It’s That Time of Year Again

Every year, in the second week of May, 3000+ medievalists descend on Kalamazoo, MI for the International Congress on Medieval Studies.

No, we most of us don’t dress up.

K’zoo plays host to hundreds of sessions showcasing papers by everyone from terrified undergrads to the world’s most eminent medievalists. It’s a chance to present your work, discuss brilliant new ideas, and make new connections that will last you for your entire career. And, of course, to see your entire bibliography rocking out to 80s tunes at the fabled Saturday night Dance.

Wednesday is Arrival Day, and after 18 hours of travel, 24 of being awake, and a valiant and nearly triumphant fight against the Bernhard printers (sadly, they got the best of us in the end…), I am very ready to sleep and recharge for a great day of sessions tomorrow.

This is the first Congress for the blog, and I’m not entirely sure whether we’ll be consistently blogging it. However, the folks over at Medievalists.net usually have fantastic conference live blogs, so do keep an eye on their site!

And, of course, don’t forget to watch #Kzoo2012 for updates.

Good Health & Anglo-Saxons…And A Little Lead Poisoning

So it turns out that Anglo-Saxons were actually quite healthy, comparatively. There was more infectious disease than in the Roman period, but anaemia, dental, and joint disease all decreased, and were lower than in the medieval period that followed. Stature was also higher than in either the Roman or Medieval period, and I believe life span was also longer, though I’ll have to check on that. All of this at least suggests access to a better diet – it has been suggested that good dental health at Wearmouth and Jarrow was due to the large amount of seafood (containing fluoride) in their diet – and possibly better living conditions.

The data is from Health and Disease in Britain: From Prehistory to the Present Day, by Margaret Cox and Charlotte Roberts. The Anglo-Saxon section is based on an analysis of 7,122 burials from mostly the early Anglo-Saxon period, so assuming that their numbers are accurate, and allowing for how spotty archaeological information is in general, their findings are actually quite statistically significant.

So much for the ‘Dark Ages.’

On the other hand, there was so much lead at Wearmouth & Jarrow from both the construction and industry that went on at the sites, that skeletons recovered from them contained between 87 and 3083 (!!!) parts per million of lead. Compare this to the normal range of 220ppm. That’s 14 times the normal concentration! To be fair, some of the lead could have leached into the samples from the soil, but Calvin Wells, who did most of the original paleopathology, doesn’t seem to think so (see Roberts & Cox, 175).

A Semantic Pet Peeve

As Medievalists, we get the short end of the stick. Our discipline is only defined in relation to others. Indeed, the very name is a derogatory relegation to secondary importance, a placeholder between the Classical era and the Renaissance. This has annoyed me for some time, so I have decided to take the time to rant.

For those who are unaware, the Middle Ages (If you call them the dark ages, I will find you) were characterised by a dominant ideology defined by the Roman Church. However, the simple dismissal of this as making the era backward or irrelevant is ignorance. The notion seems to be that a homogenous perspective is all to be found. This is false. Of course, part of the problem is also the idea that, since the Renaissance was the rebirth of Classical culture in Europe, anything not of Greek and Roman origin is valueless. As a result, a period of nearly a millennium is dismissed as nothing more than a good source for fantasy novels and Monty Python humour (For the record, Terry Jones is a Medievalist, and a funny one, at that). From a literary standpoint, some of the most poignant and subversive poetry I have read was written during this period. Poems like The Wanderer, The Seafarer and Beowulf capture the melancholy of loss and the desire for the eternal in such powerful ways. Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales skewers the hypocrisy of the dominant authority, turning its own discourse back on itself.

This is just a quick temper tantrum, er, comment on something that bugs me. Thanks for reading.

Also, just so you know, Beowulf would totally kill Achilles. Who needs weapons when you can rip someone’s arms off and beat them to death with them? I doubt the protection from the Styx will aid with blunt force trauma when the weapon is your own limbs. Just saying…

A Scribe and His Cat

The Reichenauer Schulheft manuscript is really interesting because of the lines you see at the bottom of the verso (on the left here) page of this spread:

It’s a piece of marginalia (i.e. something written into an empty space around the main text) in Old Irish. About a cat. Specifically, a white cat named Pangur. Here is a translation, from here (the website also has a transcription and reading of the Old Irish by Máire Ní Mhaonaigh). Thanks to Silva Nurmio for the link. You can see the version I had posted originally below.

I and white Pangur
practise each of us his special art:
his mind is set on hunting,
my mind on my special craft.

I love (it is better than all fame) to be quiet
beside my book, diligently pursuing knowledge.
White Pangur does not envy me:
he loves his childish craft.

When the two of us (this tale never wearies us) are
alone together in our house,
we have something to which we may apply our skill,
an endless sport.

It is usual, at times, as a result of warlike battlings,
for a mouse to stick in his net.
For my part, into my net
falls some difficult rule of hard meaning.

He directs his bright eye
against an enclosing wall.
Though my clear eye is very weak
I direct it against keenness of knowledge.

He is joyful with swift movement
when a mouse sticks in his sharp paw.
I too am joyful
when I understand a dearly loved difficult problem.

Thought we be thus at any time,
neither of us hinders the other:
each of us likes his craft,
severally rejoicing in them.

He it is who is master for himself
of the work which he does every day.
I can perform my own work
directed at understanding clearly what is difficult.
Translation from: Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Lyrics

The historical value is obvious, but let’s face it, we like it because it’s adorable. A monastery must have been a great place for a cat: mice, big houses and lands to play in, and monks to feed and cuddle you when they get bored/tired of their work.

The poem’s deeper allegorical meanings aside, we forget sometimes that monks were people too. That they got tired of their work sometimes, that they found certain things difficult, that they liked to watch kittens play with mice.

The same thing occurs in another manscript, where in pen trials (doodles or short marginal lines to ensure the pen works properly on that particular piece of vellum) a monk complains about bad weather, bad parchment, his aching back, etc. etc. A list of these was floating around Twitter a few weeks ago.

Talk about the human element.

If you’re interested in more marginalia (and even more kitty marginalia!) check out the series over at Got Medieval.

I leave you with Monk Cat:

[Here's the translation, from here, that I had posted originally.

I and white Felix,
each of us two (keeps) at his specialty:
his mind is set on hunting,
my mind on my special subject.

I love (it is better than all fame)
to be quiet beside my book, with persistent inquiry.
Not envious of me White Felix;
_he_ loves his childish art.

When we two are (tale without boredom)
alone in our house,
we have something to which we may apply our skill,
an endless sport.

It is customary at times for a mouse to stick in his net,
as a result of warlike struggles (feats of valor).
For my part, into _my_ net falls
some difficult crux of hard meaning.

He directs his bright perfect eye
against an enclosing wall.
Though my (once) clear eye is very weak
I direct it against acuteness of knowledge.

He is joyful with swift movement
when a mouse sticks in his sharp claw.
I too am joyful
when I understand a dearly loved difficult question.

Though we are always like this,
neither of us bothers the other:
each of us likes his craft,
rejoicing alone each in his.

He it is who is master for himself
of the work which he does every day.
I can perform my own task,
directed toward understanding clearly that which is difficult.]

 

New Manuscript Fragments at Rolduc Abbey

I’ve blogged before about the amazing palaeographical work happening over at the “Turning Over A New Leaf” project in Leiden. This week, Dr. Kwakkel and some of his students are at Rolduc Abbey hunting for medieval manuscript fragments – and live-tweeting their discoveries.

According to Kwakkel’s feed, the abbey library contains 200,000 uncatalogued volumes, many of which seem to contain medieval fragments in the bindings. So far, the team have found many fragements, and including two full folia of a 13th C. Justinian Digest (a part of the Corpus Iuris Civilis, the law code issued by Justinian in the 6th century), and some illuminated letters.

Do take a look at Kwakkel’s feed and #rolduc212, which post discoveries as they happen, along with pictures. Also take a look at the blog post about the hunt on the Turning Over A New Leaf site.

Studying Suffering

In the insightful post below, Julia mentioned that her scholarly interest in death, disease, and burial might make her seem psychopathic. My interests often lie in the realm of torture, suffering, and pain, which also makes me seem a bit psychologically weird. I love working on saints, especially the virgin martyrs, who often experienced horrifying tortures.

I don’t actually think very often about why these particular areas interest me, but upon brief self-reflection, I think one of the attractions of studies such as these is the distance at which they lie from our comfortable modern lives in which we often come into very little contact with anything discomforting or painful. I am especially interested in the connection between religious belief and people’s willingness and even desire to suffer. Certainly, we see this even today, but I do see something exotic and other in suffering. I don’t think it’s merely the difference that draws me to this study, though.

There is something at stake in studying the uncomfortable parts of human life. If we can understand for what reasons medieval people purposefully suffered, perhaps we can learn something about the human psyche, even about our modern minds that are seemingly so remote from the medieval.

We Study Human Beings

Today I attended a seminar where a few truly remarkable people talked about their life experiences. One of them was a doctor, who did a few years of residency in New York before becoming interested in medical administration, and deciding to do a PhD in Cambridge.

Her talk was about what happens when doctors have an end of life conversation with their patients. She talked about the incredibly complex emotions that go in to both those conversations and the decisions that come out of them. Her presentation was gut-wrenching.

What struck me was that I work with the dead on a daily basis. Just the other week, I sorted through information about 500 skeletons from a dig at Wearmouth and Jarrow. I looked at they way they were buried, I looked at pictures of graves. They affected me, especially pictures of freshly unearthed skeletons, but they did not affect me nearly as much as hearing her talk today, even though the dying, in both cases, are complete strangers to me.

I wonder what this means. On the one hand, having that separation, being able to look at medieval skeletons and forget that they felt, and loved, and hated, and felt pain, is what makes it possible to do the research we do. On the other hand the people we study did feel, did love, and did hate – can we really understand them, what they did and why they did it, while separating ourselves?

Children are different. The first research project I ever carried out was on anomalies in the burial of infants and children in Anglo-Saxon England. My parents were horrified. When I told one of my professors that I was working on this – a professor who has two young children himself – he visibly shuddered. The reason I really want to get back to this research fairly soon is that I know I will never bring myself to come back to it when I have children of my own.

On the other hand, the most important lesson I have learned from that same professor is that we study human beings. Human beings in the full force of that word, who felt and loved and were capable of completely irrational actions because they were, in the end, human. Like you and I. Being able to separate myself, for now, means that I can study them and their burials – but can I possibly understand them?

Then again, bizarrely, one of the main debates in the study of infants and children is the question of whether medieval parents loved their children – a debate carried on by researchers who, I would presume, have children of their own. So in the end, does being able to relate, to see our subjects as human, really make a difference at all?

It should also be said that we are not exactly saving lives here – is there even a point in trying to relate to our subjects so deeply? Or is it just a pointless (and slightly vain) exercise?

The one blessing of working with Anglo-Saxons is that they were perfectly clear on one fact: they wanted their memories to live on, and they wanted their burials to be a reminder of themselves for posterity. At least when we uncover their graves, take their bones to a lab, and study them, we know that we are doing more or less what they wanted.

[...Though this is slightly tangential, on rereading this post I've realized my predilection for studying disease, death and burial makes me sound ever so slightly psychopathic. So, let me explain why I am interested in it: I believe that we cannot understand how people live, or why they do the things they do, unless we grasp how they understand their own death. Life and death, sickness and disease, are the most basic, most defining facts of life. This is especially true in the Middle Ages, when one's fate in the afterlife was so much more important than anything that happened on earth.

There is a theory that one of the reasons Woodrow Wilson was unable to get his Fourteen Points fully included in the Treaty of Versailles was that he came down with the flu, and was too weak to argue for them persuasively. His medieval counterpart is Pope Gregory the Great, who mentions the crippling effect of his stomach pains in so many of his letters. Unless we can understand in what ways people were held back by their bodies, and how they understood the terms of their life, how can we possibly understand their actions?]