Just to be clear on this:

none of AElric’s Saint’s Lives deal with Homosexual saints. Most of AElfric’s saints are stridently celibate, so at best you could call them anti-sexual. I doubt AElfric had any idea about ‘Homosexuality’ as an umbrella identity, although he certainly knew some people commited acts of Sodomy. Just not his saints.

We here at Helpful Industries suggest you look elsewhere for legends about homosexual saints (I believe you will find relevant, more recent, accretions to ledgends like that of St Sebastian).

In response to the Goblin’s desire for some background reading recommendations, may I recommend these five books:

History

* Frank Stenton, Anglo Saxon England. This is *the* book.  It’s about fifty years old, is a veritable brick (better for bashing people with than most bibles), covers names and dates in meticulous detail. If you have trouble staying awake while reading Lord of the Rings, this book is not for you.

* Edward James, Britain in the First Millenium (also covers the later Celtic period). A relatively new book, and not a Canonical Great by any means. However, it’s engaging, clearly laid out, and in accessible language. I road-tested it on my father and he found it good, ergo, it will probably not put noobs to sleep. One caveat: his ideas about the dating of Beowulf are very unconventional.

Literature

* Primary Texts: any of the student editions by Elaine Treharne- sometimes in conjunction with others, sometimes not. For an example, Old and Middle English c.890-c.1400 : an anthology ed. Elaine Treharne, some of which is reprinted in Old and Middle English Poetry, ed Duncan Wu (based on the Treharne ed.). Treharne’s editions are lovely, with parallel translations which are broken up into lines but don’t sacrifice accuracy for the sake of modern poetics. They’re also clearly laid out and simply introduced.

* To continue with the Treharne fangirling, I cannot possibly over-recommend Treharne’s introductory guide to Old and Middle English literature- Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old and Middle English Literature ed Treharne and Johnson (which has a good intro essay on the Gawain poet, incidentally). The essays are simple, clear, and provide broad introductions to the most common scholarly approaches in the field.

* Paul E. Szarmach, Old English Prose: Basic Readings. The level of these essays is considerably more advanced than the Treharne introductions, and they provide original scholarship rather than simply background readings. However, if there’s something awesome in Anglo-Saxon prose that isn’t covered in this book, I have yet to find it.

~

On a completely unrelated note: OMG SQUEE EMMA OF NORMANDY IS, LYKE, TOTALLY AWESOME. *fangirls a little bit* Since I’ve discovered that the best way for me to internalise Boy History is by writing character-based narratives, expect a special feature on Queen Emma as soon as my sleep cycle rights itself. Today, in the middle of writing a sentence about AEthelred and Thorkell the Tall, I apparently got up or fell off my seat and fell sound asleep, sprawled across the library floor and partly under the table, for around half an hour.

“The rest is really boring”- a note found scrawled across 2/3 of the entries in my thesis research notebook.

I am eschewing content right now due to thesis, procrastinating, and working very weird shifts in college reception.

“The rest is really boring” may or may not be the eventual conclusion of what was supposed to be my Seven Sleepers series, too. Will think about that when my brain isn’t full of check-ins and check-outs and nuns.

Oh, did I mention the nuns? College is full of nuns (and dentists and feild roboticians, but they’re less interesting). The nuns are here for World Youth Day, they wear full habits, and they’re utterly adorable. We also have a scattering of ‘consecrated women of Regnum Christi’, which sounds like a sort of modern confraternity. (PS: NUNS, SQUEE!)

Entirely unrelated: have an icon celebrating the possibilities of high medieval slash.

That’s Anjou/France: One True Pairing, for those uniniated in heraldry and/or fanfiction.

Once upon a time, I promised that this blog would be ‘like the naked chef, but with more grammar jokes and less chance of embarrassing burns’. To that end, I spent tonight learning to use GIMP image editing program.

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These and variations on these themes can be found in my LJ

Oh, and tip of the hat to Michael Drout, whose Beowulf movie review gave me the blog name and the desire for an icon that said ‘Do Philology Naked’. Now I have the blog AND the icons, I am a happy nerd.

Let us now turn to Dr Nokes. This post shall cover, in the following order: * what ticked me off; * the sorts of medieval things a teenage girl might be reading, both history and fiction; * the reasons why she (and her male counterparts) are into medievalism anyway; * where the experiece of teenage girls and boys differs in medievalism; and finally * what history can offer to teenage girls that fantasy fiction doesn’t yet.

In his first post, Dr Nokes has a lot of good things to say about ‘applied medievalism’, how to do it and why to do it, and his final point very much agreed with the one I made in my last post.

That’s the difference between fanboy medievalism and applied medievalism. Fanboy medievalism just says, “Oh my gosh, that sword is so awesome!” Applied medievalism acknowledges the kick-butt awesomeness of the sword, but offers a broader context, like thinking about how the ceremonial swords Marines carry suggest the chivalric virtues they are still expected to continue as part of their warrior ethos. In that way, applied medievalism ideally inspires fanboys to explore further. After all, none of us emerged from the womb fully-developed thinkers about medievalism. We all started as fans, but through our explorations became more.

What gets my goat is the use of the term ‘fanboy‘, a term which he has since explained he uses because ‘fangirl’ carries unwanted connotations of ‘OMG ELIJAH WOOD IS LYKE MY HUSBAND 4EVAR‘. Urbandictionary supports this distinction, so ok, fair enough Dr Nokes. He jokingly suggests that he should use ‘fankind’, but what’s wrong with the words we have- ‘fan’, ‘nerd’, ‘fandom’?

For the purposes of the last post, I’ve used the word nerd, to denote an individual enthusiast of unpopular topics, but I shall now add to it the noun ‘fandom’, as the collective noun for the community of such nerds and the activities in which they engage. Fandom is a term normally applied to enthusiasts of a particular piece of ‘popular’ culture- books, movies, games, comics, TV shows, and to the fanfic, role playing, cosplay, and so forth which they construct around their chosen canon. With my newly invented term ‘medieval fandom’, I’m lumping together all the fandoms associated with medieval fantasy and historical fiction, movies, games, etc; and adding to them medieval history nerds and medieval role players, cosplayers, etc like the SCA who take the historical period as their canon. Are we all clear on that? Yes? Good. Let’s get back to the teenage female constituent of that fandom.

The term ‘fanboy’ aside, something about Dr Nokes’ picture of the medieval nerd bugs me. He didn’t flesh out in great detail the sort of person he pictures as the popular medievalist, so maybe I’m being a bit unfair to that post. However, it comes across as a very male picture of the medieval nerd. All swords and fightin’ and stuff. (Not that I don’t appreciate a good shiny sword… or avidly consume the Woman With Sword subgenre of medieval fantasy…) I pointed that out, and gave some suggestions on the kind of female figures- Joan of Arc, Eleanor d’Aquitaine, Jeanne de Montforte, Marie de France- whose strong characters and general awesomeness are what attracted me to medieval nerdery in the first place. It’s by reading up on these individually interesting characters that I started building a picture of the society they lived in.

Dr Nokes followed through with his next post, in which it turns out I was right. His average medieval nerd *is* an exclusively male figure, and what’s more, he apparently the intelligence of teenage girls is insufficient to be attracted by figures of scholarly study like Eleanor, Heloise and Julian of Norwich.

Still, it started me wondering, who are the female medieval figures that draw fangirls to medievalism? Highly Eccentric mentions Marie de France, Joan d’Arc, and Jeanne de Montfort, Eleanor of Aquitane, and Heloise, but I wonder how many of these a girl is likely to encounter before she takes an interest? I would think the first medievalist figures a fangirl encounters would be Guinevere, Elaine, maybe Joan d’Arc or Boudicca (which may depend on the national heroines of her country), or women fantasy authors.

So, how about it? Ladies, what brought you into fankind? No scholarly answers, either — no 14-year-old girl ever picked up the Shewings of Julian of Norwich and said, “hmmm, I’ll bet this’ll be as interesting as the Baby-sitters Club series” — I’m curious as to what drew your interest back before you even knew you had an interest. Or was it the same kind of Tolkien, D&D stuff that draws fanboys?

Gee, thanks Dr Nokes. Given that BabySitters Club is aimed at the 7-11 set, any 14 year old still counting them as the height of interesting reading is probably not destined for a life of arcane nerdery.

If you’re wondering how teenage girls stumble across figures like Eleanor d’Aquitaine: we READ. If she’s anything like me, the fourteen year old girl in question will have picked up an illustrated children’s guide to the middle ages sometime in primary school, having learnt at about age seven that history books are always more interesting than BabySitter’s Club. She wasn’t looking for anything medieval; she wasn’t looking for strong female characters; she was looking for something interesting to do with her lunch break. She had probably already read The Roman Times for a class project, and picked upThe Medieval Messenger which was lying next to it, because she knew that series is funny. After that, she might have specifically sought out something like The Measly Middle Ages, or perhaps she stumbled across it by accident. There aren’t many medieval fiction books out there aimed at the under-ten set that she might happen across, but I think I read a King Arthur comic book and a three-chapter novella about a young kid transported to King Arthur’s Court.

If she’s like me she’ll start reading Redwall and Tamora Pierce before she finishes primary school. If she’s like K, the Heretical Purple Blur I mentioned in my last post, who’s a little younger than me and was around for some books I missed by virtue of Getting Old, she’s also reading Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Arthur series, and the Royal Diaries (where, Dr Nokes, she might meet Eleanor D’Aquitaine and Isabella of Castille…) By fourteen, she’s probably reading Tolkien and is already a regular posting member on a handful of fantasy fiction fan sites. She will be reading Arthurian fantasy, and the Arthurian canon is leading her outwards into faux-history and pop history. Depending on the state of her local library, she might be reading Sara Douglass’ The Betrayal of Arthur, or T.W. Holleston’s Celtic Mythology. When she gets older, she might beg her parents to buy her the Allan Lee illustrated Mabinogion and the Oxford Classics translation of Malory. Primary source reading will find its way onto her bookshelf as a matter of course, because she’s insatiably curious and irreparably escapist.¹

She sounds much the same as any intelligent, library-lurking fourteen-year old boy, doesn’t she? She’s reading fiction and history together; she’s attracted by exciting characters, different settings and adventurous plots. At fourteen, she’s probably also paying close and curious attention to the kissing scenes- but then, I suspect her male counterpart is too, even if he won’t admit it. Even if she’s only one tenth of the nerd I was, even if (as it seems from the comments) American libraries aren’t near so well stocked in children’s Medieval history books as British and Australian libraries might be… It still shouldn’t be surprising that an intelligent teenager should find medieval history interesting when she stumbles across it!

Nokes asks if girls are attracted to Tolkien and D&D, as the boys are. In fact, as long as I’ve been in it, Tolkien fandom is predominately a female domain. I can count the regular male posters over at ringbearer.org on my fingers. OK, a lot of the female Tolkien fans back when I joined up were the ‘fangirls’ that we (the SRS TOLKIEN READERS) called ‘swooners’ back in the day, but most of the hardcore Tolkienuts were (are) also female. I’ve never tried playing D&D, and I understand it does draw a more male-oriented group.

The problem is, Nokes takes it as given that boys are attracted Tolkien and D&D, without saying why, while wondering what might interest girls in medieval fandom. Well, what are the boys in fandom for? Why should we expect the basic attraction to be any different, although gender may result in some statistical variation as to exact field of interest?

I shall hereby posit three things which attract young people to medieval fandom, and I see no reason why these basic attractive elements are any different for the history side of it as opposed to the fiction and gaming side.

1. Above all, again and again, escapism. There’s something really enthralling about societies and cultures so different to our own that we have to piece them together bit by bit- and then the similarities you find are so much more engaging. If you pick up Bridget Jones, for example, you don’t lose yourself in her world, because her world is yours (or it’s supposed to be… someone shoot me if I’m ever that much of a twit). Tolkien, Raymond E Feist, Gary Gygax’s games, the LOTR films- they take you out of your setting and away.
The thing is, historical non-fiction does the same thing. You can piece together a picture of another world, another society, where cool and exciting things happen, and cool and exciting people live, only with the added bonus of it was all real once and you can never learn ‘all there is to know’ about it.
Reason 1A for being attracted to medieval fandom is ‘characters to identify with’. Really cool people, fictional or historical, are what draws you in to their world, and I think it’s here that there comes up a difference between girls and guys, so Reason 1A will be treated separately.

2. Intellectual stimulation. As per my post yesterday morning, knowing stuff is fun. Knowing stuff few other people know is a double-edged sword: you get your own little universe, but you don’t get any sense of solidarity out of it. A sufficiently intelligent teenager, having discovered that medieval history is pretty cool by just picking up a book off the shelf, will probably continue to pick up books from the shelf because she enjoys learning things; because doing research of her own offers more scope and depth and fun (see escapism, Reason 1) than the simplistic approach of the high school syllabus. For the same reason, she’ll probably thrive on Tolkien- even if it takes her nine months the first time around, as it did me- because Tolkien is so much more demanding on the reader than anything they set you in high school. (Unless you have trouble with Shakespearean language, I guess…)

3. The fandom community. Like Dr Nokes’ typical fanboy, many girls must come to an interest in medieval studies only via their first interest in Tolkien, or Arthurian lit, or the works of Tamora Pierce, having somehow never picked up a copy of ‘The Measly Middle Ages’. Or maybe they did, thought it was kind of cool, and were never afflicted by the obsessive desire to research which afflicts K and I. Regardless of how much you’re reading on your own, a sense of community and people to nerd out with will go a long way to keeping your interest active. I quite liked Tolkien, but my Rabidly Obsessive Phase didn’t come about until I’d been on ringbearer.org long enough to absorb the enthusiasm. RB also gave me a bunch of recs for other good fantasy lit… My guess is that the fanfic side of fandom works the same way, and I wonder: if more people were out there writing historically-informed fic for fantasy lit, if that might arouse interest in the primary texts? (Example: an alliterative Gawain fic by a Proper Medievalist whose name shall not be publicised for the sake of her reputation…) A quick search of the internet reveals that there’s at least one medieval history forum out there, as well as multiplicious fantasy boards.

Having established these three reasons to be into medieval fandom, and that history and fiction are both attractive for these three reasons, let us return to Reason 1A, ‘characters to identify with’.

1A. Having interesting fictional or historical characters makes for a great interest-grabbing hook which sparks your interest in a genre or period. For me, medieval pop history provided something that fantasy fiction didn’t: strong female characters I could really identify with.

Let me clarify that. It’s not that fantasy lit doesn’t have strong female characters. There’s a whole subgenre that I like to call the ‘Women with Swords’ genre- most notably Tamora Pierce, who often says of her work that one of her main aims in writing young people’s fantasy is to provide teenage girls with heroic female role models. I devoured Women-With-Swords books as a teenager, and several concluding books (including ROTK) were violently thrown across the room when I discovered that the Shieldmaiden wasn’t going to get the Main Hero Guy. The problem is that most of the ‘Sheroes’ in fantasy are cast in the same mould: they’re tough, physically strong, assertive characters whose strength is in acting man-like, which almost always means wielding a sword. Every one of Pierce’s Tortall protagonists has a weapon of some kind (discounting magic, which most of them have as well), even Thayet, who is otherwise depicted as powerful by virtue of her royal birth and skill at court politics. The hallmark of a strong female fantasy character is her ability to pass as a man. While that makes for a rollicking story, and I passionately idolised and envied the Shieldmaiden, fact is I know and have always known, I’d never pass for a knight. Zip, zero knightliness here. Nor am I going to dress as a sailor and stow away to sea, or dress as a pirate and take over the ship (Robin Hobb’s Liveship Traders), and I’d rather not get involved in any telepathic dragon orgies, really (yes, I once read Ann McCaffrey. We all have our shameful secrets). But at the same time, I find Arwen boring, I find Imrhien’s lovesick wanderings around Erith tedious, and although I now recognise that Faraday is the true tragic hero of the Axis trilogy, as a teenager I found her wilting and dull and wished she’d get around to doing something interesting for once.

Now, there are manifold types of male heroes in medieval literature and medieval fantasy. Big, buff, tough type, ‘most eager for praise’? Beowulf is for you. Fancy yourself as a cunning trouble maker? Loki. You’re the little guy who’d rather not have to play the hero? Frodo. Can you see yourself as a guerrilla, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor? Robin Hood. Are you the poet, the dreamer and the visionary? Stephen R. Lawhead’s Taliesin. You want to alternate your time between studying ancient scrolls and leading your trained scouts into enemy territory? Then you’re a Faramir. The list goes on and on. Point is, no matter what your teenage boys temperament is, now matter how unlikely he is to ever duel someone for his lady’s honour, there’s a role model in medieval fandom that say he could be the hero, given the right circumstances. Medieval literature just doesn’t offer that sort of scope in female characters. Efforts have been made in fantasy to redress the imbalance, witness the popularity of Shieldmaiden protagonists. But more often, I’d like to see a nun as a fantasy hero, or a minor lord’s wife, or a princess who never even asks to pick up a sword, or a queen mother, or a farmer’s daughter.

This is where historians can fill the breach. Because history is about real people, and real people, however narrow their prescribed social roles, come in all shapes and sizes and with all kinds of temperaments. For some reason, although I can’t imagine me ever developing the motor skills to wield a sword, I look at Eleanor of Aquitane and part of me thinks ‘I could do that’. I read about Adela of Blois and I think ‘huh- running the estate while my husband’s on Crusade, nagging him until he returns a second time, and then taking over the headship of the family when he dies? I’m pretty good at nagging.’ Nevermind that I’m tactless and a bad liar, and so would be terrible at politics. Part of me thinks I could learn that, whereas I couldn’t learn to use a crossbow. As a budding author of bad teenage poetry, it didn’t require any effort at all to identify with Marie de France, and she’s remained one of my favourite characters, despite the little I’ve had the time and access to read of her writing.

Medieval history has some awesome characters in it, and among them are some pretty fantastic female characters in every sub-period. Michelle, in her reply to Dr Nokes, said she didn’t think there were any women in Anglo-Saxon England who’d be attractive to noob girls… but what about Æthelflæd, who kicked Danish butt in the early 800s? I can see St Æthelthryth No-Sex-For-YOU of Ely warranting a whole page in ‘The Abominable Anglo-Saxons’, if Terry Deary ever writes such a thing.

So there you go. There’s so much to interest a teenage girl in medieval fandom, I wrote an essay-length post on it in a matter of hours. If only essays were this easy! To summarise:

• Teenage girls come to medieval fandom the same way boys do: they read stuff. The read fiction, they read history books, they read the Intarwebs, and they probably started reading these things before they were out of primary school.
• The reasons teenage girls are attracted to medieval fandom are, at the root of it, the same as those of teenage boys, and fiction and history can be attractive in the same was: as escapism, as intellectual stimulation, and as part of a wider community of fandom.
• There isn’t the same variety of female characters to identify with in medieval fantasy as there is of male characters. This is important, because identifying with a character really creates your escapist alternate world, and it provides a stimulus for further research.
• Historians can fill that gap and make medieval history more interesting to young girls by telling stories of real medieval women, and telling them in an engaging and accessible fashion.

Here endeth the lesson rant for today.

~

1. If she has a father like mine, she’ll have company in her Celtic explorations; she will also have acquired a working knowledge of the First World War and aviation history, not to mention the fall of the Roman Empire, the invention of the motor car and the difference between a Neanderthal and a Homo Sapiens. Because curiosity is better in company.

Greetings, O Blogosphere. Some time ago, Matt Gabrielle opened a Bloggers Forum on the relevance of Medieval Studies to the general public, asking:

How about a blog forum about what medieval studies and/ or medievalism has to offer a wider public? But not pitched to other academics? How would you talk about a topic of your choosing to a group of community members in a public library, for example? How do you talk about “relevance” (or the lack thereof) to undergraduates? etc.

There have been several responses to this call, but I shall link you to Jeff Sypeck’s contribution for two reasons: One, that page links to all the previous responses; and Two, Sypeck’s post is what started Dr Nokes thinking.

Now, I want to talk about two things: the weakness¹ of Dr Nokes’ approach to the medieval ‘fan(boy)’, and my own answer to Matt’s question ‘What can Medievalists offer to the general public’. I’m going to address these things in two separate posts: one, as a general answer to Matt’s question, and another coming up in response to Dr Noke’s second post.

Firstly, why is all this important anyway? Why are we fussing over what we can offer and particularly what we can offer to teenagers? Forgive me, but it (not just Dr Nokes, but the entire discussion, regardless of the age of contributors) looks to me like the elderly constituent of the congregation I grew up in, fussing over how to be more ‘relevant’ and more ‘contemporary’ so as to attract more ‘youth’… not out of any inherent concern for the youth of today, but because young bums on seats give the old folks a sense of validation.

It’s a given that we all want more students of medieval studies. I don’t teach, myself, but that hasn’t stopped me ranting and cajoling any potential medievalists I know into taking courses with my favourite teachers. My motivations are multiplicious: I’m a naturally helpful sort of person, the kind of person who likes sharing the things she knows (even if you don’t care), and in this case the thing I knew is how to structure your study so as to take two majors. I’m also very fond of the CMS and I don’t want to see good students lost to the English or History departments. And thirdly, I happen to live with the major recipient of my medieval cajoling, and the more medieval courses she takes, the greater the chances are that when I walk into the dining hall, a purple-and-blonde blur will rush past, muttering as she goes ‘I realised I couldn’t talk about confraternities, so I’m doing heretics instead!’, or similar nerdy comments. It’s good to have someone around who’s more-or-less on the same plane as you.

That third point, I think, is where we can say that academic medievalists really do have something to offer the general public, if by ‘general’ you mean ‘isolated teenage nerds’. What an academic can offer- via blogs or books or public forums or school visits- is firstly a bit of solidarity. Hey, that guy’s an even bigger nerd than I am, and HE’S made a career out of it. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, is that regardless of whether or not the nerd in question goes on to do any medieval subjects at uni- maybe she discovers her true calling and becomes a stockbroker- is that an intelligent teenager, unless she’s very, very lucky in her schooling, is never being pushed to think as far, as deeply, or as independently as she could. Which is a pity, because knowing stuff is fun, and thinking about it is MORE fun. Whether it’s Dr Nokes’ ‘Big Beowulf Bash’ or Jeff Sypeck’s book ‘Becoming Charlemagne’, a bit of academic medievalism, pitched to her level, might give her a bit of intellectual stimulation she’s not getting from the high school syllabus. I’d say the same thing to scholars of Shogun Japan and to Microbiologists: there are kids out there to whom the opportunity to learn something they’re really passionate about, to whom the encouragement and non-patronising interest of a specialist in that field, to whom simply the chance to use their brain at a higher capacity, would be as precious as gold. No matter what your speciality or it’s immediate usefulness, society can always do with more kids encouraged to think beyond the bounds of the high school classroom.

I always knew I didn’t want to teach your average school student, I wanted to teach people who were smart and engaged. My mother suggested ‘university teaching’ when I was about seven, but from the time I was ten until I was… oooh, fourteen or fifteen, I wanted to be a trained Gifted & Talented upper primary school teacher, just like one Mrs Coffee, who had rescued me from mental stagnation and got me started on reading fantasy fiction, amongst other things. That’s been crossed off my To Do List for Life, but I still care about the education of smart kids. A little broadening of their horizons, a sprinkle of encouragement, the promise that other people out there in the Big World will value their quirky interests and passions, yeah… that’s worth doing.

Don’t do it if you don’t like kids. Don’t do it if you’re going to patronise or talk down. But if you have the time and the resources, do. If not public appearances, then books. There are never enough books out there on which an intelligent youngster can sharpen his brain-teeth. Websites aren’t a bad idea either, but I don’t know that any website, no matter how engaging, could beat a beautifully illustrated book like Kevin Crossley-Holland’s ‘The King Who Was And Will Be’, a wonderful introduction to high medieval culture in bite-sized snippets. It’s thanks to Kevin C-H that I discovered Marie De France, Dr Nokes. Kevin C-H sticks in my mind as the only pop history book I could find that said right out that there probably was no King Arthur, but that didn’t matter. Camelot, he says ‘is in our minds and our hearts’. If you have a nerdy child in your friend or family network, one who appreciates beautifully decorated books and interesting windows into a past society… find a copy of that book and give it to them. From memory, it should be comprehensible to your average ten year old, but I was still enjoying it at fourteen.

Comin’ up: Teenage girls are smart and they read history books! Special Investigation This Evening!

~

1. That’s polite academic-speak for ‘inherant sexism’…

1. Establish a social context.

2. Establish the ideal hero.

3. Test the ideal hero.

4. Reveal his weaknesses and return to relate him once again to his social context.

Yes, I am that awesome. Well, I would’ve been if I realised I was doing it. If I’d realised I was doing it, I would’ve broken the essay into four sections, and headed each with a decorated capital. (And possibly put four smaller capitals in there as well, which may or may not constitute further sub-divisions.) Unfortunately, I didn’t think of this until I was just about to hand it in, and I decided it wasn’t worth going and changing it now.

It is far too long (ahem. I mean… it’s just right, Lolo!), and my ideas are sprawling and there’s so much more I want to say. On the other hand, it’s certainly the most dense thing I’ve ever written. And it has a Theoretical Basis, even if it’s not a very well researched one.

However, in I’m-not-going-to-say-how-much-more-than-three-thousand words, I had all of fourteen or fifteen footnotes. This happened in the last essay I wrote too, although here it’s exacerbated by my decision, according to the rules of the MHRA Style Guide, to cite line-numbers in text rather than in footnote.  The beginning and end of the essay are resonably well represented with secondary source footnoting, but the middle is just me blathering on about the poem.

Is this supposed to happen? Until now, the better I’ve gotten at writing essays, the more footnotes I made. Last year I prided myself on a ratio of footnote/words that was greater than 1/50 at all times. Now I’m writing things which feel harder, and I suppose that’s the collorary of having a big slab of original idea: no one to cite for it. It feels a bit like having my training wheels taken off. (When I learnt to ride a bike, training wheels had to be taken off one by one when I wasn’t looking, or I’d cry and refuse to get on it again.)

While I go off to find a desperately needed coffee, have yourselves an interesting modern poem about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Dr Nokes has an eloquent post on ‘outreach’ Medievalism which you should all trundle off and read. I’ll get around to posting a response to it once I’ve finished my essay. Suffice to say, the only problem with Nokes’ post is that his picture of the medieval nerd is male-focused. I know, by personal experience and the Internet, that there are a lot of twitty female medieval fantasy nerds out there, and even sub-genres of fantasy lit aimed specifically at them. Also, witness the good deal of medieval/early modern historical romance books out there.

I will, building on my comments to his post, talk a bit about ways of appealing specifically to that audience. However, right now in my procrastination, may I advise you on something which does NOT draw interest in Medieval Studies?

As Nokes points out, many people are interested in the medieval origins of modern institutions and traditions. Stephanie Trigg’s work on the Order of the Garter is one good example. People also like to know about medieval things because it seems romantic, or adventurous: I remember JP telling us that he was suddenly fielding calls from radio stations across the country when Kingdom of Heaven came out, asking him ‘if the Crusades were really like that’. (Short answer: No.)

One thing people are NOT interested in, despite its usefulness and medieval origins, is double-entry bookkeeping. Despite the fact that JP, in the context of 12th/13th century Florentine trade, managed to explain to me a concept my mother, a trained bookkeeper, has never managed to get through my head, the appropriate response to ’so, do you understand about double-entry bookkeeping’, when asked by an employer, is not ‘oh, yes, it’s a respectable 12th century Florentine invention!’. This will earn you only funny looks and a VERY DETAILED demonstration of the charges and payments on the computer.

Having said that, I have not stuffed up charges or payments yet, and no one has had to spend hours explaining why the same transaction has to be entered twice. I guess next time someone asks if I learnt anything useful at university, I shall say yes, I did. My Medieval Studies course has made me a more efficient receptionist.

Next time someone asks me why I don’t read the bible anymore, I’m going to tell them it’s because bibles are deadly. Or they were, for medieval monks. You can’t be too careful, I say.

A Momentous First has just occurred. Highlyeccentric just drafted a paragraph- the very first paragraph in the essay, discounting the introduction- defining her theoretical approach to literature. Apparently, I use a ‘dialogic’ theoretical basis, as defined by Laurie A. Finke in her chapter on Sexuality in Old French Literature, in the aforementioned Bullough & Brundage ‘Handbook of Medieval Sexuality’.

It’s just as well I started reading B&B, really- I picked up my feedback forms from the honours conference today, and although I thought I’d gone through reasonably clearly for the benefit of everyone the way I saw literature (or at least SGGK) relating to social context, most of them came back with ‘please define your theoretical approach’. So now I have a definition, and I will wave it around. I like this definition, because it will also allow me to argue the validity of the study of literature before historians, should I meet any historians in a fightin’ mood. Also, thanks to Finke, I have names and publication titles which I can use (later) to read MORE about this theory, and generally advance in the world of literary awesomeness.

Everybody witness this amazing first:

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a product of the chivalric ideals of the fourteenth century English nobility. It is not a pure reflection of the practices of that class, by any means, but rather a stylised expression of the ideals by which they identified themselves. The poet guides his audience to identify with Gawain, rarely presenting a scene outside of his point of view. For a fourteenth century audience, the poet’s artistry in this respect would only serve to emphasise a personal identification with Gawain based on his status as representative of Arthur’s court, the embodied figure of the golden age of English chivalry to which fourteenth century chivalry aspired to emulate. The literary depiction of the chivalric ideal is not a static one, however, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in its construction of this ideal can be seen respond to the anxieties facing the knightly class in the fourteenth century. The literary construction of chivalry is, if you like, in dialogue with the actual situation of chivalry in society. This set of assumptions about the relationship between literature and history is defined by Laurie A. Finke, in his overview of theoretical approaches to the study of sexuality in Old French literature, as a ‘dialogic’ approach, emphasising the dynamic, two-way interaction between a literary formulation of an ideal, and the historical realities affecting that ideal.

Please note that it’s very draft-y, and you’re bereft of the rest of the essay it goes with (although so am I, not having written it). If it strikes you, however, that this makes no sense as an introduction to the basic assumptions underlying the essay I’m about to write, please do tell me.
In case you think I need to actually explain the anxieties of the fourteenth century chivalric classes if I’m going to argue anything based on them, yes, I know, and the next paragraph will be a SRS version of this post, plus some more stuff I’ve picked up along the way.

And now, to bed, to mourn the demise of my happy theory-free existence.

That got your attention, didn’t it?

Instead of writing up my Gawain paper, and instead of doing any real blogging; and in between learning how to be an efficient receptionist, and giving my patent Twitface Look to first the incoming Principal of Women’s College and then to our soon-to-be Head of State, The Governor-General Designate, I’ve been perusing one of the gems of Awesome’s bookshelf, the Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Bullough and Brundage. I particularly enjoyed Jaqueline Murray’s article ‘Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible: Lesbians in the Middle Ages’. I give her the highest praise I can give to a theory-dense article: she works through the historiography and the Theory background systematically, making it clear at every step just how the Theory relates to historical study, and she gives you big clear pointers for further reading. And, as if that wasn’t enough, as the article goes on, she demonstrates a good range of primary source work (although I guess I’d have to go and look at the primary sources in question and particular scholarship on them in order to evaluate her use of them properly).

I could give you a run-down of Murray’s theoretical approach, but I won’t. Instead, I’m going to give you a titilating segment from Etienne de Fougères’ Livre des manières, translated by Robert L.A. Clark and appended to Murray’s article.

These ladies have made up a game:
With “trutennes” they make an “eu”,
they bang coffin against coffin,
without a poker to stir up their fire.

They’re not all from the same mould:
one lies still and the other makes busy,
one plays the cock and the other the hen
and each one plays her role.

*p. 210 in Bullough & Brundage. Words in italics have not been successfully translated.

This passage follows a comparison of the ‘beautiful sin’ of heterosexual fornication with the ‘vile sin’ of homosexuality and instructions to kill homosexual men ‘like any cur’, so I doubt we’re meant to look favourably upon ‘these ladies’ either. However, some features Murray notes:

* de Fougères shares with canon and secular law a phallo-centric approach to sex: lesbian sex is defined by the absence of a penis.
* HOWEVER, unlike the canon and secular law, he doesn’t presume that lesbians must grow or manufacture penises as substitutes for manly apparatus. If you look at the stanzas above, he’s obviously pointing and laughing at the futility of ‘banging coffin upon coffin’, but he presents his Ladies as perfectly happy without a pestle in their mortar. He think’s they silly and unnatural for not desiring a penis in their sex act, but he does grasp the fact that they don’t want one.

and something I noticed myself, from the last stanza:

* de Fougères also shares with the legal examples Murray gives the assumption that sex involves an active and a passive partner. This meshes nicely with David L. Boyd’s side note, in ‘Sodomy, Misogyny and Displacement’, that medieval sexuality is defined by an active/passive binary, which, for men, meant that the recieving partner in homosexual penetrative sex was debased and shamed, for being made passive and therefore feminised. I wonder how this binary transfers over to lesbian sex? Murray may have addressed it, I’ll have to have a closer look at the article sometime…

In the meantime, happy innuendo, everyone!

Another AElfrician sermon, and a very long one this time. I’ve never translated it myself, so this very abridged version will be based exclusively on the Gunning/Wilkinson translation (ed. Skeat, attrib. to Gunning/Wilkinson only in the preface.)

Once upon a time, in a land far far away, a Roman Emperor named Decius decided he wanted to go down in hagiography as a really spectacular persecutor of Christians. So he got his army together and went down to Ephesus, where he set up idols in the churches and demand that the people make sacrifices with him. Those who would not make sacrifices with him he and his soldiers gathered together and tore to peices; they pulled off all their limbs and made the streets run with their blood; and then they hung the headless corpses from the city walls and stuck their heads on spikes outside the town, as they did with theives. Carrion birds proceeded to come down and pick apart the flesh and gouge out the eyes.

The whole scene, AElfric tells us, was so horrible that all the idols cried out in one voice, telling everyone how much they wanted to leave that place, because of the suffering of the martyrs there. Furthermore, the paving stones on the street cried out in horror, and the walls shook with grief as the martryrs were cut up ‘like stuck swine’.

Meanwhile, seven of the Emperor’s best mates were fretting and worrying over the fate of the Christians (and possibly over their own hides). They spent their days in prayer and grew grey and old with grief (and probably some fear too), and they conveniently arranged to be absent whenever Decius was insisting that more sacrifices by made. However, sooner or later someone noticed their mysterious absence and decided to follow them, and found them praying in a hidden room. The someone trotted back to Decius and said ‘O Emperor, did you know that Maximianus and his six friends are hiding from you and praying funny prayers in a dinky little room instead of making sacrifices?’

‘Now, now, this won’t do,’ said Decius. ‘O Maximianus, why are you so anti-social? Why aren’t you down at the church butchering some animals before the idols, with the rest of us?’ And Maximianus and his six mates came before the Emperor weeping and dressed in sackcloth and ashes, and answered his question with a short speech on trinitarian doctrine and Christian sacrificial practices.

Decius had heard all this before, and was perhaps rather bored with it, because he couldn’t be bothered torturing them all seperately, and instead bound them all together and left them there, unbeheaded and more or less whole.

And since it’s one AM and I have to work tomorrow, I’m going to leave them there until sometime later in the week… Have a nice few days, internets!

Ok, I’m a slack blogger, but some news:

*My Gawain paper went off very well and many helpful questions were asked. I now have to write the blasted thing up, which should be fun, but I’m lazy.

*The whole English Honours conference was fascinating, and I learnt about things like the death of the human subject and was privileged to witness the resurrection of Edgar Allan Poe. I am now convinced I should read some theory (starting with Baarth’s ‘Death of the Author’ and Foucault’s ‘History of Sexuality’), and also read something written after 1350 occaisionally.

YAY HAPPY NEWS:

*I will have an Old English classmate next semester! We will presumably have a proper class time and everything.

SULKY NEWS:

*This no longer means I can do whatever the hell I want for ‘class’.

OMINOUS NEWS:

* The Bocera has decided on an all-Beowulf semester. Aaargh. I HATE Beowulf. I might be a disappointment to Anglo-Saxonism for it, but I detest the thing. I can see, from the translation, how it’s wonderful and fascinating and all of that, and I expect after being forced to study it I will come around. However, I’m bad at poetry, and Beowulf is all that I am bad at poetry for. My translations thereof never, ever, ever make sense; they drive me mad; they make me cranky. Grumble. Don’t wanna.

This paper proposal was accepted to the Australian Early Medieval Association’s conference! I only sent it in last night, so that suggests more about the eagerness of the conference conveners for any sort of paper than it does about the quality of said proposal, I think, but… let us rejoice anyway!

Next bleg: they asked if I wanted to apply for a bursary to attend the conference, and instructed me to send my CV. I have no idea what kind of wank to put in an academic CV. I’ve never given a paper before (although I will on Friday… but that’s for in-department assessment, does it count?), I’ve never published and I’ve never really done anything interesting at all.
What should one put on one’s very first academic CV?¹

(In case you think I’m just blegging the internet when I should ask Wise People, I am going to try to hunt down the Bocera or Lolo to ask them this question as well.)

~

1. What about format? Do any of you have online academic CVs I could look at to get an idea of what kind of layout people use?

Question:

Why is Gawain’s rant against women, at the end of SGGK, reffered to as an ‘anti-feminist diatribe’? I doubt Gawain, or his poet, has any idea what feminism is. You can’t be anti-something that doesn’t exist yet. (Un, yes. I’d pay it as an ‘unfeminist’ diatribe, but no one ever calls men ‘unfeminist’, and it would be a moot point in the fourteenth century anyway.)

Why does ‘feminist’ in this context function as the adjective for ‘relating to women’? What is meant, I assume, is ‘misogynistic’, which is a perfectly good word on its own. Use it, people.

Oh, and Shiela Fisher: the primary right of a feudal lord is not the right to traffic in women. A feudal lord is a feudal lord based on the pact of service and protection between himself and his dependants. Feudal lords traffic in women, yes, but every man and his dog traffics in women- they did so before feudalism developed and continue to do so today. What makes a feudal lord distinct from anyone else around him is his relationship with other men. NER.

This rant is brought to you by Shiela Fisher, ‘Taken Men and Token Women’, in Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Writings ed Fisher and Halley.

Awesome is away (and her cat appears to be stuck under her computer), I’m not seeing the Bocera until next semester, and everyone else has dissapeared for exams/ on their way to Leeds. I’ll try taking this to Old English Reading Group tomorrow, but I shall also put it up here and hope some nice person sees their way clear to telling me if this is an acceptable-looking paper proposal. (The conference in question is entitled ‘Welcoming the Stranger’). It’s nearly a hundred words short of the word limit, but so were the abstracts for last year’s conference.

Legislating for the stranger: Archbishop Wulfstan and King Cnut

Archbishop Wulfstan of York stands out early 11th century England as a lawmaker, homilist and one of the few stable political figures in a period of invasions and great social upheaval. From the time of Æthelred, Wulfstan’s laws and homiletic works show that he was developing a theoretical basis for the ideal Christian society, but it was under the invader Cnut that he found the stability to begin shaping that society. The manuscript Cotton Nero A.i, compiled under Wulfstan’s direction, provided both a sourcebook for Wulfstan as he worked on the great Cnut Codes of 1018, and the resources he needed to hand in order to instruct Cnut and his court about the laws and traditions of Christian England. This paper will examine the relationship between Wulfstan and the stranger on the English throne, and the process by which Wulfstan cast the invader in the role of Christian king over the English, with particular reference to the texts in Cotton Nero A.i.

Along with uprisings and social anxiety, guess what else was going on in the fourteenth century?

An old, rich, well-established although now militarily irrelevant crusader order, the Templars, was being rounded up by the French monarchy (including, amusingly, one Templar rounded up while tax-collecting for the self-same French monarch), being tried, and then re-tried by the papacy, ordered to disband, and disbanding by bits and stages all over Europe (or, in the case of Portugal and Aragon, being staunchly defended by the relevant monarchs and given permission to transmute into national orders) in a process that took half a century.

On Tuesday, I went down with the Centre for Medieval Studies to view the University’s new facsimile of the Templar trial papers. I’m sorry to say they looked just like pieces of faux-vellum and paper to me, but I can now say I’ve seen the handwriting of Pope Clement the Something, at least. The facsimile includes four or five faux-vellum documents, most of which stretched right across the huge veiwing table, and some of which are barely readable. There is also a paper facsimile which consists of the summaries of the French trials, as put together by or for Pope Clement, and including notes in his own handwriting; and there’s a small square document which is the proceedings of the papal trial at Chinon. These last two, I gather, were only recently found, miscatalouged, in the Secret Archive by Barbara Someone-or-Other (sorry for the lack of details, pens aren’t allowed in the Rare Book library so my notes were all made at the end), who was studying paeleography there. Another two of the vellum documents were edited in the 19th century, but according to JP, none of the documents in the facsimile have been used by modern Templar historians. Michael Barber, the big cheese in Templar studies, doesn’t refer to them in his book on the subject, or in the edition (catalogue?) of Templar documents which he and one of his students published more recently.
The facsimile pack also includes a full transcription (including UV transcriptions of the illegible documents), and replica seals of the papal curia.

There’s nothing terribly inflammatory in the documents; they, as the assembled academics remarked in a satisfied fashion, throw a bucket of cold water on the whole Da Vinci Code hullaballoo. (Not that Templar conspiracists will care…) According to JP, who did say he hasn’t had a chance to really look at the documents, Pope Clement was rather suspicious of the confessions garnered from the French trials, and was trying to do the best he could for the Order in a sticky political situation.

Ours is copy number 300 of 799 copies for public sale (Pope Palpatine Benedict got number 800). Neil Boness, the Rare Books Librarian, thinks all 799 probably won’t sell, or won’t sell quickly, due to the high asking price.

The only other thing of interest I noted was that all the academics were standing around nodding solemnly about the scope for a really kick-arse PHD based on these documents. If you’ve an interest in Templars, or in Phillip the Fair, or Pope Clement, or any such thing, get yourself a grad school application for a school which owns a copy of this facsimile. (And if you can’t get Barber for your supervisor, you could do worse than JP, even if his speciality is more in the Crusade direction… just sayin’… There’s a woman in Melbourne who works on the Italian Templar trials, but I believe we have the only copy of the facs. in Australia.)

Dr Nokes posted this clip, from a most hilarious French TV show, about medieval music:

Giggle. Giggle.

And on an entirely unrelated note, Dr Rundkvist posted, as a side note in his notice about an Antro/Archaeo blog carnival, this fascinating tidbit:

The Rota System, from the Old Church Slavic word for “ladder” or “staircase”, was a system of collateral succession practiced (though imperfectly) in Kievan Rus’ and later Appanage and early Muscovite Russia, in which the throne passed not linearly from father to son, but laterally from brother to brother (usually to the fourth brother) and then to the eldest son of the eldest brother who had held the throne. The system was begun by Yaroslav the Wise.

Looks a little like the supposed Pictish succession, from uncle to nephew down the matrilinear line, which, as Michelle has discussed before, may not have been a proper system but an emergency measure.

The Wiki article on the Rota System goes on to say:

The system was begun by Yaroslav the Wise, who assigned each of his sons a principality based on seniority. When the Grand Prince died, the next most senior prince moved to Kiev and all others moved to the principality next up the ladder.[1] Only those princes whose fathers had held the throne were eligible for placement in the rota; those whose fathers predeceased their grandfathers were known as izgoi, “excluded” or “orphaned” princes.

Apparently some scholars doubt this was such an organised system at all, as always. If it were, it would create an interesting mix of sibling and cousin rivalries, and loyalties as well. It would behove a king to treat his nephew or brother well, lest said heir’s succession be artificially accelerated. The king’s *son*, meanwhile, who might see his uncle or cousin as a threat, would be well advised to demonstrate his loyalty thereto in order to survive the years between his father’s succession and his own intact. But what of second sons, who would probably not live long enough to inherit? What of these orphan princes?
Your fourth sons wouldn’t be the expendable end of the royal family, as they would be under direct patrilinear succession systems. Instead, they’d be the ones likely to live long enough to take the throne. How very, very interesting.

I wonder, in this system, how the precedence is worked out? Simply by age? Does your father’s age also count?
Let’s say King A dies, and his throne passes first to his son A1, and then to his son A4, A2 and A3 having died in the meantime. When A4 dies, A1’s eldest son, A1.1, inherits. Presumably he is succeeded by one of his brothers, ≥A1.2, in turn. When ≥A1.2 dies, does the throne necessarily pass back to A1.1.1? Or does it pass to A2.1? if A2.1 were older than ≥A1.2, would he have had seniority on the death of A1.1?
What if A1’s first wife had been barren, and A2.1 were older than A1.1? If the position of princes on the ‘ladder’ were based simply on their age, A2.1 would succeed A2. If on the other hand the system were designed to ensure that each branch of the family had their place on the ladder in turn, he wouldn’t.

I wants to know, precious…

So, my attempt to make Arthurian fudge cookies isn’t going so well. When the recipe says ‘refrigerate for an hour’, but your fridge is full, covering the mixture and putting it outside for a while will only be a suitable substitute if you live somewhere where winter is actually COLD.

And on with the later life of St Aethelthryth! If you recall, we left her two weeks ago, newly proffessed as a nun at Coldingham. One week ago, we looked at her image in the Benedictional of St Aethelwold, in which she appears the right holy sourpuss.

After only a year as a nun, Aethelthryth was appointed abbess at Ely, which, if I recall correctly, was a new foundation at the time. Aelfric tells us she was a mother to many nuns- Mecthild Gretsch, in her book ‘Aelfric and the Cult of Saints’, writes as if everyone knew that Ely in Aethelthryth’s day was a double monastery, but how everyone comes by this information I’m not sure. (It could be Aelfric’s use of the term ‘mynstre’, but I don’t know what the word for convent would be if it were a distinct term…) I also read a theory once- and this was back before I had any idea how to spot a crackpot Anglo-Saxon theory when I saw it- that Ely before Aethelwold refounded it was never a ‘real’ monastery, but a house where Aethelthryth and her sisters and their women retired to live chastely (not unlike the ‘nunnan’, not nuns but consecrated widows, a distinction Sarah Foot makes in her several-volume work, ‘Veiled Women’).

Regardless of the formal arrangements at Ely, Aethelthryth continued to be on her best saintly behavior. She fasted, eating only one meal a day, except for feast days; she prayed alone; she wore woollen clothes. She took a bath only on high feast days, and then only after first bathing everyone else in the convent with her own hands.

Eight years on, she grew a ’swelling’ under her jaw- variously accounted for as a tumour, swollen glands, and a leftover plague buboe. As you do, if you’re a saint, Aethelthryth thanked God for sending her an ‘affliction in her neck’, concluding that it was punishment for having worn necklaces adorning said neck in her youth. ‘And now’, she said, ‘me thinketh that God’s justice may cleanse my guilt, since I now whave this swelling, which shineth instead of gold, and this scorching heat instead of sparkling gems.’ (Trans. in Skeat, which is not, as it turns out, by Skeat, but by Skeat, Gunning and Wilkinson, the two latter ladies having done all the grunt work and Skeat the revision.)

A leech was called to ’shoot’ the swelling, and shoot it he did, ‘and there came out matter’. In spite of this helpful leech, Aethelthryth ‘gloriously departed to God’ on the third day after his ministrations.

Strangely, dying of a tumour qualifies her for an entry in Bede’s Martyrology- the only Anglo-Saxon saint therein, in fact-, which interesting piece of information I found via Michelle of Heavenfield.

Having carked it, Aethethryth was buried in a wooden coffin and remained quiet for sixteen years. After sixteen years, her sister Sexburh, now abbess, decided Aethelthryth belonged inside the church itself, and ordered the brethren- (ah, that’s where the double monastery thing comes in)- off into the fens to look for a nice big stone to make a sargophagus out of. Off they went, rowing their way to Grantchesteter, where they found a coffin-ready made, standing against a wall, made out of white marble. The brethren nicked off with the coffin, declaring it a miracle. This explanation seems to have been acceptable, and no one asked who the coffin might have belonged to in the first place.

Next stop: the graveyard. They pitched a tent over Aethelthryth’s grave and dug her up, singing hymns all the while. Lo and behold, she lay there as if asleep. The leech who had tended her was there, and gave assurance that she looked exactly as she did the day they buried her, save that the wound he had made