeper: "Did you pass your Latin exam?"
IGS: "Yes"
G:"Lisez-vous français?"
IGS: "Oui?"
G: "Sprechen Sie, Bzw. Lesen Sie Deutsch? Wenn Sie etwas auf Deutsch lesen, wissen Sie unbedingt, dass Ihre Übersetzung korrekt ist?"
IGS: "er ... ja ...peut-etre?"

At this point, the student is not doomed to be cast into the chasm.* There are lots of languages we use. Perhaps the questions should have been posed in Italian or Old Norse (in which case, the student will really need that German, too). My point is that we are expected to have Latin and at least two modern European languages between when we walk in the door (say, for example, at Toronto) and when we get to the writing stage. Presumably our colleagues in the UK and Ireland have the languages when they start, because they don't have coursework. At my grad school, Europeanists needed to pass two language exams, Americanists one (and they could substitute SPSS if it was more relevant). Medievalists needed three plus any other languages needed -- and we didn't get a choice in the first one. Latin.

But languages we must have. They are not always easy to learn. We must also learn other odd and peculiar skills, like paleography, the reading of archæological reports, Orts- or Personennamenkunde, and a working knowledge of a huge number of general primary sources. That may be another difference, come to think of it. I think that the canonical writings in our fields tend to include far more primary sources than secondary sources. But that's another post. Now, we may not have to read all of these languages or acquire all these skills equally well. New Kid, for example, can probably kick my butt at reading unedited legal documents, because almost everything I use has been edited. It's in Latin, and much of it isn't translated, but it's edited. I don't need to read some scribe's handwriting -- although with Carolingian miniscule, at least that's not the most difficult thing in the world! On the other hand, she'll never have to try to trace family relationships through the leading names and name elements! The medievalist's tools are diverse and hard to acquire. I can tell from some of the comments I've seen here and elsewhere that some people think we are using those tools to keep people out. To a certain extent, I guess that's true. But would you hire a carpenter who couldn't use a hammer and saw?

Without the tools of our trade, languages being the most important and basic of those tools, a mediævalist (or Classicist, or Late Antiquarian)** cannot join in the scholarly conversation. I've just glanced over to my collection of library books. For the first time I can remember, the majority of books are in English. That's because I just took back six books in German and because I'm working on a project on women and property, and there is a lot of scholarship in English to weed through, even though it may have very little to do with what was happening in the Lahngau and Grabfeld and Mainzgau in the 9th and 10th centuries. There's one book in French, Sauver son Âme et se Perpétuer. I'm not really looking forward to it because, well, it's in French, which is my fourth-best language. But I need to look at it, because it's part of the conversation. If I ignore what's out there, then my own work will be incomplete and honestly, pretty shoddy -- or at least it won't be able to stand up to close scrutiny.

I'm lucky, in that I have a really good feel for languages. I have to work at them, but I can generally pick up the basics pretty quickly. I also lucked out because my grandfather made me read and speak Spanish as a child (not that I'm all that fluent 40 years later), my counselors made me take two years of French in middle school, and I foundered through two years of high school Latin before I picked it up again my last two years of undergrad, where I took three years of Latin courses and a quarter of Greek in two years. Somewhere in there I took a year of German. Among my friends and colleagues, it's pretty much only the Classics undergrads who have comparable language exposure. Meaningful language requirements at any level seem to have fallen by the wayside in most Anglo-American educational systems (except for the politically-motivated French requirements in parts of Canada). I do know from friends in the UK and Ireland that they often deal with the same issues of under-trained students who wish to pursue postgrad degrees.

I think one of the results of this will be that time to finishing will continue to creep up for people who go into grad programs in Mediæval History -- or those students accepted and/or granted fellowships will be those who already have languages. My guess is that the students who have language skills will be from the high-powered unis or selective Liberal Arts Colleges. I don't like to think what that might mean for demographics. I also don't like to think that our requirements will make others think that we occupy some rarified position -- at least, no more rarified than the people who split atoms or do any number of very specialized things. This doesn't seem to be as much a problem for our Asianist and Islamist colleagues, because, well, what they do is relevant. Somehow, and I realize that none of these thoughts are as well-formed as I'd like, but it was either blog now, or blog much, much later and blog something closer to perfection, I think that that is the problem. When we don't see language as being particularly relevant to our daily lives, we don't see that the fields that require languages are relevant unless they directly connect to politics or economic forces.

Whatever the results, I think that we need to conceive of language requirements (or paleography requirements, etc.) differently. We are used to the gate-keeping/maintaining standards model. What if, instead, we were to see these -- and describe these to others -- not as requirements absent the connection to our work that we know is implicit and absolute, but rather as tools and skills. We cannot do our jobs properly until and unless we acquire them, in the same way that cabinetmaker needs to know the different properties of different types of wood and the kinds of tools (and how to used the tools) to use in their appropriate circumstances.

In terms of those of us who have got through the training and are either on the market or employed, I think there is another battle -- and perhaps another post. I don't know about the rest of you, but my teaching load is detrimental to my getting a lot of scholarly work done during the academic year. This means that I have to come up with strategies (not too many good ones, as it happens) for keeping up my languages. It takes me up to a week of hard work to get to where I feel comfortable in my reading skills again. Mostly, I find myself grabbing dictionaries and actually writing out translations that differ from what I read only in completeness. But the tools seem to rust. Next post -- dealing with rusty tools.

*Apologies to Monty Python
** And yes, I know that we have colleagues in Asian and Islamic (and Eastern European) history who have to learn many of the same types of things to do their work. Although they are in some ways as marginalized as we are, I think that time plays a role here, too. If you are a modern historian, I think that people understand more easily because of the relevance issue I mentioned above.

On Gatekeeping

On Gate-keeping

In the comments to this post, Anastasia pointed out that I was probably engaging in a kind of gate-keeping. I think I was. I've been pondering my own ideas for when I think gate-keeping is good, and when it's bad. Faculty engage in gate-keeping all the time. Grades are a form of gatekeeping. So are hiring committees and T&P committees. Of these, grades are the ones that arguably have the least wiggle room; faculty should be grading almost entirely on the merits of the work and whether it meets the criteria of the assignment. Search committees can be more nebulous -- there's a lot of legitimate room for 'fit', but then there are also discussions of whether candidate A or B is more likely to be a productive scholar ... all kinds of things. T&P committees, so I've heard, can be all over the place. Friends at campuses trying to reinvent themselves often tell me that T&P committees often seem to take great joy in expecting new faculty to meet requirements that far exceed what already-tenured faculty had to meet for their own T&P. Me? I think that it's really important to have standards, but that they have to be applied fairly. If these things are done fairly and transparently, then I think it's not really gate-keeping in the negative sense -- it's trying to maintain standards.

It's when gate-keeping is applied unfairly that I tend to worry. In almost every workplace -- or part of life, for that matter -- we run into people who want to make and enforce rules because they can. The ability to prevent people from doing things -- in fact, to complicate their lives and jobs -- is an expression of their personal worth and power. That's true for the people with some authority as well as the Jobsworths. What surprises me is that often, these are people in support positions. When I worked in support, I got my ego boos by helping people and out of being able to say that I was just doing my job after helping untangle a hopeless crisis. There are definitely people like that out there -- the guy who stayed on the phone with me for two hours after Adelphia accidentally disconnected my internet service (and initially claimed it would take three days to bring back up), talking to managers and getting things fixed was an absolute star.

I've run out of ideas for a snappy conclusion. What are your ideas on gate-keeping? When is it legitimate? When is it just obstructionist?

More Confusion

More confusion -- EndNote version

Can somebody explain to me why one would use Endnote and what might be a better program for what I need? I would like to be able to take all my notes as I'm reading and keep them in my computer. Right now, I use Word and just type in Keyword terms at the end of each note. I've tried Scribe and it's incredibly complicated, even though it seems to duplicate the notecard type of functionality I want. It would be very nice to be able to type in my notes, have them all linked to one bibliographic database, and be able to search for them and put them into my work as I'm writing. Is there such a thing?

RBO Confusion

RBO Confusion

Things that confuse me today:

• Why textbook companies don't just buy into the used textbook business.
  
• Why my campus bookstore refuses to buy back books just because there's a new edition out -- even thought the old edition is still available and I've ordered it.
  
• Why there aren't solar panels on a/c units. Seems to me that the times one is most likely to use a/c are also the times when those solar panels would work best.
  
• Why, if we're trying to conserve energy without hurting the economy, we don't require greener building practices. Unless 'hurting the economy' is some kind of code for, 'people will have to spend more on things and so they'll buy less crap they don't need and then the people who make and sell the crap will be out of work.' Except wouldn't more people be needed to make and sell the things that go into green building? and if we gave incentives to people and companies for green remodeling, then wouldn't that employ people, too?
  

In which I am confused by the world of publishing

In which I am confused by the world of publishing

I made a day trip to Research Library in the Big City yesterday, where I met up with Tiruncula. We talked a lot about jobs and book projects -- I need one, she has a cool one. In fact, hers is especially cool because it's not history, but I understood exactly what she wants to do, and it sounds fascinating and amazingly simple and clear-gut. Plus, I got to say things like, "Have you looked at X?" so I didn't feel like a complete eejit. Anyway, it was fun to get together with someone who is becoming a better friend the longer I know her, and who knows the most amazing restaurants. OMG people, the food! (and she likes anchovies, too, so we ate things with anchovies AND tentacles!!) I ate more than I needed to, because, well, yummy. And a luscious, if a little spendy, Lacrimae Christi which may now be one of my favourite wine types.

What does this have to do with publishing? I'm getting to that. As I was packing up to leave the library, I noticed a book. I didn't have time to read through it, so I grabbed it and added it to my pile for check-out. Possibly too much of the evening was spent boring my dinner companion with the book's OMG!!WTF??? passages. Later, I had a conversation with Cranky Professor about it. It went something like this:

Me: I could have written that book!
Him: No, you really couldn't. You have standards.

What follows illustrates a collection of problems I have with academic standards, my own academic snobbery (or rather, my uncertainty about whether I'm being a snob or defending my turf or whether my complaints are valid), and how random the standards for academic publication sometimes seem. I'm also thinking in terms of gatekeeping -- if I were employed at a research uni, or even a SLAC with a coherent idea of scholarship and support for research, my work would be judged by people who know my field. But I think many campuses with pretensions are happy to have "books" and "articles" (peer-review is in there somewhere, but I think not necessarily the level of peer review one finds elsewhere), and really have no mechanism for judging the quality of the work. And face it, if the campus offers little support for research, should they expect that their faculty can produce publications equal to those of their colleagues who have access to world-class research libraries, low teaching loads, and sabbaticals? Those are just a few of the things that looking through this book brought to the forefront of my panicky, trying-to-work-on-my-portfolio thoughts.

Before I decided to post about this, I did a little digging. The author's most recent (I think) book, Carolingians in Central Europe, Their History, Arts, and Architecture: A Cultural History of Central Europe, 750-900, published by Brill, was the recipient of one of the most thoroughly painful reviews I've ever read (in one of the last three issues of Speculum IIRC -- I'd look it up, but I keep my journals on campus). The upshot of the review was, "don't buy it, and if your library did, it should ask for its money back!" The book I'm looking at is Schutz, Herbert. The Germanic Realms in Pre-Carolingian Central Europe, 400-750. (Peter Lang: 2000). It's part of Lang's "American University Series." It has disheartened me.

I hadn't really looked at the book, except for the title, when I grabbed it. The title itself made me uneasy, but the name of the author made me think that it was perhaps just an awkward translation of something that had first appeared in German. The back cover dispelled any such illusions. The author of the book wrote his PhD thesis on the 20th c. German novelist and poet Hermann Kasack. This leads me to believe that the author is not trained as an historian. You may have noticed, but I'm an Early Medieval (or incredibly Late Antique) historian. My Doktorvater specializes in Late Antique (but back when he got his degree, that was still the Early MA!), and much of his work is rooted in archæology. I am not a philologist, but most of my Latin and German training came from philologists (I wonder if that's why my French is comparatively not as strong). I may not be quite as au fait at recalling on the spur of the moment secondary sources -- or even some primary ones -- as some of my colleagues, but that's why one has books and notes, right?

So. This book. It follows few of the conventions of my field. Secondary sources and primary sources are not separated. The primary sources are almost entirely in translation, either in English or German. There are a couple of sources from the PL, but you wouldn't know it unless you were familiar, as the bibliographic entries point to Migne (after the occasional misspelling, so that 'Medielanensis' is where Ambrose is from). Again, this stuff isn't a problem, if one already knows what the sources should be. The same is true for the Latin within the book. Some of it is just wrong, both in forms used and in translations thereof. (There's also a lot of random capitalization and italicization that just irritates me. ). In general, the book screams, "The author just doesn't get it!" For example:

The Royal line of the Franks -- Merovech, Childeric, Clodovech* -- contrary to that of other peoples who derived their descent from Wodan/Odin, ⁴⁶ derived their ancestry from a territorial maritime divinity in the shape of a bull, a Quinotaur, ⁴⁷ -- the horse harness in Childeric's grave had the golden head of a bull attached to it -- hence the frequency in the Merovingian names of the syllable mer, meaning ocean/sea, used either as prefix or suffix.⁴⁸ (p. 152). [The author continues with a discussion of the changes conversion to Christianity would have brought to a people used to worshipping a localised deity and posits that the Franks might have seen the Christian god as a local god of Belgica Secunda]

I could go on, but I've spent too much time on this. There's a strange discussion of the relation of the words 'duke' and 'Herzog' via Indo-European, with absolutely no reference to the Latin title and/or office of dux (p.304). There are strange insinuations (I cannot find the pages, but will, if asked) that the Franks may have been Arians before conversion and that the Merovingians were trying to recreate the Roman Empire. There's the strange usage of 'Agilulfingians' and 'Arnulfingians'. But basically, what it boils down to is that this book contains nothing new or insightful, is primarily a synthesis of the stories in the narrative sources and relatively current scholarship, and is frequently just misleading and wrong.

Medieval history is hard. It requires training and skills. It takes most of us years to acquire any expertise, and most of the people I know who are experts are still not experts in everything -- they regularly engage in conversations with their colleagues in order to make sure they aren't missing things. It's not that I don't think people can shift fields and gain the expertise necessary to write in those fields, but I think it's very difficult. The people I know who are best at it are those who have become experts in sf/f, but the historians among them tend to take a more historical approach to the literature and avoid Lit Crit. Also, well, sf/f has had connections to medieval scholars for a long time. Having said all that, I think this is a case where a History Channel person thinks he's a Historian, and hasn't had the training. And yet, the book is here. It's tangible. OK, it's published by Lang, but the book was funded by a major grant from the Canadian government. This series of Lang books seems to have helped the author to have gained a contract with Brill. My mad google skilz show that Schutz's books are being used all over the interwebs by people who aren't scholars -- and he does rely on the works of reputable people, although I really do get the feeling (the one an experienced teacher gets when reading student papers) that most of the references to primary sources are gleaned via the scholarly works. I'm not entirely sure what I'm trying to articulate here, because it's really hard to define things that just create a general unease. It just seems to me that this is an example of several systems having been gamed (and I think with the best of intentions -- someone just fell in love with a topic and decided to write about it), and it makes me feel devalued, disillusioned, and very unsure about how much role luck and chutzpah play in this academic life.



⁴⁶ The Venerable Bede, Baedae, Opera Historica, With an English Translation by J.E. King in 2 Volumes, Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, Loeb Classical Library, I, XV (Cambridge, Mass. London 1963), p. 73

⁴⁷ Wood, Kingdoms, p. 37, concerning the supernatural origin of the dynasty. This mysterious origin is only reported in Fredegar. Gregory of Tours does not make reference to this supposed supernatural origin of the dynasty. Either he did not know the legend or he deliberately suppressed it. See Graus, p. 319f.

⁴⁸ Kaiser [Das Römische Erbe und das Merowingerreich(1993)], p.83, in his review of the literature indicates that Gregory of Tours tried to displace the sacred, pagan elements of the Merovingian kingship, in order to bring the achievements of Chlodovech to correspond with Christian ideals of monarchy.



*Schutz announces early on that he uses the forms of names that seem least confusing and most melodious to him -- apparently those are better criteria than English-language convention.*

Memorial Day

Memorial Day

Inspired by Karl Steel at In the Middle

The door it opened slowly,
my father he came in, I was nine years old.
And he stood so tall above me,
his blue eyes they were shining
and his voice was very cold.
He said, "I've had a vision
and you know I'm strong and holy,
I must do what I've been told."
So he started up the mountain,
I was running, he was walking,
and his axe was made of gold.

Well, the trees they got much smaller,
the lake a lady's mirror,
we stopped to drink some wine.
Then he threw the bottle over.
Broke a minute later
and he put his hand on mine.
Thought I saw an eagle
but it might have been a vulture,
I never could decide.
Then my father built an altar,
he looked once behind his shoulder,
he knew I would not hide.

You who build these altars now
to sacrifice these children,
you must not do it anymore.
A scheme is not a vision
and you never have been tempted
by a demon or a god.
You who stand above them now,
your hatchets blunt and bloody,
you were not there before,
when I lay upon a mountain
and my father's hand was trembling
with the beauty of the word.

And if you call me brother now,
forgive me if I inquire,
"Just according to whose plan?"
When it all comes down to dust
I will kill you if I must,
I will help you if I can.
When it all comes down to dust
I will help you if I must,
I will kill you if I can.
And mercy on our uniform,
man of peace or man of war,
the peacock spreads his fan.

The Story of Isaac -- L. Cohen

What do Wikipedia and Mel Gibson have in common?

What do Wikipedians and Mel Gibson have in common?

They think they have a clue about history and really don't care if they get things entirely wrong as long as they agree with their friends that they're right. And that other people believe them.

At least it's so bad that if I don't catch my students plagiarizing it, I can still flunk them for using really, amazingly, pathetically wrong information. Because, yeah, we all know that the Carolingian Empire and the Holy Roman Empire were one and the same. Er ... yeah.

Oh Al

Oh, Al ...

"In the Middle Ages, often the Court Jester was the only guy who could tell the truth without getting his head cut off..."


*headdesk*


By the way, what do we even know about court jesters? I can't think of a single reference to them in any historical source. I mean, there's Lear, and there's the elevation of the Fool at Carnival, but does anyone know when/how this idea (and the whole Queen of Hearts, "off with her head" thing) came into our common (mis)perception of the MA?

Chicken or Egg?

Chicken or Egg

So I'm looking at Stafford's Queens, Concubines and Dowagers to see if there's anything useful for the paper-to-article thing. And she says, "During the sixth century the Merovingian kings extended Frankish control and won great though not always lasting victories over Thuringians, Burgundians, and Bavarians" (p. x)

So here's my question, and it's one that has been floating around in my head since I started my PhD thesis:

The who? This is particularly in reference to the Thuringians. Oh -- let me preface this by saying I haven't yet read any of the (end of) Rome/Barbarian books that have come out in the last year or so, nor Wickham. Sorry -- heavy teaching load and job searches kind of got in the way. But anyway ...The who?

Do we actually know anything about the Thuringians, except that we have a law code and Fredegar and (I think) the Annales Regni Francorum. And some of Boniface's correspondence. At least, that's all I can think of in terms of pre-Carolingian stuff. I assume Stafford is talking about the Basina/Basinus/Chlothilde stuff (also in Gregory -- sorry LDW!), and perhaps Radulf, who is put in as dux. But does anyone know of a anything that ties all of these sources together into the same group of people? Because IIRC, Schlesinger, in Geschichte Thüringens discusses the arguments that the Thuringian duces (or is it just the Würzburger duces?) at the time of Boniface's mission are possibly (probably? -- oh hell, that may be Prinz. I should check that.) the descendants of Radulf, which I suppose makes him an analog for Agilolf in Bavaria.

Why am I rambling about this? To figure out one small point that may or may not make it into this article. It would be nice to know which law obtained in the area I'm studying in the period between Boniface's mission and, say the reigns of Pippin or more likely, Charlemagne. And of course, "this area" is also problematic. Anybody know of good maps for C7, C8, and C9 on what areas were considered parts of Thuringia then? Anyway, I'm looking at women and property in this area, and it would be nice to know whether we modern people are calling it Thuringia because that's where the Thuringians were, or if we're calling the people Thuringians because that's where they live.

And yes, I realise that the real answer is probably that we just don't know and who cares? But it's these little details that keep me from fretting about the rest of my life.

Also, yes, I am very aware of Innes' State and Society. It doesn't answer my questions per se, but I suppose I should just break down and buy a damned copy, since CUP lost LDW's order when he tried to get it for me as a gift.

PS -- If this entry tells you for sure who ADM is IRL and you didn't already know, I'd appreciate your not passing it on. Cheers.

Carnivalesque XXVII

Carnivalesque XXVII is up!

Hi all -- Martin Rundkvist at Aardvarchaeology has posted the latest Ancient/Medieval Carnivalesque. There's some good stuff there. And remember,

is certainly not just for academics. Carnivalesque welcomes 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, and limit nominations to recent posts (in the last 2-3 months, since Carnivalesque alternates between topics monthly).

Potential hosts should be regular bloggers with some knowledge of and interest in pre-modern history (though, again, not necessarily academics). If you are interested in hosting an edition of Carnivalesque, please send an email to carnivalesque AT earlymodernweb DOT org DOT uk, noting whether you are particularly interested in early modern or ancient/medieval, and telling a little about your background and historical interests.

Well, Shoot.

Well, Shoot

The panel I asked for at a big conference got shot down. I'm kinda bummed, because I think it would have been a good one. It was a little weird -- the CFP for pre-modern, especially medieval, was fairly desperate -- I've never actually seen one that said, "hey, we want you all so much that you can give papers you've given at the Zoo and MAA!" Maybe I should have suggested a re-hashed paper panel -- except that most of us can't really get funded to present the same paper twice, and it seems kind of dishonest to just change the name.
So I suggested something else -- a roundtable on the similar challenges medievalists face on different types of campuses (to be fair, they are similar to the challenges faced by Africanists and Asianists -- except that departments large enough to have Africanists and Asianists generally have more support all round, whereas medievalists are often hired as generalists). I think it would have been interesting -- plus it fit in with the call for different types of presentations, rather than the straight paper panels that tend to be the rule. Oh well, live and learn. I just really hope that the medieval panels that got in will be worthwhile, because it's usually damned hard to find something worth seeing there besides the book room.

Another reason to love Joss Whedon

Another Reason to Love Joss Whedon

Via a friend on LJ:

Joss wants to know what is wrong with women.
This is in the context of an honor killing that was filmed and is available via CNN. And an upcoming film about the kidnapping and torture of a young woman. He asks:

What is wrong with women?

I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.


How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn’t buy into it. Women’s inferiority – in fact, their malevolence -- is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.


I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I’m sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy. Biology: women are generally smaller and weaker than men. But they’re also much tougher. Put simply, men are strong enough to overpower a woman and propagate. Women are tough enough to have and nurture children, with or without the aid of a man. Oh, and they’ve also got the equipment to do that, to be part of the life cycle, to create and bond in a way no man ever really will. Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, “If all we do is hunt and gather, let’s make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let’s make childbirth kinda weak and shameful.” It’s a rather silly simplification, but I believe on a mass, unconscious level, it’s entirely true. How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts restrictions on women’s behavior that are practically untenable? That the act of being a free, attractive, self-assertive woman is punishable by torture and death? In the case of this upcoming torture-porn, fictional. In the case of Dua Khalil, mundanely, unthinkably real. And both available for your viewing pleasure.

The whole thing is worth reading. I know, he's pretty much preaching to the choir, if his readers are like mine. And this is pretty much the subtext of BtVS. But it never hurts to remind people. Again.

Sometimes, it's the little things

Sometimes, it's the little things

More random bullets:

• I cleared out half a file cabinet and shredded tons of stuff today. More tomorrow. Then I'll have more room in my home office! (more being a relative term ... I really need to move a ton of stuff into my campus office, rearrange furniture, and buy another bookcase or two)
  
• I got my contract for next year! It's nice to have that security.
  
• I went out with a colleague last night and listened to some other colleagues perform. Much fun, and it was good to be with people who had been at SLAC for a while and know the system
  
• I scrubbed the bathroom floor the old-fashioned way. Swiffers are all well and good, but no mop really does your standard apartment vinyl very well.
  
• I typed up a list of all the articles I have copies of, so that I can check the list before I go looking for them.
  
• I found a bunch of notes for teaching, and realised I have a bunch of notes from my diss that might be relevant to the articles I'm working on, so maybe I should review my notes before re-taking them?

Friday RBOC -- Returning from the 'Zoo edition

Friday RBOC -- Returning from the Zoo edition

• Cat claws are sacrosanct ... please do not trim them
  
• when given a choice between duty (faculty workshops) and something really cool, like a one-of-a-kind international symposium, take the symposium, because most of your colleagues have already left for forn parts and/or the beach
  
• There is still a large pile of crap on my desk at home. It includes three ILL books. I've got about 10 of the damned things due back on 25 May. I really need them for longer. My ILL librarian and my department chair are going to hate me, because my ILL books tend to cost money.
  
• Also in the pile is are the receipts for two conferences. Got to get those forms in today
  
• I bought new running shoes yesterday (we shall not speak of the price) -- I had them fitted at the running shoe store in Dabbaville. Running up and down the mall seems to have loosened my Kalamazoo back, which was all tweaked from walking in heels and sitting for prolonged periods in very uncomfortable seats -- can I just say how much I loved being able to sit in a panel in Fetzer 1005? mmmmm .... comfy!
  
• I'm thinking back on some of the papers I heard. Some were very good and very cool. Others were really derivative and honestly nothing new. I actually re-capped one to LDW, where he said ... "Well, I said that in X...oh, that's so-and-so in Y... everybody knows that!" But then, there was a different paper where I sat there thinking, "I just read this article!" At the end of a long section of the paper, the person said that the author of said article had made great contributions on the subject or some such thing. Er, no. The author pretty much said in print (from conference proceedings from a few years ago) what the presenter said. Attribution is kind of important. Misleading attribution worries me. I'm going to assume it was the format of the rushed conference paper, and not anything deliberate.
  
• OMG People, Please! I know that Danuta Shanzer's guidelines (I'd link, but I can't find them at the new K'zoo site) are a bit scary, but DAMN! Far too many people tried to fit 25-30 minute papers into 20 minutes. The fact that you can read that quickly, doesn't mean you should. There were so many papers, especially those without handouts, where I just found myself tuning out because I couldn't keep up while trying to weigh the paper's ideas.
  
• And speaking of handouts -- bring enough. If you don't, then please do not assume that your audience knows what you are talking about. At least have the decency to check and make sure the handouts are being shared, and make some changes on the fly to let people know what they don't have in front of them. Don't leave big gaps that can only be filled if a person has the handout.
  
• I've been having a great time reading other people's Kazoo posts.
  
• When a senior Lion said he'd like to send me an article he was working on, I didn't expect it to be in French
  
• Also, cat claws may be sacrosanct, but the cats I serve are very forgiving. It's hard to work with a cat on one's lap.