someday I shall once again talk about something that isn't academic, but it ain't today

I just had a legit moment of "History! There's too goddamn much of it!" Which is right up there with the time last year when I was sitting in class and honest to goodness thought, "History is just one damned thing after another," after the one more Gallic invasion in a long succession of Gallic invasions.

I need to do another (another!) prospectus for my medieval religious culture tutorial, so I went in to browse through the religion section in Tilton (Library of Congress call numbers roughly BR-BX, at least for Christianity, with unexpected surprises in the middle). THERE ARE A LOT OF BOOKS ON RELIGION which should come as no surprise to anybody. And it's not like there's a section that's just medieval Christianity; I went shelf by shelf for an hour, discounting anything that was ancient, early modern, Renaissance, or modern (we did one week on Late Antiquity, so I think that counts for the class), anything that wasn't European (why couldn't I find more books on Italy, but there were shelves and shelves of books on England?), anything that was theology (I can't handle theology, and really shouldn't try), and anything that immediately looked like doing quite a bit of reading on it would bore me to death or infuriate me (I'm so over saints and persecution, y'all). I'm not sure about how I feel about monks right now, either. We haven't done anything with the Crusades in class, but I think it's something to consider.

I'm also having this weird backlash against doing something with nuns or women, because on the one hand, well, that could be interesting (on the flip side, why can I find a few dozen books on nuns in medieval England, but the only ones I can find on Italian nuns are Renaissance/Early Modern?), but the backlash comes where some part of my brain goes, "Doing women is such a cop-out, it's like you're not even trying to find an interesting topic and you're just defaulting to women's history!" And then another part of my brain goes, "You are perpetuating the hegemony by thinking that!"

I wonder if something with the late medieval papacy would be relevant to the class. We really haven't talked much about the papacy except in passing -- maybe because it's not so much a part of the mainstream culture? I mean, like I said above, we didn't talk about the Crusades at all; we've done quite a lot on persecution, saints and cults of the saints, images, texts and exegeses, but that's really more of the day to day, instead of the extraordinary. Hmm. Or! I could do my usual classical lit thing, since there was quite a bit of Christian interpretation of classical literature back in the day. Or I could go back to Late Antiquity and prod more at the thing that really interested in Peter Brown's book, which was the figuring of Christian beliefs and social order in the terms of Late Roman social culture. I'm just not sure how much research has already been done on that.

Well, it's good to have options.

(no subject)

Looking at graduate schools mostly has the adverse effect of convincing me that I will never get into graduate school. *curls up in corner*

(If I could settle on a program, that would be GREAT. I might be able to get into a MA program in Classics at a school that only offers the MA -- so far I've found Notre Dame and Boston College; I have also been strongly advised to look at MA or MPhil programs in the U.K. -- I think I could get into a grad program in History; I found a lovely program in Renaissance Studies with a concentration in Classical Studies that, unfortunately, I would have to get into the PhD program in Classics to get into. I have no idea what Yale's logic is there: also, I can almost certainly not get into Yale, at least not from undergrad: thus the MA program in Classics. Which I also probably can't get into.)

(Also, every other university's website besides Tulane sucks. I don't know if I'm just really used to Tulane's website, or if other universities are just that dysfunctional. I dread leaving Tulane because then I will have to actually navigate off those damn websites. Also everyone else has really unwelcoming colors.)

I was looking at grad programs today because...oh, because I thought, huh, comp lit, my advisor mentioned that and my first thesis topic is comp lit (and I was e-mailing my committee members), why don't I look into that? And then I looked at comp lit programs, ran over the Renaissance Studies program at Yale, and it all went downhill from there and I really need a cup of tea right now. Also, I think I'll make rice. I'm Japanese, rice is soothing. So is miso soup, but I don't have any right now.

ETA: Today is one of those days when I am doing something else completely unrelated, and all of a sudden I find myself pulling up graduate programs from various universities. UC-Berkeley goes on the list -- I should have known that, my Shakespeare prof told me I'd like it, but I was resisting the UCs for...some reason, I don't know. But I quite like their history program, just from a quick onceover. There's a medieval historian there who I recognize and have read, as well. I think I'm going to lean slightly towards a program in early modern history, at least for the MA, just because it will be easier for me to meet the language requirements at this point than it will if I try for a program in ancient history. If I can get into an MA program, then I can panic about the PhD in two years. That's vaguely reasonable, right?