• 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.

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.

Work, Money, Stuff

The bosses have heard my cry and are thinking they can max out my allowed work hours for me. It's not going to fund me what I need, but the extra £55/week will go a long way toward making life generally livable.

Doing the math, if I can stick to my budget for personal things, even if I increase it 5 pounds from the extra shift (not always easy, but mostly possible), I can put aside a fair amount of money each week. Some of it can be tagged for school expenses, like paper, research fees, photocopying, etc.

You know, it could be worse. I'm not on a ramen diet, although I do take advantage of any free food to be had. It's kind of eerie how I feel like I'm living a PhD Comic. A small amount of money can buy a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables, and as long as I keep the staples on hand (flour, noodles, rice, potatoes, oils) I can make a lot of great stuff. (The free stuff I get from work occasionally is awesome, too.) I do kind of miss orange juice, though, so I'm-a get some concentrate this week.

Aaaand, this post has turned into a ramble. Enough of that. I am going to go write some letters and relax for a bit, because my brain is fried after a full Saturday shift.

Cheers!

Grad School Defined

From the lovely Mel:

"The change from undergraduate course work to graduate course work is somewhat of a shock to the system, like someone's doused me with a bucket of cold water. Cold water filled with BOOKS and FISTS."

One Man, One Cup: the transgressive comedy of Till Eulenspiegel

This is just to show that there is nothing new under the sun.

In the early sixteenth century, the tales of Till Eulenspiegel were published. Till, a jester of anarchic and trickster bent, delighted in transgressive comedy and basically anything that would tweak powerful people's noses. Rather like Heath Ledger's joker, minus the malice.

In one of the tales, Eulenspiegel is in a jest-off competition with another jester. Desperate to win, and having been matched on every joke and trick thus far, he squats on the floor, defecates, and eats half with a spoon. He invites his rival to enjoy the other half, and then to do the same. His rival declines and Till wins.

That such a motif is present in literature from so long ago and is still so morbidly fascinating today*... well, I leave you to draw your own conclusions as to what that says about humanity in general.


* No, I have not seen it, nor do I want to. I don't know anyone who HAS, yet everyone has heard of the meme somewhere. I cannot explain its apparent "popularity."

Fun Mit Acronyms!

Well, I am now set to participate in the SSDMA* roundtable session and in the session "God's Cripples, Crazies, and Imbeciles" at the ICMS** It's good to have that very tiny chunk of org done.

Meanwhile, head for the hills, it's SSHRC*** time again! My supervisors will be writing me references, and it's nice that I will be able to draft my proposal based on some solid research and specific primary sources.

Whew.


* The Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages, for those who are just tuning in.
** International Congress on Medieval Studies, more commonly referred to as "K'zoo."
*** The Social Sciences and the Humanities Research Council, a major funding body for Canadian academics.

Taking off at a run

Have you ever looked at the CV of an established professor and wondered how the heck they manage to accumulate so many speaking and publishing credits?

I'm learning. It's not about being particularly competent. It's about the nature of deadlines and the human condition.

May seems awfully far away right now. It's months and months away! So I fool myself into thinking that's loads of time to prepare a full 20 minute paper and a 10 minute roundtable talk. If by this point you are laughing hysterically, then you know what I mean.

Likewise with the book review I agreed to do in May. And the article I committed to in July. And now it's September, and the reason you don't hear from me much is my frantic scramble to make good on all my promises. It'll happen again in May, I'm sure.

And now, I'm off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of... well, he's not a wizard and he's not particularly special and he's been dead centuries but he wrote some cool stuff about deafness that I'll get back to you on.

Language, Deafness, and Humanity

When we read medieval discussions on deafness, it's easy to judge. We are so used to knowing that deaf people are intelligent, rational human beings. We ask How could they have been so prejudiced?! How could they not realise people who can't hear are still people?!

Now imagine you're in a shop. In walks a tiny little Chinese woman (or a Filipino man, or a pair of Argentinian teenagers) and in broken English she asks you how much an item costs. You have a difficult time getting the answer through to her, and then she asks if you can hold it for her - but all you hear is accent and mumble. Your routine of ringing up items and moving the line along is broken. Be honest - what goes through your head?

If you're normal, you probably get kind of frustrated. And you wonder why she doesn't learn better English. You wish she'd just go away so you can handle the next customer. This person clearly wants something, but you have no idea what. You forget that back home, she was a trauma surgeon. How could she be, when she can't even make herself clear in a shop?

We all do it. All of us. It's a rare person who can endure a frustrating five minutes of garbled non-communication and at the end still have no pre-conceptions of the other person at all. Intellectually you know that the other person is a normal human being,* but the failure to communicate is so limiting that you forget.

Now imagine someone who cannot speak at all. Someone who has never spoken, and cannot hear you. Communication is made by awkward, goofy body language. To the best of your knowledge, no such person has ever learned language of any kind.

We take communication for granted these days. We have so many gadgets and resources, and we're used to the concept of sign language, at the least. Everyone can read and write, in a pinch. It's easy to forget the time when we had none of these modes of communication.


* And that if the situation was reversed, you'd look a right doofus, too. Probably worse.

The Move

Well, that was easy. Welcome to the new version, folks. I'm going to be updating some of the other stuff in the next little while, too.

Cheers!

Terminology

The most recent written work I've done (for a supervision) has left me with some odd thoughts.

I feel that in some way, we're re-writing the dictionary here. First, in the most simplistic way, those of us working on medieval disability are discovering nuances and usages that the dictionaries of medieval Latin never bothered specifying.*

Secondly, one of the more important mental adjustments we have to make is moving away from modern preconceptions and definitions. That means leaving behind all speculations that Leonardo da Vinci was autistic, and similar speculation, because it is simply not relevant, and makes it difficult to explore the actual medieval issues. When we label Leonardo as "autistic," we put him in a box alongside all the baggage that we carry with the diagnosis today. We automatically begin seeing his life in that lens, nevermind how he experienced his life, or how his contemporaries viewed him.

But that leaves a vacuum of terminology. What do we call people who displayed an abnormal mentality to their contemporaries? I have moved away from "fools," because that seems to be more of a literary/artistic term. More commonly, I come across "idiot" or "imbecile," idiota or imbecillens, but the problem is that those words carry modern-day baggage as well. A hundred years ago (even 50 years ago) they carried clinical connotations before moving into the common speech of pejorative. I have begun using them, generally as a strict translation of what's on my page.

These words have become so taboo in scholarship of disability, though. They have become the disability studies equivalent of "the N-word." (Fortunately I do not have to use the word "retard," because that might get too awkward, even for me.) It is a strange feeling, transgressing these lines we've drawn. Yet I see no other way to allow the texts to speak for themselves. It is easier among fellow medieval scholars, who understand the methodology we are stuck with, but quite tricky when facing modern disability scholars.

Sometimes there is a thrill in the transgression, in throwing a taboo word at someone, but sometimes it just feels weird.




* There is a LOT more to the word lunaticus than simply "madman," for example. Note the luna stem...

New URL

In roughly a week, on Friday, this blog will be moving to http://debilitasmentis.blogspot.com

I'll leave the link up here for a while, but I suggest updating your links.

News of Import

This is just to let all my readers know that this blog will be moving sometime in the near future. I.e., as soon as I get around to figuring out the process. I'll give you a bit of warning about the shift, and then I'm going to wipe this URL of the content and move it entirely to the new one. This is for some personal privacy/security reasons, and I'm sorry for the hassle but I feel it's necessary.

Updates to follow.

An Assortment of Odds and Ends

I think there's something of a shit-disturber in me. It's just a polite shit-disturber. I love the thought of publishing something that could get people all in a tizzy. I simply adore the fact that people have built a tenuous house of cards to house the history of disability in the Middle Ages, and we are taking it gingerly apart, card by card. Eventually someone will give a lecture or publish a paper and the whole thing will come tumbling down. And people will be aghast at what we've done.

Then - then - we can start building a new house in earnest. Those of us in the little niche understand each other, but until we can definitively enact a paradigm shift we will just be that group of weirdos in the corner.

We'll know the house is tumbling when people outside the community start getting disturbed by what we write. We'll know the cards are all on the floor when people stop asking us "Why bother?"

But I think that's enough of that particular metaphor. I just love the challenge. I love seeing it happen, helping make it happen.

The library at York has been helpful with this, especially the Minster Old Library (pre-1800 books). I'm surprised anew each time I go looking for an obscure fifteenth century text and it pops up in the catalogue system. I just wish I could get some photocopies or even digital pics. But the spines are sometimes delicate and the photos mean licencing issues, so I look forward to many days of transcribing. (One of my current projects has 11 folios dedicated to the topic! ELEVEN!)

In unrelated news, I booked my Christmas flights today. I found a very good price and good dates, and you just can't beat that!

I really am lucky

You know how people are always telling you to make sure you get a job you love? "Find something you love and then find someone to pay you to do it" is the best elucidation of the concept I've ever heard.

Well you know what? I do. I am head-over-heels in love with what I do. I can barely think of anything that excites me more. Here I am, making discoveries, thinking things no one ever has before, seeing texts history has just passed over... By pure chance (or perhaps divine providence, I am in the incredible position of being on the front edge of a whole new field of medieval studies. It's wide open spaces, baby.

On the professional activities front, I am in-process for actually publishing some stuff. Nothing is certain yet (except for the book review which I really ought to get my rear in gear about), but it's a good feeling. The pressure to publish, even when you're still a student, is intense. One item is a revision of the Margery Kempe paper I gave at the York-Norwich conference, and the other is shaping up to be a killer article for the Journal of Fifteenth Century Studies. I can't say more about it right now, so you will just have to take my word for it. But really, it's awesome. Greg and I have been geeking out about it for the past couple days, which is what spurred this post initially.

And while we're at it, I've gotten my first submission for my k'zoo 2009 session, which is cool. I should write something brief up as well, for form's sake. And also so that I know what I plan to do.

And that's about the state of the nation at the moment.

WOOHOO

Today: good supervision! Very good!

I made good points, I had LOTS of material. More than they expected, it seems (thank you!).

Also, I had a brainwave regarding the records, hospitals, care, and silence. I'm going to London today for a couple days, so remind me to share when I get back, Greg. Also, I was informed that there's an MA student here doing a thesis on idiots in the Patent Rolls. It's like pulling teeth, sometimes.

Have a good couple days!

It's Occurs to Me...

... that it's been a while since I did a "crazy britons" post.

Dill pickles, aka "gherkins."

Under no circumstances should there be sugar added to them. Ever. It is an offence against picklekind.

Ahem. These Britons are crazy.

K'zoo 2009

It seems that I'll be going, since I'm co-organising a session. It's titled "God's Cripples, Crazies, and Imbeciles: New Dimensions of Religious Disability." Tell your friends.

Actually, if your friends study medieval disability and religion comes into it somewhere at all, please DO tell them. I'm still a-lookin' for abstracts.

What's Been Happening

In short form, "artistic differences" with my advisors. A large part of this is due to my own stubbornness, I admit. I have such a disinterest in the literary facet of things that is York's speciality (if you like Chaucer, this is a good place for you) that the dual-discipline gig here is rough on me. And yet, I don't really have the training for archaeology or art history, either. And I'm not "trained as a historian," so single-discipline is out.

However, it does appear that we have reached a compromise. I have been digging through a mountain of legal records for the past while (a workload drastically reduced by the kindness of my Colleague). I've also been doing a bit of reading into jurisdiction disputes - the Church and the State were constantly squabbling over who had jurisdiction.* The question of wills and testamentaries is an odd one - they appear in both sets of records. But I digress.

My attendance at the Leeds IMC was not unprofitable, as I scored a copy of The Sign Languages of Poverty and a CD-ROM version of The Parliament Rolls of England (fully searchable in BOTH official languages**), as well as attending a certain reception, wherein I found a reference to senile priests in a display volume and got to chat with a some very nice and informative people. Also, the coffee service is better at Leeds than Kalamazoo.

My digital camera has become my new research tool in the world of non-lending libraries. Naturally, I do not subject rare and delicate books to the camera, but for hardy year-2000 hardcovers? No guilt. It's cheaper than photocopying, if you have a decent hand.

I look up at my bookshelf, and I begin to understand where the professors get the huge shelves and shelves of books that fill their offices. Slow, gradual accumulation. It's neat, too. I am developing a rather good library of the history of foolishness and insanity.*** It's neat. I'm becoming my own library.

Oh, other good news! The Disease, Disability, and Medicine in the Middle Ages conference was a winner! It was simply fantastic. There were so many perspectives and subjects! I can't believe that anyone could ever say "Oh, there's nothing to say there." There is SUCH a glut of things to talk about in the field. The paper that was the most valuable in terms of my own research was "Bones of Contention: Some issues surrounding the use of human remains in the study of disease and disability," presented by postgrads L. Craig and K. Hemer. It reminded me (Oh how did I manage to forget??) that burial is a religious practice. Also, it was an excellent example of palaeopathology put to good use. P. Mitchell's paper, "Gastrointestinal Disease in the Crusades," made me glad all over again that I've gone vegetarian. Nothing spoils my appetite for meat like the thought of intestinal parasites. T. Jones' paper on distant-travel warefare and the limitations unfamiliar water and climate would have imposed on armies was extremely interesting. Really, all the papers that were presented were great.

I also connected with some great people. I got to meet Irina Metzler, who is GREAT conversation, and fun as well as brilliant. The grad student population was well represented, and it seems there may be another medieval disability PhD at York in the relatively near future (WOOT). I had coffee with a fascinating scholar from Oxford (he also taught in Canada!) after the conference officially ended. All in all, it could scarcely have been a cooler conference.

Plus, I had Turkish Delight ice cream. It's exactly as awesome as it sounds. (I had lavendar ice cream yesterday, and it was equally divine.)

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have a date with the Parliament Rolls of Medieval England and a glass of sloe gin and tonic.



* CSI: Canterbury, anyone?
** You know you're Canadian when...
*** Except I don't have a copy of Foucault. So sue me.

I ATE'NT DEAD

Really.

The past little while has been extremely busy and extremely confusing and worrisome, and I haven't felt like posting. Limbo-posting always feels like a bad idea.

Fortunately, I think I've got things sorted out. Good things are happening, good books are being read, good people are being met, and good conferences are being attended.

I promise I will update soon.

De amicitia

One of the papers at the York-Norwich conference was on Friendship. Now, that person would have to be the one to tell you all the theory and texts behind it, but I just need to say that a friend is someone who will go dig through their academic library to find you some obscure article or resource you don't yourself have. And then will take pictures of it or scan it, and send it to you.

There's lots of other ways to define friendship, all totally valid. But once someone has done that for you, there's no denying.

A friend also encourages you when you're down, helps you clarify your thoughts, critiques drafts, suggests books, and tells you not to give up.

I have fabulous friends. Thanks, guys.