Logographer

I’ve been distracted with other activities this week, which might explain the scant blog posts. Here are a few things from other blogs to wet your whistle.

• Mark Grimsley’s interest in counterfactual history is on display in his post entitled What If France Had Not Fallen in 1940?
• Dean Dad responds to a reader’s question and provides guidance on teaching a class at a community college in contrast to teaching an upper level class at a university. “[N]othing is too good for the proletariat.”
• Toby Lichtig reviews Tod Wodicka’s novel, Jonathan Cape, which sounds like an odd but interesting book.
• Jonathan thinks there might be something to the claim that modern gadgets and distractions leave us with no time to think. I suppose an intellectual is defined by the propensity to think about thinking.
• Carl Pyrdum at Got Medieval participates in the amusing game of Medieval Wikigroaning. (No, it doesn’t have anything to do with Matt Groening or The Simpsons. Groening doesn’t even sound like groaning.) Maybe I’ll play along later, when I feel like exerting myself.
• And even though it’s summertime and school isn’t in session, Dennis at CAMPVS MAWRTIVS is compelled to delve into historiography, making a few comments about Jacob Burckhardt, a name that reminds me of my mentor, which in turn reminds me that summertime is nearly over and I really should be thinking about my thesis more often, if not about historiography per se.

That’s it for now.

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The latest ancient-medieval carnivalesque is up, courtesy of Gillian Polack.

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In another sign that medievalism sells, CBS just signed a multimillion-dollar contract for a new “costume drama” set in the Middle Ages, outbidding NBC and Fox for the show.

The broadcast networks went medieval over “The Kingdom,” a Middle Ages drama set in Europe’s world of castles, kings and typhoid fever.

That doesn’t sound like the period I’m studying, unless there was a vase-of-Soissons-moment in the negotiations.

Written by “Runaway” creator Chad Hodge, “Kingdom” is described as a medieval “Entourage.” It revolves around four guys, one of whom is crowned king and reluctantly takes the throne despite preferring drinking and sex to procession and war.

I don’t know anything about “Runaway,” but “Entourage” is one of our favorite shows at Castle Logographer. It’s unclear from the article whether “Kingdom” is going to be a comedy, though. And there’s no mention of when it will air. At any rate, I’ll tell my TiVo to watch for it.

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It’s summertime, and for some people that means it’s time for the local Renaissance Faire, which usually contains more medieval elements that renaissance ones, as John Gravois observes in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. Gravois interviewed Prof. Richard Nokes for the article, who has more observations on the link between academic medieval studies and what he calls popular medievalism.

I have only been to one Renaissance Faire, probably fifteen years ago, held somewhere north of the Golden Gate in Marin County. I enjoyed it. Although I wasn’t studying medieval history at the time, it dovetailed with my interest in Olde Things. I especially enjoyed the demonstrations of blacksmithing and other forms of manual labor, and had a blast watching the horses in a joust. (A year later, I was taking dressage lessons in Los Altos Hills, which I kept up for about two or three years until switching to the cheaper mountain bike.)

As the term implies, popular medievalism shows that medieval topics survive outside of academia. Should this translate into increased funding for medieval studies? It could lead to that conclusion and is one that Prof. Nokes himself takes. In practice, it hasn’t worked out that way. Our former history department chair, now dean of the college, once remarked, perhaps jokingly, that it was strange to see so many students in Silicon Valley, the center of technology, enrolled in our undergraduate medieval history survey. I couldn’t (and can’t) understand that viewpoint.

Some people gravitate to medieval studies, at least initially, because they have a romantic idea of the past, especially in contrast to the world of computers and office cubicles, a world that seems to alternate between dog-eat-dog competition (but usually less violent than that of Clovis’s world) and bland conformity. Once immersed in medieval studies, it becomes apparent that human nature hasn’t changed much, even if materially much has changed in the last 1500 years. I think it was John Lewis Gaddis who said, in The Landscape of History, that one reason to study history is to escape one’s own provincial and self-centered views of the world, to connect one’s perspectives with the experiences of humanity at large, to grow up.

But however it ends, the beginning of medieval studies for some people involves a trip to a Renaissance Faire, or immersion into the world of Dungeons-and-Dragons, or involvement with the Society for Creative Anachronism. Others might nurture their love of things past with a visit to northwestern Switzerland, where John Howe, artist on the Lord of the Rings films, brings Middle-Earth to life for the Saint-Ursanne La Fantastique festival. You might even decide to become a medieval arms fabricator with the construction of a trebuchet. In any case, it seems clear that the middle ages aren’t dead yet.

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Here are a few things that have caught my attention and entertained me on the web recently.

• The funniest thing I’ve read in the last few days has to be Prof. Richard Nokes’s commentary on a 1200-year-old Viking turd. No, really!
• Continuing the story of the impending closure of Antioch College, which I mentioned a few days ago, two posts caught my attention: One on the lessons for college philanthropy from the Antioch debacle (are there any, really?), and another from Inside Higher Ed, which is itself interesting because of all of the comments attached to it.
• In the cold, icy realm of economics, that dismal science, Prof. George Borjas looks at the flip-side of immigration’s contribution to US GDP and attempts to calculate the impact of immigration on US wages.
• Prof. Mark Grimsley of Ohio State asks whether there’s any support for the claim that military history is a discipline strictly for conservatives.

There you have it. Scatological history, immigration, war, politics, and academic gossip all in one fell swoop.

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A few days ago I said that I enjoy reading Jeff Sypeck, and his post comparing Tony Soprano to Charlemagne gives me another reminder to check Quid plura regularly. I especially like the film ideas at the end of the post and in the comments section. Very funny!

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Steve Muhlberger found a fascinating video on YouTube which animates the Bayeux Tapestry, the famous embroidery commemorating the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. With a few introductory comments for students in his class on Medieval England, Steve encourages readers to compare the Bayeux Tapestry to the modern graphic novel. Intriguing exercises like this help make the past seem less remote and more lively.

Update June 1st: More about this at Got Medieval.

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Yesterday I received a copy of Michael Drout’s Beowulf Aloud, a 3-CD set of his dramatic reading of the epic poem in its original language. I added the whole thing to my iTunes/iPod collection this morning, and hope to have some time to listen to it this weekend.

This morning I sampled the lecture and a few tracks of the poem. Although I can’t speak or read Anglo-Saxon, I’ve dabbled in it from time to time and have tried to pick up some sense of it by reading the poem itself. After listening to Beowulf in Old English for even just a few minutes, I’ve gotten some feeling for the original rhyme and rhythm, which even the best translations can’t recreate completely. Maybe I’ll post a few more comments on Beowulf Aloud after I’ve heard the whole thing.

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Got Medieval’s Bush v. Gore v. the Middle Ages post is not only entertaining (as usual) but relevant. (Isn’t that the historian’s Holy Grail?) The post gets double points from me for mentioning Spain in several contexts, and for raising questions of group identity in current events.

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I just noticed Carnivalesque IX: The past is back to haunt you. It’s a good compendium of ancient and medieval topics recently posted at a bunch of blogs, and includes a link to a Logographer post to boot. (What a nice surprise.)

P.S. While there, try the crossword puzzle.

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