Who'da thunk it?

So apparently, I’m “literati”. Yes, that is according to an email I received recently informing me that I’ve been included on this list of the “100 best blogs for the literati”. And they weren’t even asking me for my bank account details (though to be fair, the message was sandwiched between two emails from a very nice person in Nigeria.)

The site says -

“If you feel that you’re destined to be an intellectual long after you graduate from college, you’re going to have to work a little harder to keep up with high brow culture and scholarly debates on your own. These 100 blogs will help you jump in on the discussions influencing the art, literature, political and culture worlds, even without the support of your professors and fellow classmates.”

I have just two things to say about this:

1. I’m in good company. The other blogs in the History section include the excellent book history blogs Wynken de Worde and Bookn3rd, both favourites of mine. Check them out if you haven’t already.

2. High brow culture?? Wait till they see what I’ve got in store for you next week…

Take that, cultural imperialists!

I’m relieved to see that Google has been forced to see sense on its Google Books digitisation project and concede to a fairer settlement with rights holders. Google promoted its plan to digitise the world’s books and make them freely available online as a magnanimous gesture to education the world over. Unfortunately, the original out-of-court Google Books Settlement disregarded the claims of non-US rights-holders, and had authors and publishers in New Zealand (and a lot of other countries) crying ‘cultural imperialism!’

The attitude that ‘if it’s not currently sold in the US it’s free for the taking’ really got Kiwi writers’ hackles up. (Though it was the pressure put on by the EU and its individual members - France and Germany made formal complaints - that probably made Google back down.)

As the NZ Press Association explained the original deal back in August -

“If a book is not generally available for sale in the US, even though it is widely available elsewhere, it is considered out of print and Google can display excerpts without consent…. It has digitised books by Janet Frame, Hone Tuwhare, Sir Edmund Hillary, Witi Ihimaera, Michael King, James K Baxter and Keri Hulme, all without any permission from anyone.”

These are best-selling, iconic New Zealand authors, whose books are all currently in print and widely available in this country. Just because mainstream US booksellers have not seen any value in stocking them does not make them ‘out of print’ and therefore freely available for Google to do with them what it likes.

Further, while authors and publishers could opt out, asking that their books not be included as part of the digitisation project, “Google was under no obligation to agree to that request. The rights-holder then had the right to take their chances and sue the multi-billion dollar company.”

Yeah, good luck with that, tiny NZ publishing house. New Zealand authors would fare even less well. The local market is so small that even best-selling authors sometimes need to do the odd bit of corporate huckstering to pay the mortgage. There are still some significant problems with the revised settlement (here’s a good analysis), but at least Google has been stopped in its book-plundering tracks and forced to recognise that the world of publishing does not begin and end at the US border.

Inside my brain

Check this out. It’s a Wordle, a graphical representation of this blog showing which words get used the most and relative relationships between different terms. You can basically consider it as a picture of what may be going on inside my brain at any given moment (or at least the stuff that’s fit for public consumption).


I like the quirkily appropriate way some of the associations are working here. Note, for example, the bundle ‘political violence state’ in the upper left quadrant, and at bottom left, ‘Christians bad’ (this is how I felt when the door-to-door Catholics recently came calling while I was studying for my final exam). At top right, we have ‘analysis pain’ and ‘connect better’, which I could read as either a set of instructions to myself or a whimper of despair, depending on how my research is going. And in the middle, the ‘Times Muslims experience’ sounds like I’m advertising an odd sort of son-et-lumière show.

I don’t know if I should thank Jliedl or curse her for the link, given the time I’ve frittered away playing with this toy over the last week or so. Meanwhile, someone more insightful than I am has been considering the Wordle as teaching tool and gateway drug to textual analysis. Over at Muhlberger’s Early History, some unexpected results were obtained by running the text of Geoffroi de Charny’s 14th century book of questions on war through the Wordle generator. Muhlberger notes, ‘I am not surprised that "Charny" and "arms" are big; but I am rather taken aback by the size of "prisoner" and the near invisibility of "knight."’

I might try this out on some of my corporate clients. It would be a great way of hammering home the point I’m always trying to make, which is that they spend way, WAY too much time talking about themselves.

ETA a correction to the name of the Charny text.

Reminder: Carnivalesque ancient/medieval All Hallows Eve edition

The All Hallows Eve ancient/medieval edition of Carnivalesque will be hosted here at Bavardess on October 31.

There’s still time to nominate your favourite ancient/medieval posts from September and October by completing the form here, or by emailing me directly on bavardess AT gmail DOT com.

And thanks to everyone who’s already sent in nominations - they’ve led me to discover some interesting new blogs this month!

CFPosts: Carnivalesque ancient/medieval All Hallows Eve edition

The All Hallows Eve ancient/medieval edition of Carnivalesque will be hosted here at Bavardess on October 31.

In this edition, Carnivalesque will traverse the worlds of the living and the dead to explore tales of mystics and monsters, saints and spirits, zombies, gasts, ghouls, myths, beliefs, fears and fancies…

Nominate your favourite ancient/medieval posts from September and October by completing the nomination form here, or by emailing me directly on bavardess AT gmail DOT com.

And please spread the word through your own blog if you wish.

Skelly-tun and friend are from a French Book of Hours, ca. 1470. Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.167.

Researching medieval soldiers

A quickie post from me today, as I’m madly trying to do research for a seminar and paper due early in September, and I need to get a couple of weeks of skiing in between now and then.

For those of you who, like me, have to work at a distance from the major UK and US archives, I’ve just discovered ResearchBuzz. This useful-looking site aggregates new information on search engines, online databases and other sources of digital information (including maps and image databases, by the looks of it). They’re not all history-related, but a recent post advised of a new online database of 90,000-odd soldiers who served in the Hundred Years War (1369 – 1453), assembled by researchers at the universities of Reading and Southampton. Related links point to online sources for York Castle Prison records, Great Reform Act plans for Scotland and other such history-related goodies.

I’m going to have a trawl around later this week and see what the database on medieval soldiers is like, so I’ll report back on that and on any other useful links I find. In the meantime, if you’ve got any favourite online databases of historical records (especially for the fourteenth – sixteenth centuries in England or France), please share them with me!

A round-up of things (mostly) medieval

I’m in the throes of writing a paper this week and haven’t had much time for musing. So, in lieu of a proper post, here’s a quick round-up of interesting things-historical from elsewhere in the webosphere.

The Guardian considers supposed fear of protest harboured by British politicians, putting recent incidents into a longer historical context which incorporates the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, the 1688 Glorious Revolution (so-called), and Chartist protests in the nineteenth century.

Over in A Corner of Tenth Century Europe, there is a fascinating post that sheds a different light on power structures in 10thC Normandy, pointing to the possibility of heretofore-unconsidered Viking princes operating there independently of the Norman lords.

To continue the theme of power and its uses/abuses, Magistra et Mater has been doing a great series summarising a recent conference dedicated to the historian Pauline Stafford. Stafford’s interests include queenship, family and ‘female lordship’, and Magistra’s posts cover some interesting new scholarship on violence, power and gender in medieval Europe. There’s lots of good stuff here that I’ll be coming back to in a later post (when I have time to write it!).

Clio Bluestocking has a typically insightful post about how the ‘self-help’ culture is producing students with some pretty strange ideas about the abolitionist movement and slavery in the United States.

Closer to home, the winter lecture series at Auckland University is promising to “remove the black singlet ‘straightjacket’ on our history”. Other topics will include the Maori ‘renaissance’, New Zealand at war, and the role of Empire. Also –

It will be argued that “the rebranding of old stuff as trendy and desirable” demonstrates widespread interest in our history. Moreover professional historians cannot ignore the popularity of events such as art deco weekends and medieval jousting tournaments.

Finally, if you’re lucky enough to be visiting New York anytime soon, the Morgan Library & Museum – home of some of the beautiful and quirky illuminations featured as Mmm…marginalia at Got Medieval – is holding an exhibition called ‘Pages of Gold: Medieval Illuminations from the Morgan’.

According to The New York Times, “This quietly compelling show assembles ‘orphan’ leaves (illuminated pages separated from medieval manuscripts and sold, individually, to collectors). Organized geographically, the show allows a comparison of illumination styles in England, Italy, Spain and other countries and regions. It also highlights the figures who created and participated in the market for single leaves. They include an Italian abbot, an English art historian and a mysterious artist known as the Spanish Forger.” Sounds intriguing, yes? If you get a chance to check it out, please report back!

Silencing and the sexual slur

Last month, I wrote about the issue of gendering public space and how tactics used to constrain and silence people in the physical world have emerged in the online world, often in distinctly gendered forms. I had a number of replies, both in the comments here and via email, recounting personal experiences of this. I also received this comment:

For better or for worse, crude sexualised insults are part of the blogosphere's vernacular... The correctness or otherwise of insisting on sanitised discourse is worth pondering.

And ponder I did. Was I being a hopeless idealist? Or simply talking out of my ass? (My commenter, who is an IRL friend, would probably vouch for the latter and then prescribe a calming glass of pinot gris). Perhaps I didn’t make my point clearly enough, leading my commenter to assume I’m advocating some sort of censorship. I’m not. Quite the opposite, in fact. I understand very well that censorship has always been the servant of political, social and cultural oppression. But when people scorn a valid argument or silence the speaker by using humiliation or intimidation, or by wilfully misrepresenting what was said, that is a form of censorship, albeit an informal one. What else can it be called when power is deliberately wielded to deter others from voicing their opinions or beliefs, whether the forum is real or virtual?

Maybe it’s my naturally rebellious side, but I’m also bothered by the notion that just because something exists (crude sexualised insults in the blogosphere) that is the way it must be and we should all just lump it. Crude sexualised insults used to be much more widely accepted as part of normal workplace culture, too. They function as a way to police boundaries and enforce hierarchy, and things only change because people get to the point where they refuse to passively accept it, “like it or not”.

Passive acceptance is what enables a mass media culture (I almost wrote ‘ass media’ there – Freudian slip much??) that is governed by the lowest common denominator, where intellect is openly mocked and political debate is reduced to facile sound bites and vacuous rhetoric. Really, how low does the lowest common denominator need to get before we stop placidly tolerating it? Frankly, I’m with Howard Beale: "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

Let me be clear here. I’m not talking about common or garden variety swearing (to object to that would make me a hypocrite of the highest order). Nor am I offended by sexual banter per se: It can be plenty of fun to indulge in when it’s exchanged between people operating on a basis of equal power and mutual consent. But sexualised language becomes more problematic when it’s used to construct and perpetuate unequal relationships of power. The sexual slur has always played a potent role in political and social discourse because it is so effective at achieving this end. As one demonstration this effectiveness, consider the scandalous, scurrilous and downright pornographic pamphlets produced about Marie Antoinette and other hated representatives of the ancien regime. Their accusations and lurid portrayals were generally ludicrous (and frequently physically impossible except on the part of a contortionist – or maybe I’m just not as flexible as I used to be). But this highly sexualised polemic, particularly that directed against the queen, played a critical strategic role in the French Revolution and, especially, in The Terror of 1793-4*.

All of this is to say that the sexual epithet is rarely transparent or simple. It carries with it a host of deeper claims – often the unconscious products of gender, race and/or class privilege – about who can and cannot hold power.

When we bridle at such usage, either online or in the real world, we’re usually told to let it slide or that we should ‘lighten up’ and ‘get a sense of humour’. Sometimes, ignoring it or walking away is the best course of action, especially when it’s an argument you know you can’t win (cue the old adage about refusing to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent). But not always. Sometimes we need to expose and confront the claims that inhere in sexualised insults, to refuse to brush them off as ‘just jokes’. Sometimes, we need to challenge ourselves to think more deeply about the potency of language to create and define our realities. And then we need to ask ourselves if those are the realities within which we truly want to exist.

* For more on this, check out the excellent book Marie Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen

Textual interventions and medieval mashups

Social media expert Chris Brogan has a post up this week reflecting on the “next media company” and the transformations of traditional media being rendered by Web 2.0. In this new world, content is no longer delivered via a one-way relationship to a passive audience, but is produced, reproduced, added to and changed by many different reader-writers. In this process, publication is merely the first step rather than the last. Signification is ever evolving and morphing, and meaning is inherently unstable and slippery, as it is in all texts. (I use the term ‘text’ here in the sense that literary theorist Roland Barthes expresses it, wherein everything that is interpreted comprises a text, not just the written word.)

As I read Brogan’s post, I had a distinct feeling of déjà vu. It all started sounding like the process of copying, recopying, annotating, excising and interpolating that was integral to the production of medieval manuscripts. Anyone working with these texts must get to grips not only with their primary content, but with the acts of erasure, addition and change (both deliberate and inadvertent) carried out by each hand they passed through. The annotations that mark the margins of these works – both words and images – tell their own stories and serve their own ends. Each new encounter between text and reader generates new interpretations from a variety of perspectives (geographical, temporal, cultural, political and social), subtly shifting meanings or even rendering new meanings that directly conflict with the original writer’s purposes.

Take, for example, The Book of Margery Kempe. Probably written in the early 1430s, this is widely regarded as the first autobiography in vernacular English. It purports to be the story of a moderately well-off Englishwoman’s transformation from conventional wife and mother into edgy religious mystic, after a spiritual crisis sparked by the birth of her first child. Both its creation and its reception – by contemporary audiences (as reported by the author herself) and by later readers – have been the source of perennial controversy. Margery claims to be illiterate, so is the book actually the creative product of male scribes? Or are these priestly scribes a cover, which she uses to shield herself from charges of heresy or to claim a spiritual authority which was elusive for women in the Middle Ages? Is the Book a work of authentic religious mysticism? A subversive social and political commentary on Lancastrian England? Or the ravings of a woman suffering post-natal depression and ‘feminine hysteria’ because she can’t fit herself to the traditional stereotype of wife and mother? (It won’t surprise you to know that the latter interpretation has been depressingly common amongst male scholars.)

The treatment of the text itself has been integral to the many ways it has been interpreted. In 1501, the printer Wynkyn de Worde included extracts in a devotional work aimed at lay readers. Because only the least controversial passages were reproduced, religious scholars and historians who based their interpretations on this version dismissed the writer as a conventionally pious and not terribly interesting person who could certainly not be classed a mystic or spiritual leader (not least because she was a married woman and a mother, and was therefore unable to claim the state of virginity that conferred authority on other female mystics).

The Wynkyn de Worde text was the best-known account of Margery’s experience until the rediscovery of a full manuscript copy of the Book in 1934. This manuscript was originally in the possession of the Carthusian monks of Mount Grace Priory in Yorkshire, a particularly austere and spiritual house. Throughout, it is amended and annotated by several hands, of which at least two appear to be monks from the priory. Their interventions place Margery’s text into a broader framework of late medieval devotional piety and affective spiritual expression, and indicate that this deeply religious male readership regarded Margery as a genuine mystic.

In a number of cases, the second monkish commentator (early sixteenth century) interacts with and reinterprets not only the original text, but also the annotations of the first commentator (fifteenth century), effectively creating texts-within-texts. The commentators have also added their own illustrations, perhaps designed to guide interpretation by later readers. One of these is a small but detailed drawing of a tower, commonly used in medieval iconography to represent virginity. The image can be read to signify that for these monks, Margery’s own claim to be ‘a virgin in her soul’ – to have reclaimed spiritual virginity as a sign of God’s grace – was authentic and not the product of hysteria, wishful thinking or an unseemly (feminine) desire for attention.

But the added marginalia point to conflict, tension and ambiguity as well as endorsement. One commentator inserted marginal instructions for reading the text that put its chapters into a different sequence from that in the Book as originally written. He has also drawn common devotional symbols such as the (sacred) heart and the flame (of divine love) alongside passages that describe some of Margery’s more extreme and dramatic expressions of piety (which included uncontrolled crying, being struck dumb, and ‘roaring’). These drawings could be read either as signs of the commentator’s empathy with Margery’s unusual experience of the divine, or as his attempt to produce readings that filter her account through the lens of more conventional devotional practice, thus sanitising her mystical experience and shaping it to fit an accepted formula.

In the history of The Book of Margery Kempe and its many readings, we have a classic exemplar of the marginalia and annotations in medieval manuscripts – the emendations, excisions, redactions and interpolations – being as critical to producing meanings as is the central or primary text itself. The medieval reader/annotator/writer was acutely aware that manuscripts – rare and precious as they were – were communal products and their textual interpretation was an active and collaborative process rather than a matter of passive reception of fixed meanings. In this medieval ‘mash up’ of text, marginalia and images, significations were constantly being shifted, subverted, reinterpreted and recreated to fit the changing needs and expectations of diverse communities.

So all this has me wondering, is this ‘next media’ or ‘new media’ culture we're starting to engage in really so new? Or can it be seen as the evolution of very old practices that have simply been made more visible – and, it must be said, much more accessible – by a universe of new tools?

Surfing and scholarship

As someone whose historical research interests centre on late medieval/early modern England and France, I can sometimes feel a little isolated in my far-flung post-colonial corner of the world. But lately, I find myself constantly delighted by the many ways the web is dissolving both geographical and temporal barriers. I can access ever-growing digital collections of documents and texts dating back to the twelfth century, making it possible to undertake original research without leaving my study. And there are some beautiful sites where I can view photographic images of medieval manuscripts, invaluable because they show not just the primary content but also the marginalia and annotations that provide critical clues to the history, interpretation, dissemination and multiple purposes of a particular text. (For a quirky example, see this tale of two lions and the change of noble ownership they represent.)

And through the self-publishing miracle that is the blog, I’ve been able to make contact with some of the leading scholars in my areas of interest. I’ve participated in challenging discussions about specific historical interpretations and theoretical approaches; and I’ve debated the roles – both real and ideal – of the historical profession in contemporary society. Most recently, I’ve come across the innovative Carnivalesque project, which each month showcases a selection of recent posts on ancient, medieval and early modern history from professors, graduate students and independent scholars. Writers nominate their own or others' best posts for inclusion and hosting moves to a different blog with each edition, providing a variety of perspectives on the monthly theme. It’s not constrained by the rigorous peer review process (and glacial publishing timelines) of a traditional academic journal, but it is a credible forum where dubious scholarship or poorly supported claims will be quickly challenged by people who are experts in their fields.

There are loads of good blogs on medieval and early modern history, from the serious-minded – where posts often feature an impressive depth of detail and careful interpretation reminiscent of scholarly articles – to the hilariously light-hearted (Got Medieval and Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog spring to mind). I’ll soon be adding my own favourites to this site, so you’ll be able to check them out for yourself. Nominations are also welcome, as I’d hate to think I’m missing out on any gems!

Picture credit: Crusade scene from the Hours of Pierre de Bosredont, France, ca.1465 (Pierpont Morgan Library)

Gendering public space: Battle is joined online

Gendered control of public space has long functioned as a way of marginalising women and enforcing hierarchical power structures that privilege the masculine. In medieval Europe such control was often institutionalised, with town regulations dictating curfews while sumptuary laws imposed regulations on women’s clothing. The overt threat of rape and other forms of sexual violence was also used to deter women from going out in public without a male escort – usually a husband, father or brother who had legal and moral authority over them.

We might think, ‘phew, thank god we’ve moved on from those bad old days’, but this article makes me wonder (yet again) how much that is really the case. Linked on Digg, Fast Company’s story about the most influential women in Web 2.0 drew comments from the dismissive (“there are no women on the web”) to the outright hostile, with crude sexualised insults being the order of the day. The aspect that bothered me most was the barely veiled masculinised aggression, the attitude that ‘this is OUR space and if you women dare to tread here, you will get what you deserve’.

I’m tempted to say Digg represents the atypical views of an insular community of techy geeks who are externalising fears about their own sexual and social inadequacy, but I don’t think it’s as simple or as isolated as that. I’ve seen this type of behaviour on a number of blogs I frequent run by women historians (for example, the excellent Historiann: History and sexual politics 1492 to the present). It seems that simply stating one is a feminist is an intolerable provocation for the men (presumably, from their screen names) that occasionally turn up there not to engage in reasoned, intelligent debate, but to insult and bully in an attempt to silence.

How did this happen? It seems that in the virtual public space of the twenty-first century, women are having to fight the same old battles to be heard, to be respected, to be taken seriously and to be safe from sexual harassment and aggression that we have had to fight over centuries in the real world. At first, the realisation depressed me. But depression was quickly superseded by rage. The web and its new crop of social media tools offer enormous promise to promote human rights across national borders and to give the voiceless a place to speak out. But this promise isn’t going to be realised if we back down in the face of aggression - whether overt or implicit - from those who would seek to replicate in the virtual world the same inequities and barriers that we are struggling to dismantle in the real world. If as a female, you’ve met with this type of silencing tactic online, I’d be interested in hearing about your experience. And regardless of your political position or your gender, if you witness this sort of behaviour being used to try to exclude people from a virtual public space, don’t let it pass unchallenged.