23 October, 2008


  • SSHRC is on the move.
  • The article Greg and I were writing on deafness has been pushed back because the scope of it got too big for us to give it an adequate treatment in the time allotted. But we're going to keep at it.
  • I have to remember my other funding options.


I'm going to post a "Latin Tutor Available" sign in my house. There's a lot of beginners here this year, and I may as well see if I can come to an arrangement. Money is acceptable, but so is food or even trade in kind (any Anglo-Normanists out there?). I also really need to remember to submit my application to teach in the winter term.

As for research, I'm working with chronicles right now, and while I find them interesting, they're not particularly rich in the material I need. One reference here or there. Mostly they're more interested in calling opponents sinners and heretics rather than fools. But I do have two references so far, so maybe I will find more.

I'm not sure how I'm going to pull all this together. I've got my pastoral manuals and a heck of a lot of court cases, a couple chronical refs now, Margery, and Piers Plowman. Somehow this will all pull together into a single coherent thesis? I guess SSHRC is good practice for this.

Meanwhile, I really wish I had time to stop and do some secondary reading. There's a lot going around in the background that I need to sort out. I need to revisit my conceptual books. Time is such a fleeting thing. Perhaps I will beg an indulgence of my supervisors next meeting.

12 October, 2008

Some days you win

Today has been one of those days. The mountain of work aside, I have made three big discoveries today. Two of them basically prove that the high medieval summae confessorum I've been wanting to examine were, in fact, circulating in late medieval England. They were being traded/donated/sold, and William Langland quoted them in his famous Piers Ploughman. Proof enough? Literary enough?

And the other I can't share yet but I saw my first book (someday...) take shape in front of me.

It's been a good day.

I even got a paragraph of SSHRC written.