What's New: Nothing Much

Yeah. So. Today:

• I had an unprecedented six students come to my office hours. Of those, three wanted to talk about their midterm exams and how they could do better on the final. Oddly, never in eight years at Field College did one of my students come to see me about a past exam...although now that I think about it, I typically only gave final exams, not midterms. That would explain it. Never mind. Anyway, I'm glad to have students--especially those who aren't doing terribly well--stop by for help! But wow, that was a tiring two hours.
• Excitingly, two of the students who came by are thinking about majoring or minoring in Comp Lit. And I signed up two new majors last week. Recruiting, yes! (Most students--undergraduate me included--don't really know what Comp Lit is when they get to college. So our major is smaller than it ought to be.)
• Best news of all: I got my hair cut today, for the first time since July. Amazing how good that feels.

Other news.... Hm. I'm feeling pretty mentally fried and am not even close to accomplishing my overly ambitious research goals for the semester, which were

1. To finish an article for an edited collection (done--this was pretty quick)
2. To revise an article that has been boomeranging around for years now (done, sent to writing group; writing group comments received; now I need to read some more stuff and revise AGAIN before I resubmit it. In my loveliest of dreams, that will happen this semester)
3. To submit an abstract for Kalamazoo (done; accepted)
4. To submit another conference abstract (due next month; not drafted)
5. To revise a chapter of my book draft (not started; this is my lowest writing priority at this point)
6. To write another chapter (what on earth was I thinking? I'm working on one, but I'm about 3500 words in, and I have research to do to write this thing, and probably a research trip, so clearly this won't be written this semester. I am working on it, though, so that's something).

I do need to work on realistic writing goals.

So yeah, that's that. I don't want the semester to end too soon because then I won't be able to believe in the possibility of accomplishing All The Things before December 15 or whenever. And yet, accomplishing the Things will be easier once classes are over. So it goes.

Networking: Another difference between institution types

So I strongly suspect that most of my keen, incisive observations about the differences between my new (public, big, R1) institution and my old (rural, private, tiny, SLAC) institution are pretty freaking obvious, but they still keep smacking me in the face like they're subtle and earth-shattering revelations.

Well, maybe not earth-shattering.

Anyway, one that's occurred to me lately is the ease of networking at this big school, which also happens to be very close to four other schools. At Field, I was the lone medievalist of any kind at the entire college; I was also a half-hour drive from any OTHER college or university, and those others (a couple of community colleges, a state university, and two smaller private universities were within about 45 minutes) weren't really powerhouses in my field. Nor did I have any real "in" at those schools. Nor did I have a great deal of time (or, okay, desire--I'm a little shy) to cultivate such "ins." Nor am I--truth be told--any good AT ALL at networking.

For the longest time--in fact, still now, but I'm fighting it tooth and nail--my inclination, when asked about my research, is to change the subject as quickly as possible. It's probably easiest to just blame that on my thoroughgoing imposter syndrome.

NOW, however, I am in a substantial community of medievalists (from a variety of disciplines, from all five colleges/universities in the area), some of whom are very friendly and have made a point of introducing me around. And there are Events--a series of seminars, for example, that I'm involved with and that brings together scholars from a range of Humanities disciplines from various periods; at our first big meeting this last weekend, I had lunch with an art historian, an English professor, and a religion professor, from three different colleges, all of whom have interests that overlap with mine. (Also an archaeologist, which was cool but less professionally relevant.) This coming week, I'm invited to a dinner with a Big Shot Awesome Medievalist visiting Nearby College, so I will get to talk with her and the other local lit-medievalists who will be attending. And immediately upon arriving on campus I was asked to give a talk this Spring to the local medievalist group (because of a dearth of willing speakers, I suspect).

All of a sudden, I get how people wind up with those prefaces that thank twenty-five thousand people. If you're at a school with a large network of scholars, and that also invites scholars to campus, you will meet more people; you will have circles that can help you think through problems or give feedback on manuscripts; you will (eventually) be invited to submit to collections or give talks or do other cool things of that nature.

I should mention here that the acknowledgements page to my first book thanked, I believe, exactly three other medievalists: my dissertation committee. No, make that five: I also thanked the reviewers.

I still think that I'm not very good at networking. But I'm excited to see how being in an environment that facilitates networking might help me to find a (local, live) scholarly community.

Universe! Enough with the paleography already!

Today I sort of hit a wall. I know, it's only been three days--and when I hit said wall, it had only been two and a half. But sitting quietly in the manuscript room fussing over fourteenth-century Latin abbreviations for two and a half days is not exactly relaxing, trace or no trance.

Essentially, I was tired: I slept badly last night, having been kept awake until almost 2 am by the irrelevant ranting I was doing in my head. Really--I was having long mental arguments over trivial things with people I'm unlikely to even speak to in the next three months, anticipating all kinds of disasters in the upcoming semester, worrying about money when I have no business doing so (chiefly regretting committing to an overseas conference of which the College will only be able to pay half, which means that my savings account will be depleted by about 8%--horrors! Really. Just tell me to shut up), etc. Evidently I have some kind of stress or something. Or perhaps my body is overcompensating for the jetlag? The point is, I was tired.

I also kind of lost direction by mid-day. I'd answered my immediate questions and was casting about for another one; in practice, this meant staring off into space a lot and then idly flipping through a few pages.

At 3:00 or so, I decided to take off. This isn't helpful, I thought. I vowed that I would regroup tomorrow and do something productive.

So, having dropped off my laptop etc., I went to the used bookstore to pick up a novel, since I'm almost done with my fun reading. I settled on Zola's Le Reve, because I had enjoyed Germinal (which I read in English) and it was relatively short.

Off I went, to wander, drink a beer, etc. I was doing quite well with the French and enjoying the story, which--so far--is about a young girl named Angelique who is taken in by a couple, Hubert and Hubertine Hubert (or so I enjoy calling them, to myself, because the characters are individually called Hubert and Hubertine and collectively called les Hubert).

One day, twelve-year-old Angelique stumbles upon--seriously--a 1549 edition of a French translation of Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea. Seriously.

She likes the pictures, at first. And then she confronts the text. I translate, loosely:

The two dense columns of text, whose ink had remained very black upon the yellowed paper, frightened her, because of the barbaric appearance of the Gothic characters. But she got used to it, decoded its characters, understood the abbreviations and the contractions, figured out how to decipher the ancient words; and in the end she read fluently, enchanted as though she had penetrated into a mystery, triumphing over the conquest of each new difficulty.

And then, I kid you not, Zola blathers on for twenty pages about the lives of the saints.

The revisiting of Juliana and Vincent and Stephen and Christina etc etc I can take. But a twelve-year-old reading a sixteenth-century Gothic hand? Please. And, universe, I know that I'm not very good at this--stop rubbing it in.

Apparently I am capable of intense focus

First day at the library. I'm here to look at one manuscript, and I wasn't even sure whether there would be anything of interest therein--I knew that it contained the oldest version of a vita that I've been working on, but knew nothing about this variant or what else was in the codex. Kind of a gamble, eh, for Field to spend upwards of $3000 for me to look at this thing? Sometimes this profession seems beyond absurd.

Anyway, so I get to the library right when it opens, figure out how to get a card (easy), and gain access to my codex. It shows up at about 9:30, after only a 10-minute wait; I use the time to review my edition of the vita and psych myself up. The codex is small and fat, elegantly rebound at some point--not recently, I'd guess, but certainly not in the fourteenth century. I start in.

First: I copy out the table (or rather paragraph) of contents on the first page, trying my best to decode the Gothic rotunda Latin. It's been...a long while since I engaged in anything approximating paleography. I am Rusty. However, it's not too hard to recognize actual Latin words as opposed to the monstrous mistranscriptions I sometimes concoct, so at least I know which words I'm most likely to have misunderstood.

The excitement begins when I spot my vita listed in the ToC. Then: another medieval woman's life! And a bunch of other random vitae and orae, as well as a totally indecipherable name.

Step two: Start looking through the book, page by page, writing down where each text appears. Blah blah blah. No pictures, occasional decorated initial (nothing fancy), plenty of red ink. Finally I reach my Vita. It's not terribly interesting, visually, but does have one intriguing bit of marginalia--intriguing because it suggests an interest in similar vitae, vitae like the unexpected woman's life. Hm. Okay.

Something I can't identify follows my vita. Ho hum.

A few pages later: WHAT IS IT??? I think. Something crazy! A drawing with a big red mandorla-shaped item in the middle, surrounded by words. Later, I come back to this, and figure out that the red splotch is a wound, and that it is made of blood flowing off of the cross above and into a little spindly, flower-decorated cross below. Coolness. And it contains a prayer of some kind that keeps referring to wounds (I need to translate it--can't be more specific yet. My Latin sure does suck, although I'm doing better than I would have expected ). Alas, the writing to the right of the wound is cramped and hard to make out, and the writing surrounding it is virtually illegible. I do my best.

A few pages later: More visual craziness! One page in a totally different hand lists what appear to be numbers of days associated with individual people (Pope So-and-so three years and twelve days, pope such-and-such sixty days, etc.). In the right-hand column are labeled drawings of, for example, a torch, a bleeding heart, and ten footprints in little boxes. I haven't entirely figured this one out yet. Actually, I haven't figured it out at all, but I'm looking forward to doing so.

Oh, and [indecipherable] turns out to be another contemporary female saint. Some kind of pattern might be emerging. Not sure what yet. Something else to follow up on....

"Madame." The librarian is standing in front of me, whispering. "On ferme."

What? No way. They must be closing early, I think. I emerge: It is ten minutes to five. I've been at it since 9:30 (minus the enforced one-hour break for lunch: the library is closed from 1 until 2). How did this happen? My hand, back, and shoulder ache. Good lord. Why can't I work like this all the time? Or at least one day a week?

Library bleg

Has anyone out there done paleographic research at the Royal Library in Brussels? I emailed them some time ago (in French, even) about what I'd need to get in to look at a manuscript, and haven't heard back. If you know it--or have done similar research at similar libraries--what credentials, paperwork, etc. does one need to get in there and look at the old stuff?