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bedlamsbardI 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.
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.