K'zoo Schedule Up

The 2010 International Congress on Medieval Studies program is up!

Medieval America: Progress Report

Someone asked me recently how my monograph I'm working on, tentatively entitled Medieval America, is coming along. Since I haven't mentioned it in so long, here's a progress report.

Everything came to a crawl in the Fall semester, when a heavy teaching load (5 general education courses) and service responsibilities stopped me from doing much of anything else. I had nearly completed the chapter entitled "Medieval American History" when a technological failure ate most of what I'd done on it.

You would think that I'd be discouraged, but honestly it was a relief. When I write too slowly I lose my sense of voice, and instead turn out that horrible turgid academic prose that relies on footnotes where an explanatory argument would be better. I had all the material down, but I hated the way I had written it.

This semester (God willing) I'll have much more time to devote to Medieval America, and I think that lost chapter will be re-written much better than the first time I did it.

So, as a practical matter, I'm not much further along now than I was at the open of the fall semester, but I'm in a much better place. I'm going to start chopping the chapters up into conference presentations (no venues selected yet), so if you want a preview, by the end of the year you should be able to hear one.

Jewish-Christian Marriage

This is interesting: Archival evidence suggesting that despite prohibitions against it marriage between Jews and Christians in 15th-century Poland may have been more possible than previously thought.

Medieval Queens

Spinning Clio has re-printed an old post on medieval queens, which would be an excellent resource for non-academic medieval history buffs, particularly if you think you might be interested in medieval women's history.

The Six Million Dollar Beowulf

Easily in the top 10 cool things on TV in the 1970s was the episode of the Six Million Dollar Man in which Steve Austin fights Bigfoot, who as it turns out is also bionic and has been created by aliens for some reason that I cannot recall all these many decades ever.

One thing I didn't notice as a kid was the possible Beowulf analogue that we see around minute 6 of the clip below:



Steve Austin rips off Bigfoot's arm, then Bigfoot flees into some sort of underground lair. As I remember (and if anyone has seen the full episode more recently, please correct any of my errors), as it turns out, Bigfoot is just misunderstood, and they end up freezing him in cryogenic stasis or some other such thing.

It's possible that the arm-ripping isn't a Beowulf allusion, and is just a coincidence -- but then I wouldn't get the chance to post something so awesome on the Wordhoard, would I? Oh, and by the way, if you don't think the Six Million Dollar Man fighting Bigfoot is cool, then you are a bad person.

Girl Medieval Nerds

Medieval Living has a couple of recent posts revisiting the discussion of girl medieval nerds, one recommending girls read the works of Steven Till.

My own daughter fled from medieval geekdom* a few years ago, primarily because I would have liked it -- and there's nothing less cool than something your dad likes. All things medieval got jettisoned with all things literary.

I'm started to see the veneer cracking, though, as her own natural curiousity is getting the better of her. It started with history (with a brief enthusiasm for the Egyptians), then moved into Latin. Now, after hearing that a non-academic adult male friend was finding Pride and Prejudice "freakin' hilarious,"** she nonchalantly expressed an interest in that. We recently watched the movie Labyrinth, and she really enjoyed that -- the first open interest in anything vaguely medievalist.

So, for the female Wordhoarders out there, what medievalist bait would you suggest for a high school girl who's desperately trying not to show an interest in anything medieval? It has to be subtle, or she'll suspect the trap and I'll lose my quarry.


*I prefer the word "geek" to "nerd." For a brief overview of the difference, see here. Dork, of course, rarely applies to medieval enthusiasts.
** If you don't find Pride and Prejudice funny from the very first line, you're not reading it right.

Sypeck's Charlemagne and Ralph the Collier Available

Jeff Sypeck's The Tale of Charlemagne and Ralph the Collier is now available in all sorts of different forms, from paper to PDF.

I wonder how much for a copy inscribed on vellum?

1999 Beowulf Still Bad

The 1999 futuristic film version of Beowulf starring Christopher Lambert was on TV the other day, so I decided to record it to see if maybe it had become fun in an ironic sort of way now that some time has passed. I wanted to write something about how medievalism is adapted to science fiction in the film.

I regret to report that it remains unwatchable. It took me three tries to get 20 minutes into it, and I can go no further. It still holds a 0% rating at Rotten Tomatoes which is, in a perverse way, impressive.

Medieval Style Brick Oven

While searching for something completely unrelated, I ran into these instructions for building a medieval-style brick oven. It's clearly not meant to be super authentic, since it has materials such as a cheap plastic tarp.

What I found fascinating was the claim that "Our oven is based on one from the 12th century found in an excavation at York, England (i.e., Norman period), although it is similar to earlier Viking Age ones. The original was made out of wickerwork and completely covered inside and out with daub."

A wickerwork oven? I never would have thought of that, but protected by daub, properly dried and fired, there's no reason that wouldn't have worked.

Here's someone else who underestimated the power of wicker for baking.

Demands that I Leave the Field

Over at History News Network, Jonathan Jarrett (perhaps better-known for his excellent blog, A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe) expresses annoyance with me for my piece on the Medieval Warm Period. If I take his argument correctly, he suggests that it is irrelevant whether the MWP occurred because MWP denial allows policies to be made today that he and other "thinking people" support.

Obviously I disagree, and have no immediate plans to seek non-medievalist employment, but his piece is worth a read.

Medievalists without Borders Redux

Medievalists.net recently re-ran an old article of mine, "Medievalists without Borders." Reading it now, it seems quaint that I had to explain what a blog is.

Still, the point I've made there is still valid. Others have argued with some justification that the blog is a dying genre, and that the new locus of community is social networking sites, like Facebook. I'm not sure we're quite using social networking right as a scholarly community, and I'm not even sure as a medium they are suitable for scholarly discourse except in a very narrow band.

We shouldn't be surprised to find the same issues today as three years ago -- after all, these are the same issues King Alfred faced. Only the context changes.

The Round Table of Pick-Up Artists

Someone sent me a book to read over Christmas Break: The Game, by Neil Strauss. It's a memoir of how Strauss fell into a group of pathetic losers who decided to re-make themselves into "pick-up artists," and mostly follows his own arch of becoming a leading figure within that community to his epiphany of the emptiness that life.

Near the end, about the time that he's figured out that all the pick-up artist strategies have left him surrounded by insecure, manipulative men (rather than the women he'd hoped for), one of his friends tells him the fable about the scorpion and the frog (the one in which the scorpion stings the frog even though they'll both drown because it's in his nature). Strauss, though, sees his situation as more Arthurian than Aesopian:

I went up to my room, showered, and paged through a copy of the medieval legend Parsifal I had recently bought. People often read books to search for themselves and find someone who agrees with them. And, right now, the nature of Parsifal agreed with me a lot more than the nature of the scorpion.
As I interpreted the legend, it's the story of a sheltered mother's boy who meets some knights and decides he wants to be just like them. So he goes off into the world, has a series of adventures, and progresses from legendary fool to legendary knight.
The country, at the time, has become a wasteland because the grail king (who guards the holy grail) has been wounded. And it just so happens that Parsifal is led to the grail castle, where he sees the king in terrible pain. As a compassionate human being, he wants to ask, "What is wrong?" And, according to legend, if someone pure of heart asks that question of the king, he will be healed and the blight on the land will be lifted.
However, Parsifal does not know this. And as a knight he has been trained to observe a strict code of conduct, which includes the rule of never asking questions or speaking unless he is addressed first. So he goes to bed without talking to the king. In the morning, he wakes to discover that the grail castle has disappeared. He has blown his chance to save king and country by obeying his training instead of his heart. Unlike the scorpion, Parsifal had a choice. He just made the wrong one.
When I walked through the living room to get a drink from the kitchen, I saw Mystery nursing another cocktail in front of the TV. He was watching a video of The Karate Kid and crying. "I never had a Mr. Miyagi," he sobbed, wiping tears off his reddened cheeks. He was drunk. "My dad didn't teach me anything. All I wanted was a Mr. Miyagi."
I suppose we were all searching for someone to teach us the moves we needed to win at life, the knightly code of conduct, the ways of the alpha-male. That's why we found each other. But a sequence of maneuvers and a system of behavior would never fix what was broken inside. Nothing would fix what was broken inside. All we could do was embrace the damage. (p. 415)

The book is a bit tedious (over 400 pages for Strauss to figure out what most men figure out in their early 20s, of what he could have learned just by reading Proverbs), but here in the end we see the bond to the leige depicted as a desirable father-son bond, rather than a socio-economic bond. Mystery here is enacting the sorrow of Anglo-Saxon elegies like The Wanderer, cut off not just from family and friends, but also from the lord and mentor. Perhaps the real Grail quest is for a Mr. Miyagi.

What Santa's Elves Wrought

This year I didn't get a lot of medievalist gifts (I'm now at that age when I'm genuinely excited to get socks) but Santa's elves did make me something special at his workshop: A custom-made chainmail bow tie.

Of course, this was quality elf workmanship (workelfship?), but if you like what you see here and want something similar, I've heard rumors that Chained Elegance consults with the North Pole. They're the same outfit Allegra Torres gets her stuff from.

So what about all of you? What exciting medievalist gifts did Santa bring you? Any cool new books? Games? Recreational garb? If it's something that has to be seen to be appreciated, go head and send me an image and I'll try to post it.

End-of-the-Year Round-Ups

Medieval News has the top 10 medieval news stories of 2009, and here are all the Ancient/Medieval Carnivalesques of 2009:

Carnivalesque 47
Carnivalesque 49
Carnivalesque 51
Carnivalesque 53 (This one is now password protected; Sorry, I can't do anything about that)
Carnivalesque 55
Carnivalesque 57

Getting Medieval's Medieval Christmas

Getting Medieval has a nice post on medieval Christmas.

Robin Hood Trailer

Someone who really hates high taxes:

When Medieval Cathedrals Attack!

Berlusconi has learned the hard way -- never turn your back on a medieval cathedral, or even a replica of one. Here's more on the actual cathedral itself.

Perhaps Saint Ambrose is unhappy about something?

December Saints Calendar

Got Medieval has the saints up for the first half of December, including one particularly famous one you may have heard of...

Update on the CRU Scandal and the Medieval Warm Period

We’ve now heard back from the Wordhoard’s resident Science Dude* on his review of the CRU e-mails and the kerfuffle they’ve caused. In addition to the e-mails, he’s looked at some of the published results that came out of them. As promised, I report to you his findings.

Some of the public sturm und drang over the e-mails is over things that are either misunderstood by laymen or simply the casual way that two academics might talk with one another over presumably private e-mails. For example, a lot of cry has gone up over the sentence, “Next time I see [prominent global warming skeptic] at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.” Well, heck, there are some colleagues in my own field I’m tempted to beat the crap out of, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I had expressed that in an e-mail to a friend. It’s the kind of thing you write in an e-mail to someone you know well, not the kind of thing you publish in a footnote.

Science Dude does find, however, that at many points the e-mails reveal “bad science,” “deception,” and academic bad behavior ranging from the “sloppy” to “beyond the pale.” Beyond the unethical behavior, he notes, there also appears to be illegal behavior in the requests to delete e-mails to avoid FoIA requirements, something that is illegal as “anyone getting grants at that level would know” ((though I should note he is Science Dude, not Legal Dude). Because you can’t really be fined or prosecuted for being a bad scientist, but you can be for violating the Freedom of Information Act, Science Dude says “I can also say I would rather be Michael Mann than Phil Jones right now,” and he notes that even the other participants in the e-mails are quickly distancing themselves from Jones – a very bad sign indeed.

To see “the most honest thing written” on the CRU scandal to date, Science Dude recommends reading Eduardo Zorita’s “Why I Think that Michael Mann, Phil Jones, and Stefan Rahmstorf Should Be Barred from the IPCC Process.” Science Dude notes that Zorita has probably done serious damage to his career by writing it – which also explains why I’m respecting Science Dude’s anonymity.

Now, for the part that affects us here at the Wordhoard – the Medieval Warm Period. In one now-notorious e-mail, Michael Mann wrote that “it would nice to ‘contain’ the putative ‘MWP’” (or Medieval Warm Period), but Mann has since argued that what he meant by that was that he simply wanted to identify exactly when the MWP began, not deny its existence. Science Dude, however, finds Mann’s explanation unbelievable, both in the context of the e-mail and Mann’s other publications. Read enough of what Mann has written about the MWP (or what he prefers to call the “Medieval Climate Anomaly”), and you’ll see that his explanation doesn’t pass the laugh test. Whether the MWP was just an anomaly or not, Mann clearly meant to hide it in the data.

At the end of the day, the requests by Jones to delete e-mails were not just probably illegal – they were also clear signs of conscious deception. At best they were like Colonel Jessep in A Few Good Men, shouting “You can’t handle the truth!” As Science Dude points out, deciding what the public can and can’t handle is “a dangerous business for scientists to get into.”

Even more troublesome within the scientific community is the reliance on the CRU for binned data. Binning data is a process that that’s intended to eliminate small observational errors, but it can be very computer intensive, so other scientists have been acting in good faith using the CRU’s binned data for their own work – but if that data was massaged to aim toward a particular end rather than eliminating error, the hard work of honest scientists has been compromised. Science Dude doesn’t have access to the unbinned data to compare with the binned data (nor would he likely have the time or resources to do so just as a favor to me) regarding the Medieval Warm Period, but the CRU scandal opens the possibility that some of what we think about the MWP will have to be revised as we get more honest data.


*Science Dude is a legitimate university scientist – millions of bucks in grants over the years, full professor, etc. He characterizes himself as a believer in climate change, and would not call himself an anthropogenic climate change “skeptic,” but notes that climate is always changing. He would argue that the question as to whether and to what degree human activity affects that climate change is uncertain.

The Third-Millennium Scriptorium

Here's an article about how a monk is preserving manuscripts digitally. Unfortunately, it's behind the Chronicle's subscriber firewall, but you get the idea.