Metablog XI: link clear-out

As is now normal, alas, I have to apologise for the gap in posting; there have been exam marks to finalise and then, heavens help me, I actually took some time off to do non-medieval things. But now I am back and I’m trying to work towards the point where I’m not just up to date with my own stuff but also with at least some other people’s. That’s still a long way off but as a first effort I have taken a long haul through the links in my sidebar, taking out those that no longer existed or are inactive, updating those that had moved and fixing some typos in what survived. Now, everything I’m linking to should be some kind of relevant and active.

There’s room in such an exercise for reflection, of course. It’s noticeable, for example, that most of what I had to prune was in the Resources section; I had to take out far fewer blogs even though my criteria for them are more stringent (viz., they have to have medieval content less than a quarter old on the front page). It seems that a one-person operation with commercial hosting is more practical to maintain than a static institutional website, who knew? Well, we all knew it probably, but it shouldn’t really be that way should it? Digital continuity is for some reason something the Academy can’t manage as well as WordPress. Then again, it may be the one-person thing. When it can be someone else’s fault if something isn’t done, it’s easier for everyone to ignore it maybe? Certainly, group blogs seemed to have survived less well than single-author ones, though obviously this is not real statistics given it’s a selective sample of a tiny size.

A conceptualisation of the blogosphere by analogy to the Earth’s atmosphere, located and explained at Perishable Press (linked through)

Then there’s nostalgia (which is, as we know, not what it used to be). It’s not just me that’s had trouble keeping up with updating; some of the most venerable medievalist blogs, the ones who were an encouragement to me that other people did this thing when I was starting and who have been written about as bloggers, are now silent or dormant. In some cases there were real, sometimes fairly awful reasons; in some cases like mine it’s just acute time shortage; but I guess that it’s also that for a lot of now-silent bloggers online interaction has moved, to Facebook or Twitter. I don’t use those (because as Stuart Airlie once insightfully told me, it’s all about control) but no less a figure than Geoffrey Chaucer shows how this can happen. It’s not that blogs are dead, despite worries to that effect for many years now. There are also several fairly new blogs on the roll, but they are more noticeably academic publicity operations and less anonymised relations of the life academic than was once the case. The medium continues, but it’s now being used for different things, indeed roughly the things I set out to use it for when I started, although I slipped towards the middle of that continuum fairly rapidly. I doubt I started the trend, I think it was the pressure for impact and relevance that did that, but it is still noticeable. There’s still masses to keep up with, of course, and as yet I can’t, but I do hope to again some day. Now, at least the list of what I can’t keep up with is up to date again…

Collecting from Cliopatria

Screenshot of the History News Network magazine website

Long-term readers may know that I used to be a contributor to a group blog at the Humanities News Network site, which was called Cliopatria. Cliopatria was kind of a lead singer and his backing band; Ralph Luker, the editor, did most of the posting and various other people chimed in every now and then, and from 2009 to the blog’s closure in 2012 I was one of those people. I always found Cliopatria a difficult audience to pitch for; I had been asked to contribute as a medievalist, but despite my efforts and those of the two East Asian studies people also contributing the bulk of both posting and commenting was modern-US-centric. I therefore wound up focusing my activity there either on things about scholarship on the Middle Ages I thought would interest other fields or, and here I had company, on the state of the Academy. Some of that material also appeared here, and I generally mentioned here when I’d got something up there, but I did try and make sure that I was writing distinctly for each blog.

Despite that, in general my posts went uncommented and in fact, it was then usual for me to get more comments and feedback here than anyone ever got on Cliopatria, so I posted there only rarely. Then, somewhere in 2011 I think, HNN had a redesign that changed their stylesheet and effectively wrecked anything that anyone had previously done with HTML tags; quotations ceased to be distinguishable from paragraph text, for example, and hyperlinked text appeared three point sizes smaller than that around it. Much of my existing content now looked stupid or wrong and it was hard to work in the new template; links inside the blog stopped working and posting, not just mine but everybody’s but Ralph’s, dropped right off. It struggled on a little longer and then Ralph finally closed the blog in early 2012. It remains readable, but I learn in writing this that Ralph himself died in August 2015, which I am saddened by. May he rest easily.

Since then, anyway, I’ve occasionally had reason to go back to my Cliopatria posts for something, and they are really hard to find. The site has been redesigned again since Cliopatria closed and things now look better, though not as good as they did before the first redesign; but the links to individual authors’ works have gone, as have all the comments, and its internal search is lousy. My name doesn’t appear over all my posts, and neither my own list of links or Google can bring back everything I wrote there. So for some time I’ve been meaning to put together a list of my posts, for my own reference as much as anything, and this is that list. In compiling it, I’ve discovered quite a number of things I had completely forgotten writing, and I fear that there may still be more I haven’t found. What I have, I’ve broken down by categories and arranged by date within them, and if you wanted to go and read any of them that would be lovely, though I’ve also indicated where they also appear here at A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe because those are easier reading still. When it drops off the front page I’ll set this post up as its own page. In the meantime, this is what I did for Cliopatria.

Actual Research Posts

These were generally poorly-judged for Cliopatria and usually also appeared here. After a while I stopped doing them except out of guilt at having not posted for ages.

• “Words That All Mean the Same Thing (in Medieval Spanish Slave-Owning)”, on slaves versus serfs in my documents and those of others, first ever post to Cliopatria and way way too long for their usual traffic
• “Three Sorts of Priest, Part 1: evidence for priests and their books on the tenth-century Spanish March”, 15 April 2009, first of a three-part series showcasing my thinking about the early medieval priesthood in my area of study and how we can know about it, cross-posted from here
• “Three Sorts of Priest, Part 2: the lost mother churches of St Petere”, 28 April 2009, second part of the same series, cross-posted from here
• “Three Sorts of Priest, Part 3: important men, so long as no-one’s looking”>, 1 May 2009, the third and last, cross-posted from here
• “Hugely Important Archæological Technique Not Quite So Important Once Actually Published”, 31 May 2009, on rehydroxilation dating of ceramics and how badly it was publicised, worth a look still
• “Interdisciplinary Conversation in Several Directions”, 15 June 2009, a combination review of two seminar presentations on hardly-medieval or non-medieval subjects used to reflect on how interdisciplinary study can best be done, at a point when I was still feeling my way round such ideas; a short version also appeared here
• “Doublepoints (Peasants, Ghosts and Memory)”, 31 July 2009, reflections provoked by Simon Doubleday’s chapter in Thomas Bisson’s Festschrift, not my worst writing
• “Now *This* is Interdisciplinary, if You Want (a Testimonial)”, 21 August 2009, an enthusiastic write-up (too enthusiastic) of the work at Harvard then building into the Science of the Human Past initiative, also posted here
• “‘All the Gold I Could Eat’: Staffordshire Hoard of Anglo-Saxon Weapon Fittings”, 27 September 2009, disputed by Guy Halsall even, yet, already, and a short version here
• “From the Sources: your actual medieval simony”, 30 November 2009, a post from here I thought played close enough to some clichés to be worth trying over there
• “From the Sources II: Sant Joan de les Abadesses and the men of Gombrèn”, 7 December 2009, another failed attempt to get some interest over there in something I’d ordinarily have kept for here
• “Eadgyth After Ealle”, 8 July 2010, a report on the identification using Science! of the body of an Anglo-Saxon princess at Magdeburg Cathedral, somehow never posted here
• “Improbable Arguments in Ninth-Century Girona”, 11 October 2011, another post from here duplicated on Cliopatria because of a long silence

Medievalism in the Modern World

A long-term strand of my blogging, this, but all the more important where medievalists would not normally tread but modernists are still reading it. These are probably the posts I’m proudest of writing at Cliopatria, I think they were useful and good publicity for why having experts on this stuff is sometimes helpful.

• “Fluffy Vikings in the UK Newspapers”, 31 March 2009, a report on press coverage of a conference I couldn’t go to, cross-posted here
• “Darn Climate Sceptics! Get Out of My Field!”, 8 January 2010, intemperate (though I stand by the argument), upset people, and rapidly tempered as a result here
• “Just One Long Ordeal?”, 15 February 2010, arguing with an article by Peter Leeson applying game theory to trial by ordeal, still a quite good example of me in take-down mode if I do say so myself
• “Lost in Translation, or, Inside Higher Ed Needs ‘une durée critique plus longue'”, 3 June 2010, arguing with a review of a book saying that “re-commemorating an individual’s life by moving his remains is quintessentially modern” on obvious grounds
• “Cordoba: 1010, in the 20:20 of hindsight”, 22 September 2010, on the absurd claims made by Newt Gingrich among others about the then-proposed Cordoba Centre in New York City, possibly the best thing I did for Cliopatria
• “Coalition Government and the Norman Conquest of England”, 3 January 2011, probably belongs in the below more than this category but it is medieval history used to make a modern point, and I’m less sorry about it than I am most of the below…
• “Is Neo-Medieval the New Medieval?”, 4 March 2011, a response to an intelligent and provocative essay by Parag Khanna likening the modern USA to the later Byzantine Empire
• “Of Monks, Canons and New Toilets”, 29 April 2011, a short wry comment on building works at Winchester cathedral which I immediately cross-posted here because that was when HNN’s first redesign happened and my post there didn’t actually appear on the blog for a month or so

The State of the Academy

I’m much less sure about these posts, as a rule. In particular, they mostly come from the point when the Conservative Party under David Cameron was just beginning to muck about with UK higher education funding; a lot of people were self-righteously angry and it was easy to get on that bandwagon without necessarily thinking too hard. After all, the government was directing baton charges against schoolchildren protesting about tuition fees; if you weren’t angry, you arguably weren’t paying attention. Also, though, for much of my time on Cliopatria I was at Oxford, which the more I look back on it (or read my leftover issues of The Oxford Magazine) looks like a bubble of small-c conservative privilege I wasn’t then fully able to see out of. The people writing in the Magazine clearly don’t represent their colleagues very widely—Oxford has not gone private, banned tourists from the Bodleian Library, legislated to remove authority from its own Council or cut back the university administration, or any of the other things for which they regularly campaigned, for a start—but Oxford also doesn’t represent the rest of UK HE very well, and I honestly just didn’t realise how true that was till I got out. So these posts come from an odd, and rather blinkered, place, and occasionally I got pulled up for that. Still, there are some good rants there and a few things I’d still stand by.

• “When Medievalists Go Bad, Hard Times Edition”, 12 February 2009, on Richard Hodges’s appointment to the directorship of the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology and his immediate cutting of 18 research jobs
• “Vocational Ph. D. Programs”, 28 February 2009, a shortened version of this post here
• “Hayden White, Move Over”, 30 March 2009, a rant I now sort of regret about how postmodernism in textual criticism isn’t new or very useful, still worth it for foregrounding the work of Carl Lotus Becker but otherwise naïf and makes me cringe, though the subsequent argument with the people at In The Medieval Middle was well worth all the pain of self-realisation
• “‘Ladies and Gentlemen, this is a protest song…'”, 24 April 2009, on student protests and the violence worldwide used to suppress them; still gets me cross, so probably OK
• “Labcoats and Tweed Jackets”, 8 June 2009, a musing prompted by the anniversary of C. P. Snow’s essay “The Two Cultures”, still OK
• “Know Ye Not that We Shall Judge Politicians?”, 5 January 2010, on what people want of historians as opposed to what we’re funded for, as applied to climate politics; half-baked but not dreadful I suppose
• “The Terrible Situation of Kings College London”, 12 February 2010, on the end of palæography and other cuts at KCL, also posted here
• “History Argues Against Cuts in Academia (Argue Academic Historians)”, 8 April 2010, a response to some advocacy by the History and Policy group, a body about which I was then and still am very dubious
• “Why Should History Have To Engage the Public, Asks Richard Overy”, 14 June 2010, commentary on a learned defence of a learned sort of history based on questions not answers; this was quite a good post, I think, and it was recognised as such by being syndicated on HNN’s main page as “Should Historians Have to Engage the Public?” on 4 July 2010 here
• “Coalition Government and the Norman Conquest of England”, 3 January 2011: see above for notes
• “A Request for your Signatures, or, After the Protest a Petition”, 13 January 2011, asking for help with a petition I’d seen protesting about the suppression of free speech in the Academy, crossposted here; it all looks a bit exaggerated now but I’m glad I stood up
• “UK HE Suicide Pact: Cambridge first”, 26 February 2011, on Cambridge’s raising of tuition fees, definitely from inside the Oxford bubble for all that some points hold good
• “That Fabled UK Perspective”, 23 March 2011, a short and light-hearted disambiguation of England and the United Kingdom that perhaps no-one needed
• “Against Marketization Becoming Marketisation”, 30 May 2011, just awful really, sorry
• “A Vote of No Confidence”, 2 July 2011, on Oxford’s expressive but rather self-gratulatory democratically thumbed nose to the then-Minister for Higher Education, David Willetts; fairly awful, sorry
• “The Correct Target for the Humanities Survivalist”, 17 July 2011, also pretty dire
• “‘They Are Trying To Rob Us of Our Right To Communicate'”, 3 February 2012, a dark and paranoid musing about the agenda if any of the UK government’s education policy, probably still true
• “A Historian’s Place in (Current) Politics”, 13 February 2012, an equally depressing reprise of my old argument that to put history to use is to misuse it, not something I still hold to this degree, and my final post there before Cliopatria‘s quite sudden close.

Entrevista a mi en Català

The seminar reports are catching up but reports on my other activity seem still to be mired in busy busy November 2014. At the very end of that month, I had the unusual honour of being interviewed for a Catalan history news website, a sort of recognition I’m very flattered to receive although I wish I could have given them a better photograph. Should you be interested, it’s here:

• http://www.elprincipat.cat/entrevista-jonathan-jarrett-professor-britanic-expert-en-el-comtats-catalans-del-segle-x/

I should probably post the English, shouldn’t I? But I am writing this on a train to Birmingham to x-ray more coins and time and wi-fi are both scant, so I’ll wait to see if anyone wants it. Meanwhile, speaking of Birmingham, even while posting was sparse here I was still cropping up in other places on the Internet, not least the blog of the Centre for the Study of the Middle Ages, as follows:

• https://cesmabirmingham.wordpress.com/2015/03/26/inheriting-rome-the-imperial-legacy-in-coinage-and-culture/, on my little exhibition at the Barber (extended till March, so you still have time if you haven’t seen it…)
• https://cesmabirmingham.wordpress.com/2015/06/24/down-the-rabbit-hole-of-tenth-century-church-history/, an introduction to my now-infamous Manresa project
• and I have one more still somewhere in the pipeline, which I’m waiting for before I write the other two I still owe them (oops).

And then lastly, though I will write properly about All That Glitters soon I promise, even as Cross Country Trains carry me towards the next session, here is a snapshot about one of those we already did:

• https://mobile.twitter.com/chembham/status/623795077421338624

I have never been so twitterfied! Anyway, with that I must get back to what I am doing now, but here at least is some record of what I have been doing that you didn’t have before!

If you didn’t like that CFP, why not try this one?

The frontiers thing not catching your imagination? Perhaps you’re thinking: “So divisive! I want to look at what brings people together. Why couldn’t our subjects just all have been friends?” Well, Amy Brown of the Université de Genève has something made for you:

Elusive affection: Proposed session for Leeds IMC 2015 July 6-9

Organisers: Amy Brown (Université de Genève, amisamileandme), Regan Eby (Boston College)
Call for Papers (two speakers sought)
Deadline for abstract submission: 20th September
Send abstracts to: amy.brown@unige.ch (will be forwarded to Regan Eby from there)

What is affection? Can we reliably locate or describe the features of affection between medieval persons, real or fictional?

Love of God, romantic love, and love between monastic peers or loyal knights: these and other kinds of love are well attested across the range of medieval sources and periods, but historians of friendship recognise the difficulty of bridging the gap between felt affection and the literary tropes of love. Love might be spoken or written of in situations where the parties were unlikely to feel positively toward one another, such as in reconciliations and peace treaties. In other cases, sources might borrow from the scripts of romance, friendship at court, or family in order to characterise a peculiar relationship, such as an opposite-sex friendship. Some forms of affection might be indicated without reference to the vocabulary of love at all.

We invite medievalists from any period or discipline to propose a paper relating to the history of affection, unconventional affectionate bonds, or approaches to situations in which we have insufficient data for firm conclusions concerning the presence or absence of affection in lived experience. The abstract for Amy Brown’s paper (focusing on 14th c english romance) is below, and we would particularly like to complement this paper with evidence from other periods or other literary traditions.

Sir Lancelot in the Friend Zone: strategies for offering and limiting affection in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur

Amy Brown, Université de Genève

In erthe is nothing that shall me let
To be thy knight loud and still

This promise appears in the Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur not as a proposition to a beloved, but as Lancelot’s counter-offer in rejecting the Maid of Astolat’s romantic desires toward him. This text features a negotiation sequence, not found in other versions of the Astolat narrative, in which Lancelot and the Maid attempt to articulate the terms of a relationship which is both like and unlike that of romantic love.

This paper aims to do two things: firstly, to set out the history of the concept of affection (linguistically distinct from the 12th c) and its overlap with medieval ideas of love. Secondly, to read the Maid of Astolat segment of the Stanzaic Morte as an instance in which comparison and analogy with familiar relationship types is used to establish affection at the core of an unconventional bond, that of opposite-sex friendship.

Final note, especially since Amy intends to distribute this CFP to Swiss colleagues: proposals for papers in English preferred, but we enthusiastically endorse the idea of panelists (esp. early career researchers) unaccustomed to working in English. Amy can volunteer moral support and/or editing assistance if helpful, and we will aim to moderate questions with opportunity for clarifications and translations as needed.

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(Hey Amy, with an interesting topic like this, you should totally have a blog amirite?)

An alternative manifesto for this blog

“If I could live in any decade, it would definitely be the 960s.”

Probably as thinking humans you all read The Onion already and saw this when it was new, or when Another Damned Medievalist also linked it (though I can’t now find where she did so), but it appeals on so many levels…

“… Everyone was in this vibrant period of transition between Byzantine autocracy and fealty to large landowners, just trying to discover themselves. For a brief moment you had this optimism that made you feel like you could just stick your thumb out, hop in a passing cart transporting waterfowl, and go. Didn’t even matter where—you’d just take it easy at the next fiefdom and figure it out. Who was going to tell you no? The king? Edgar the Peaceable was on the throne and he didn’t care. It was a simpler time…”

I mean, I’m probably more a fan of the 970s myself—so many exciting possibilities as Europe begins to have access to gold again, even if it comes with a side-order of Muslim military campaigns of terror in Spain and Southern France, Norman ones of opportunity in Southern Italy and Viking ones of conquest in England… But the arts were so much more ambitious!—but he’s totally right about the 980s. That can only seem like a good decade if you don’t remember it!

Leeds blogger meet-up (better late than never…)

Various things have kept me away from electronic media till today, more or less since I last wrote, but events march fast upon us and not the least of these is the 2012 International Medieval Congress, to which I shall be departing tomorrow (or, looking at the clock, today) and at which there has in recent years been a bloggers’ meet-up. I’m not sure we’re up to strength this year but since there will be at least five of us and possibly more Magistra has been canvassing behind the scenes and has settled upon the following time and place: the Stables pub at Weetwood Hall, on Monday evening, from 20:00. I and she will certainly be there, I perhaps from earlier, and if you are a blogger of any kind you would of course be very welcome to join us. (Please, bloggers and others, bear in mind that some who might attend do not necessarily want their real names and their blogs linked more widely, and we ask you to be suitably careful about that.)

This was taken shortly after a lengthy formal dinner, and doesn’t it show?

Thus, although Magistra’s academic identity is not what you would call secret any more, she has not yet gone so far as to put her name and likeness directly on her blog, whereas mine is all over the web, I suppose I will probably be recognisable for something other than probably being the only male in the gathering, and so if you’re looking for us you can look for me. And I currently look like this, not usually so formally attired but just about as tired… Maybe see you there!