Why having a medievalist father won't necessarily assist you in your social studies homework

by J J Cohen

Tangible benefits accrue when your dad is scholar of the Middle Ages.

You might become inordinately drawn to sports involving swordplay, for example. Or you might author modern versions of medieval romances. You could create medieval-themed toys. Or enjoy languishing like a princess. All in all you will be well equipped for lifelong participation in Society for Creative Anachronism events (see illustration, dating from Februray 2002; my son Alex will kill me when he sees it here).

But when it comes to practical things, like excelling on minor social studies quizzes, your medievalist dad is likely to be of less use. Alex has a test today on definitions of medieval terms. You would think that I'd be of the greatest use possible when it comes to getting the facts straight, but alas our conversation went something like this:

Me:  Define vassalage.
Alex:  Vassalage is the state of owing ...
Me:  WRONG. A vassalage is a drinking utensil, such as a wine vassalage. It can also be a synonym for a boat or ship.
Alex: Isn't that a vessel?
Me:  Who has the PhD in this room? Define serf.
Alex: A serf is someone bound to the land who --
Me:  WRONG. Serf is what you do on the waves in Hawaii. Don't they teach you anything in school?
Alex:  I seriously doubt knights went to Hawaii. They would also sink in their chainmail if they tried to ride waves.
Me:  I think you underestimate how transnational the European Middle Ages were. They also owned armored Speedos for just such aquatic sport occasions. Define fealty.
Alex: Fealty is sworn loyalty to a --
Me:  Again, WRONG. Fealty is what happens to bread that is left out for too long, as in: "Are you sure you want to eat that slice? It looks kind of fealty."
Alex:  I think I can study for this quiz by myself, dad. Thanks.


[x-posted to Future Lost Archive]

Ping Pong Balls, Lemons, and Other Lethal Objects

[illustration: well at least someone thinks Eileen is funny]
by J J Cohen

Yesterday the Cohen family met Eileen, Anna K. and her daughter, and Eileen's sister's partner and their triple progeny at Comet Ping Pong. I love this pizza restaurant/bar/ping pong parlor because ... well, where else do you find all three of those together?

As the list of attendees demonstrates, many present were in the age range of 5-12 (and all present acted as if they belonged within this range).

I note the presence of innocent minors because I want to record here publicly that:

1. Eileen repeatedly used her ping pong ball as a deadly missile, several times aiming the projectile with great force against me
2. When the meal of pizza was over and many abandoned crusts littered the kiddies' plates, Eileen gathered these fire-singed pieces of bread, wrapped them in a napkin, and placed them in her purse. She announced to all that she keeps them for riding the subway. If a crowded train should yield no possibility of sitting (she told the children), she tosses a crust into the middle of the aisle. As everyone scrambles to grab the thing, she quietly takes an empty seat.
3. Claiming she got the idea from a New Yorker cartoon, Eileen initiated a game in which we tried to name more than 100 ways to kill a person with a lemon. Favorites: bouncing the lemon off someone's head repeatedly; stuffing the seeds into all airholes to trigger suffocation; squeezing the juice into someone's eyes to blind them, removing and drying out the rind, and then stabbing that blind person a week later when the rind has hardened enough to use as a shank.

I blog all of these facts because when the day arrives when one of the children in attendance is arrested for murdering a stranger using a citrus fruit, or for putting an eye out with an errant ping pong ball, or for causing a riot on the DC Metro by strewing stale pizza remnants, I want the world to know who is to blame.

The Inevitable Result of Being a Medievalist's Child

by J J Cohen

Your offspring will one day surprise you by having purchased a miniature Neolithic chambered tomb for our spiny tailed lizard, Spike.

Peer closely at the picture at left and you can see Spike dozing contentedly in his new domicile.

OK, enough procrastination: I need to pack for Leeds.

Father's Day

[illustration: my study's window]
by J J Cohen

Something I share with my own dad: annoyance at the fact that Father's Day implies that every father must be obsessed by (1) golf; (2) fishing; (3) neckties; and (4) coffee mugs. That's the father's day gamut as far as I can tell ... and so it is tough to find a card that doesn't have a golf ball whizzing by or a fly fisher depicted on a lonely river. Don't dads ever ride bikes, run, read books, work as professors at universities?

So imagine my happiness that my kids actually located an appropriate card for me this year. No, not a Deleuzian "You're the most rhizomatic pa around!" card. Not a Foucaultian panopticon card that says "I'm always watching you, father." And not a Lacan-inspired Hallmark that announces "You are my Big Other, pops."

This year I got a medieval card. The cover shows a knight with horse by some water (despite the fluvial temptation, he is NOT fishing). "Dang!" he says, "Where did I put that stupid thing?" In the next section he yells over to a nearby castle with its drawbridge raised. "COULD SOMEONE OPEN THE DRAWBRIDGE?" he yells. "I FORGOT THE MOAT CONTROL."

That really made me chuckle. Inside the card announces "Some things never change." Alex and Katherine signed it, and drew some little hearts. What could be better than that?

That Leeds Keynote

by J J Cohen

I don't intend to blog much of the content of my Leeds presentation, since I would like some of what I argue there not to be known in advance, but I will offer some fragments as I proceed.

Today, though, for your amusement -- and for those who don't follow me on Facebook -- a recent interchange about that Leeds presentation.
--------------------------

Jeffrey J Cohen 491 words, the first of which is "If." That's something. 11:08am · via Twitter · Comment · Like

Eileen A. Joy at 11:21am June 8

Is the first sentence something like, "If both Jews and Christians had been able to purchase fondue pots at a medieval Crate-and-Barrel-type store, history would have turned out very differently"?

Jeffrey J Cohen at 11:22am June 8

It is now.

Eileen A. Joy at 11:24am June 8

Perfect. Because seriously, things would have been so different between Christians and Jews after all those get-togethers over cheese and chocolate fondue.

Jeffrey J Cohen at 11:29am June 8

Be serious: they would have poked out each other's hearts with those long thin forks and dipped them in the gruyere-emmenthaler mixture for tasty eating.

Sarah Werner at 11:36am June 8

although not the Jews, since surely mixing heart and cheese would be unkosher, yes? maybe if there was a non-dairy chocolate fondue that would be an option.

Jeffrey J Cohen at 11:50am June 8

My research reveals that Jews SOMETIMES violated halakha in order to feast upon Christian hearts as fondue. These cheesy organs were not kosher, but they did melt in the mouth.

Eileen A. Joy at 12:01pm June 8

But the best part, for the Jews, was not so much the taste of the melting, gruyere-covered Christian hearts in their mouths, but the sight of the heart-less Christians writhing around under the tables with all of those fondue pots with thoughts of "oh cruel world!" in their about-to-be-extinguished minds.

Jeffrey J Cohen at 12:27pm June 8

You've got it: cruel because they would die before the chocolate fondue with strawberries, bananas, and pound cake was even served.

Eileen A. Joy at 12:31pm June 8

That's fairly accurate, I think, as Christians pretty much lived for the final fondue course--that, and the bodily Resurrection.

[OK, don't take that too seriously. Believe it or not, folks, fondue will not actually make it into the Leeds version]

Medievalist(s) Rock

by Mary Kate Hurley

In case you needed more proof that medievalists are not only talented, creative artistic souls, but also just really, really cool: Dry Island Buffalo Jump, an effort to raise money for students at Saint Andrews suffering from the financial crisis.

Medievalists? Check.
Flute in a rock band? Check.*
Catchy tune? Check.
Good cause? Check.

More proof that Medievalists are awesome. Thanks to Stephanie Trigg for the initial link, and I join her in applauding the efforts of Chris Jones and the band.

____

* Okay, so if I were being entirely honest I'd tell you that that's more something I look for in a band. But flutes do in fact make rock bands cooler. I should know. I play one, and therefore am entirely unbiased.

In Search of Lost Time Again

by J J Cohen

"Although he had a weak spot for subclauses and patisserie, somehow, by sheer force of adjectives and loneliness, [Marcel Proust] intuited some of modern neuroscience's most basic tenets."

That elegant little sentence, with its unexpected conjunction of grammar and bakery, of wordcraft and solitude, comes from my recent bedstand reading, Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist. With chapters on Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Paul Cézanne, Auguste Escoffier, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein (a chapter that enabled me finally to understand the ambition of her work), and Virginia Woolf -- well, what modernist-enamored aesthete wouldn't love Lehrer's book? He combines an artist's prose (subtitle from the Proust chapter: "The Lie of Yesterday"), a scientist's enthusiasm for detail, and a journalist's ardor for Big Picture narrative. I recommend the volume highly.

As a side effect of reading Lehrer, I've been inspired for the third time to attempt to make it through A la Recherche du Temps Perdu -- if only because this blog has always been in search of lost time. My first Proustian failure was in graduate school, during a bleak summer in which I was consigned to a 'German For Reading Knowledge' course. I purchased an aged copy of Swan's Way to enjoy in my spare time, for no other reason than I had always wanted to read the book with a big cup of tea and a madeleine to dip in it. The promised spare time failed to arrive, however. Three years later the paperback's glue binding dissolved, scattering lost time across the linoleum. Shortly after the dissolution of the novel I found a copy in French at a yard sale, and decided it would be good for me to spend a summer reading the work in its original. I am not sure whether I reached page ten or page twelve -- but as yet I had not reached the cookie-in-the-tea dunk.

Last Saturday in New York City, my son Alex and I had a cold, wet afternoon to ourselves. We visited Nintendo World, wasting all of thirty minutes. We weren't meeting the rest of the family for quite some time, we were already soaked from walking ... so we did what any normal American father and son do: we headed to the nearest bookstore and each purchased the fattest volume we could lay our hands upon (Alex got one of these, don't ask me which one). We then retreated to the nearest coffee shop, sat with warm beverages, and read quietly in each other's company until five o'clock. That moment of rest during a four day whirlwind of seeing, moving, and doing was bliss. I've always had a fondness for reading on rainy days, especially when a large window yields a view of passersby, mobile in their solitude, their faces not intended to be interpreted.

So I am now farther into Swann's Way than I have ever been (which is to say p. 71 of the new Penguin translation). And you know, I am not sure I was ready earlier in life to be bowled over by a sentence like this one, in which Marcel describes the two rooms in Combray where his aunt lives her circumscribed life:

These were the sorts of provincial rooms which -- just as in certain countries entire tracts of air or ocean are illuminated or perfumed by myriad protozoa that we cannot see -- enchant us with the thousand smells given off by the virtues, by wisdom, by habits, a whole secret life, invisible, superabundant, and moral which the atmosphere holds in suspension; smells still natural, certainly, and colored by the weather like those of the neighboring countryside, but already homey, human and enclosed, an exquisite, ingenious, and limpid jelly of all the fruits of the year that have left the orchard for the cupboard; seasonal, but movable and domestic, correcting the piquancy of the hoarfrost withe the sweetness of warm bread, as lazy and punctual as a village clock, roving and orderly, heedless and foresightful, linen smells, morning smells, pious smells, happy with a peace that brings only an increase of anxiety and with a prosiness that serves as a great reservoir of poetry for one who passes through it without having lived in it.

I love that single sentence so much that I'd give up any of the books I've written just to be able to compose something so artful. I immediately read it aloud to Alex in the coffee shop ... and he in return read to me a sentence from his own book, in which the Chaos Gem is shattered and legions of the undead enter the world riding dragons wrought of flame.

Dante Alighieri's Star Meter is Up 8% at the IMDb; Also, Emmanuella Chiriqui

[fig 1: The IMDb doesn't know what Dante looks like]
by J J Cohen

So John Filardi, an alumnus of the GW English Department, is here teaching a course on screenwriting, focused upon comedy. By all accounts it has been a terrific class.

Today he invited Emmanuella Chiriqui (Sloan from Entourage) to his class to talk about ... well I don't even know. When I accidentally by happenstance and without forethought chanced to be lurking by the door as the class ended, she and I struck up a conversation (as celebrities and their stalkers oft will do). I asked her what movies she has appeared in recently. She mentioned Saint John of Las Vegas and I nodded sagely ... then ran to my office to look it up on the IMDb. Seems Chiriqui is playing a stripper named "Tasty D. Lite" in the film. But that isn't the odd part -- or, at least, the oddest part: listed as one of the writers of Saint John is Dante Alighieri.

Probing deeper (I am a tireless researcher), I discovered that this vaguely familiar Dante fellow has not only composed many a medieval text used to beat into intellectual submission the youth of our high schools, he has also been the writer of many films. Many of these works are, of course, adaptations of The Inferno. Dante also has a movie called (naturally) Beatrice. Most surprisingly, he is credited with the soundtrack to La Double vie de Véronique. Among his genres? "Drama | Fantasy | Comedy | Adventure more." Among his keywords? "Hell | Female Nudity | Dante | Inferno more." So says the IMDb, which also offers that his "STARmeter: 8% since last week." I'm sure it's always nice when your STARmeter is up -- but what is a STARmeter, and what is its unit of measurement, and how far up is too far up? Can you explode if your STARmeter rises too quickly?

And I still couldn't figure out why Saint John of Las Vegas should be credited to the great poet of Florence. Here's its synopsis: "a buddy comedy in the vein of Raising Arizona meets Sideways, that chronicles the subtle, life-changing journey of JOHN [Steve Buscemi], a former Vegas blackjack player, who, as a result of circumstance and forces beyond his control, is inevitably drawn back closer and closer to Sin City." Sure, one character is named Virgil (played by Romany Malco) (yet another buddy movie in which the white guy learns life's lessons from the chap with more skin pigmentation). There is nothing in the plot that could be called Dantean ... but then I found this declaration: "A loose adaptation of Dante's Inferno."

Very loose, I am guessing. But then again my STARmeter is down 22% since last week, so what do I know?

Slankets and Monks

by J J Cohen

Is it just me, or is the Slanket simply the newest way to become a monk without taking irksome vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty? From the jazzy Slanket ("the blanket with sleeves!") website, it seems the only thing Slanketeers are obligated to do in the robe is ingest food and libations before the altar of the living room's television. And never move from the sofa again.

Illustration: très fashionable teen ... or Franciscan wannabe? (Other attractive colors available. Apricot is clearly marketed for intellectuals, and thus has sold out -- the pre-Kalamazoo rush, perhaps. Limoges looks like a good alternative ... but what would Saint Benedict think?)

New Year, Old Traditions

by Mary Kate Hurley

Anglo-Saxonists spend a lot of time thinking about tradition. Just ask John Miles Foley, Michael Drout, or John Niles.

In case you haven't guessed, dear readers, this is a small link to medieval studies to validate a more modern focus: The end of 2008, and the beginning of 2009.

I write this from the living room of the house in which I grew up, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. My family is pretty big on traditions, particularly around the holidays. It's not really Christmas until we watch the Muppet Christmas Carol, which my sisters and I know well enough to recite whole scenes from. We still "fight" (emphasis on the quotations) over whose "baby's first christmas" ornament is highest on the tree. But the best tradition of all is New Year's Eve.

Even though the Wake Forest library is open today, I find myself drawn towards working from home -- and all to keep with a tradition that lasts a full 24 hours on New Years. If it's New Year's Eve at the Hurley household, you see, we must be watching the Twilight Zone.

I could sing the show's praises, recite the litanies of how it exposed the contingencies of ideas of beauty, the dangers of mass-thought processes, or the danger of obsession. But I want to ask you, ITM readers -- what are *your* favorite holiday traditions? It can be anything from working in that library in your parent's hometown to the annual re-watching of Frosty the Snowman.

And, on behalf of everyone here at ITM, Sǽlig Niwe-Gear*!




*NOT authentic Old English. If you find yourself in a particularly medieval Twilight Zone, I'd suggest a more authoritative source.

Stonehedge!, Or, Ye Shul it lerne wher so ye wole or noon.

by KARL STEEL

It's once again the most glorious time of the year: exam time! In a tradition much beloved by me, I'm posting my final exam, as it's finally safe to do so. The interminable CUNY semester ends this week, and today my grads and undergrads turned in their final papers, and the undergrads took their final exam, which covered The Romance of Arthur, The Complete Works of Hartmann von Aue [if your syllabus doesn't have "Poor Heinrich" on it, you are seriously missing out] and Aucassin and Nicolette. Even as I write this post, they're industriously writing, trying to answer the following questions:

Part 1: Identification and Short Answer (answer 5. Each correct answer is worth 2 points. Partial credit is possible. Extra Credit: Each additional question answered correctly is worth .5 points. Partial credit is possible.)

1.In the following quotation, who is the man? Who is the woman? “When he had heard what she told him, he said, 'Enough of that.' He immediately ordered her to get up, dress well, and to put on the best garment she had....He armed himself secretly and wore his armor hidden under his clothes. ”

2.Towards the end of "Poor Heinrich," Jesus “freed them both from all their suffering.” Clearly Hartmann means that Jesus cured Heinrich of his leprosy, but who is the other character he frees from suffering, and what was the character suffering?

3.What is ironic about Arthur's defense of Iseult when she is accused of adultery?

4.In what work is a king giving birth while a food fight rages outside his castle?

5.List two knights who live in the forest for a while and are helped by hermits.

6.This medieval image to the left illustrates a scene from which work we read this semester?

7.What does Gawain wear for the rest of his life as “a token of the untruthfulness that trapped me”?

8.What is so tragic about Lancelot killing Gaheris and Gareth?

9.Who rescues his beloved lady from a group of lusty lepers?

10.This medieval image to the left illustrates a scene from which work we read this semester?

Part 2: Essay Questions (choose 2 of the 6 questions below and answer the question. Most good answers will be about 3-5 pages long. Each answer will be graded as follows: 1 pnt: grammar; 2 pnts: structure and argument: do you have an argument? Is your essay ordered logically (that is, could I rearrange the paragraphs without affecting the build-up of your argument?); 2 pnts: evidence: have you supported your argument sufficiently by reference to the text and by making points that make sense logically?)

1.Iwein fights and defeats a giant, Harpin, who is also a knight (Hartmann, Iwein, 284, 289-90). In what other ways is the giant like Iwein, and what is the significance of this resemblance? You may wish to concentrate on the transformations Iwein undergoes through Iwein. [extra credit if you can identify whose argument I'm plagiarizing here and your name isn't Jeffrey Cohen]

2.When Iwein hears the story of the women forced to make clothing, they say “We are the tribute and we have a terrible life, a miserable youth, for those to whom we are subject are terribly corrupt, refusing to let us keep any profit at all from our work” (303). They are vague about whom they are subject to: what is the significance in their refusal to identify whether the demons or the nobles are responsible for their terrible condition?

3.The “Green Chapel” in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in fact is a rough hill with three holes in it (IV.2180: note that your edition mistranslates the line). It resembles an entrance to the “Otherworld,” the land of magic and good and bad spirits, but in having three entrances, it also resembles a Christian Cathedral. Bertilak's full name is “Bertilak de Haudesert”: desert can mean either a scary wilderness or the holy wilderness where hermits live. Why does the poem mix Christian and dubiously Christian, even demonic, symbols in this scene?

4.Wace tells the story of Merlin's paternity quite briefly (97), but Robert of Boron includes a great many more details, including a story of Merlin's youth in which he defends his mother from the charge of adultery. Why do you suppose Robert of Boron changed the earlier story of Merlin?

5.The Romans are Arthur's enemies in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain. They are foreign, as their army partly comprises Libyans and Saracens (87-88). Yet Arthur married a woman who is partly Roman (71-72) and is himself descended from Trojans (see the reference to “the ancient custom of Troy” at 76), and, moreover, Caerleon looks like Rome (74). Why did Geoffrey simultaneously represent Arthur's Roman enemies as so foreign while stressing the many connections between Arthur and Rome?

6.Why does Beroul so often go out of his way to tell us how little he likes the barons (234, for example) and/or the dwarf (231 and 234)?

Good luck! You have 2 hours. Open book. Open note. I notice that at least 3 of my 15 students didn't bring their books. What gives?

If that grabbed you, perhaps you want to take the extra credit quiz, which I sprang on them on the antepenultimate day in answer to a worried question, "Do you offer any extra credit?" I guess I do...so long as the students have done the reading and show up on time. In other words, so long as they've been doing the things that wouldn't make extra credit necessary, they should do well on the extra credit. Funny, that.

• What does Guinevere do when Mordred tries to marry her? (2 points)
  
• In what work we read this semester is there a character who imagines God as being a rich peasant who oversees a pleasant farm?
  
• Who waits to see a ship with either white or black sails? (1 point)
  
• On the map of Britain, identify the locations of England, Wales, and Cornwall. (2 points, partial credit possible) [what I learned from this? My rough-hewn, duckshaped board-drawn maps just don't cut it. Either that, or Cornwall = Scotland]
  
• What is this set of stones called? (1 point) [What I learned from this? Although I decided to make the quiz open book 2 minutes into it, although the question is a gimme because there's a picture of Stonehenge in The Romance of Arthur, students are no better spellers than I am. How many wrote "Stonehedge"? A lot. "Stonehedge, where the demons edge, and the banshees trim, and they do trim well..."
  
• This medieval picture illustrates a scene from which medieval romance? (1 point)

Gingergrendels

by J J Cohen

Spend enough time in academia and you'll find your office cluttered with those tchockes that kindhearted souls sometimes give to thank you for some kindness, to bribe you, or to bid you good riddance as they depart. The ledge around my windowsill features -- in addition to a Tiny Shriner -- a soap shaped like a shell, a soap with a picture of a moose, two gargoyles, a mug, a small skull, a stack of postcards, some bookends fashioned from polished chunks of blue stone, a Kenyan antelope, a tea box from India, and a tiki idol. Several of these items are gifts from former students; others are payback from colleagues whose travel authorization forms I signed. Today, though, I received an offering that is now my all time favorite: a plastic container filled with Grendel gingerbread men. Yes, one is arm has been lopped off each. You can glimpse five six of them doing a little dance on the napkin on my desk above. Thanks, Lowell!

Here's hoping your grading is going well, and that offerings that bring great cheer are likewise wending your way.

Pour l'action de grâce

[image pilfered from here]
by J J Cohen

Clumsy post title, I know: French doesn't have a good translation for Thanksgiving. We at ITM are grateful for you, our readers and commentators. Merci, et merci encore.

But why all this frenchiness, tu demandes? Partly because my son's homework is to name each item at notre repas in French. Did you know that la compote d'airelles = cranberry sauce? Or that une tarte à la citrouille is pumpkin pie (something I won't eat, because it violates the ancient alimentary law against mixing vegetables with desserts)? You may even know that le dindon or la dinde is turkey, but what I want to know is: what about Tofurky?

Alex's French teacher also emailed us this short piece from the NYT, about a French connection for the holiday. Really, though, Davis provides a meditation on origins, cultural mixing, and willed forgetting that should be familiar to any medievalist:

Long before the Pilgrims sailed in 1620, another group of dissident Christians sought a haven in which to worship freely. These French Calvinists, or Huguenots, hoped to escape the sectarian fighting between Catholics and Protestants that had bloodied France since 1560.

Landing in balmy Florida in June of 1564, at what a French explorer had earlier named the River of May (now the St. Johns River near Jacksonville), the French émigrés promptly held a service of “thanksgiving.” Carrying the seeds of a new colony, they also brought cannons to fortify the small, wooden enclosure they named Fort Caroline, in honor of their king, Charles IX.

In short order, these French pilgrims built houses, a mill and bakery, and apparently even managed to press some grapes into a few casks of wine. At first, relationships with the local Timucuans were friendly, and some of the French settlers took native wives and soon acquired the habit of smoking a certain local “herb.” Food, wine, women — and tobacco by the sea, no less. A veritable Gallic paradise.

Except, that is, to the Spanish, who had other visions for the New World. In 1565, King Philip II of Spain issued orders to “hang and burn the Lutherans” (then a Spanish catchall term for Protestants) and dispatched Adm. Pedro Menéndez to wipe out these French heretics who had taken up residence on land claimed by the Spanish — and who also had an annoying habit of attacking Spanish treasure ships as they sailed by.

Leading this holy war with a crusader’s fervor, Menéndez established St. Augustine and ordered what local boosters claim is the first parish Mass celebrated in the future United States. Then he engineered a murderous assault on Fort Caroline, in which most of the French settlers were massacred. Menéndez had many of the survivors strung up under a sign that read, “I do this not as to Frenchmen but as to heretics.” A few weeks later, he ordered the execution of more than 300 French shipwreck survivors at a site just south of St. Augustine, now marked by an inconspicuous national monument called Fort Matanzas, from the Spanish word for “slaughters.”

With this, America’s first pilgrims disappeared from the pages of history. Casualties of Europe’s murderous religious wars, they fell victim to Anglophile historians who erased their existence as readily as they demoted the Spanish settlement of St. Augustine to second-class status behind the later English colonies in Jamestown and Plymouth.

But the truth cannot be so easily buried. Although overlooked, a brutal first chapter had been written in the most untidy history of a “Christian nation.” And the sectarian violence and hatred that ended with the deaths of a few hundred Huguenots in 1565 would be replayed often in early America, the supposed haven for religious dissent, which in fact tolerated next to none.

Starting with those massacred French pilgrims, the saga of the nation’s birth and growth is often a bloodstained one, filled with religious animosities. In Boston, for instance, the Puritan fathers banned Catholic priests and executed several Quakers between 1659 and 1661. Cotton Mather, the famed Puritan cleric, led the war cries against New England’s Abenaki “savages” who had learned their prayers from the French Jesuits. The colony of Georgia was established in 1732 as a buffer between the Protestant English colonies and the Spanish missions of Florida; its original charter banned Catholics. The bitter rivalry between Catholic France and Protestant England carried on for most of a century, giving rise to anti-Catholic laws, while a mistrust of Canada’s French Catholics helped fire many patriots’ passion for independence. As late as 1844, Philadelphia’s anti-Catholic “Bible Riots” took the lives of more than a dozen people.

The list goes on. Our history is littered with bleak tableaus that show what happens when righteous certitude is mixed with fearful ignorance. Which is why this Thanksgiving, as we express gratitude for America’s bounty and promise, we would do well to reflect on all our histories, including a forgotten French one that began on Florida’s shores so many years ago.

Merci à Mme Howard for sending this sobering reminder of forgotten histories to her students. And happy thanksgiving!

Fencing. Also, Attorneys general.

[illustration: what I see every Saturday afternoon for three hours. Peer inside the mask to discern the mystery boy]
by J J Cohen

Given the profession of his dad, perhaps you will find no surprise in the fact that my son Alexander's sport is fencing. Prodding at an opponent with an epée? What could be more medieval?

Fencing was not Alex's first sport. We tried soccer, swimming, baseball ... you name it. If they gave Olympic medals for reading interminable series of fantasy novels, Alex would get the gold, but in the ordinary games of mere mortals he is, well, rather mediocre (and that makes him far more athletic than his dad, already). Yet fencing is not perfect just for its workouts (strenuous) or its violence (patent). The type of kid fencing attracts is also one of its selling points: quirky children, often with an offbeat sense of humor, dedicated, smart, a good sense of fun. Alex, in other words, has finally found a peer group as odd as he is.

As did I, in the parents who observe the workouts and matches. Among these parents I've had the chance to chat with casually is a man whose son Eric is passionate about fencing. Eric's a great kid; he and Alex have hit off. And Eric's dad is also a great guy. His name? Also Eric. Eric Holder.

Small world.

A Public Service Message from 12th-Century England

by Karl Steel

Try to keep your celebrations in line tomorrow night or the ghost of Bartholomew of Exeter might rise up to punish you. He warns:

De Balationibus. Si quis balationes ante ecclesias sanctorum fecerit, seu qui faciem suam transmutauerit in habitu mulierbri, et mulier in habitu uiri, emendatione pollicita tribus annis peniteat

Amateur Theatrics.* Whoever does amateur theatrics in front of churches--either a man cross-dressing as a woman or a woman cross-dressing as a man--should do penance for 3 years.

I can only assume that Bartholomew meant "until the next election season." So, ladies, men, if you're tempted to dress up as McCain and Palin to put on a show tomorrow night, or even if you just want to bust out in some Shakespearean comedy, find an appropriate venue. Keep it from the houses of the holy.

Thanks.

(from here, but can find the same thing here in an injunction against people who make "balationes" and change their form)

* Okay, I tried. What's your best shot at "ballatio"? I don't think "dance" is sufficient. By the way, the OED etymology takes me to this hilarious conclusion: [a. OF. baler. (since 16th c. baller) to dance (= Pr. balar, It. ballare, Sp., Pg. bailar): late L. (Isidore) ballare to dance. Some think the L. formed from Gr. to dance, some f. balla BALL n.1, on the alleged ground that, in the Middle Ages, tennis was accompanied with dancing and song]

For Your Weekend Entertainment: Goat Man

by J J Cohen

Forget Netflix: here is your weekend amusement on demand, right at ITM. Grab a bowl of popcorn. Turn down the lights. My son shot this little horror film and then used iMovie to edit. A six minute re-enactment of the Legend of Goat Man (the deformed sibling of the Blair Witch: alert MEARCSTAPA!), it features some summer camp friends. You'll even glimpse bonus footage at the end in which Alex makes an appearance.

Your nightmares will endure for years. Really...

Strange Conjunctions: Patočka/Derrida and Sancho Panza

by Karl Steel

(Okay, so I've been writing. And reading. And standing to the side, just over here, watching our blog get along fine. Good! Warning: what follows is just plain silly)

Last night, reading The Gift of Death, I ran across something too familiar in the midst of one of Derrida's paraphrases of Jan Patočka. He writes "Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place."

Please compare:

"Since your grace has been locked in the cage, enchanted, in your opinion, have you had desire and will to pass what they call major and minor waters?"

"I do not understand what you mean by passing waters, Sancho; speak more clearly if you want me to respond in a straightforward way."

"Is it possible that your grace doesn't understand what it means to pass minor or major waters? Even schoolboys know that. Well, what I mean is, have you had desire to do the thing nobody else can do for you?"

"Ah, now I understand you, Sancho! Yes, I have, quite often, and even do now. Save me from this danger, for not everything is absolutely pristine!"

Don Quixote, Part I XLVIII, Grossman trans.

I'm reminded in turn of a scene in the film Derrida where our hero, when asked what he'd like to see in a documentary about a philosopher--say, Heidegger or Kant--responded, "their sex lives." It's funny, and would no doubt be telling, given the evidence of the picture above. One imagines Kant, by whose regularity in his daily constitutional the housewives of Königsberg would set their watches, as being as dutiful as Walter Shandy, who, contra the opinion of his son, generally "minded what [he was] about when [he] begot me." I'm sure that whatever Hannah Arendt did with her Martin, or Simone Weil did with her God, would give us something.

And yet: sex and death. It's a bit operatic, don't you think? How would philosophy had [grammar edit!] have been different if it had built itself upon what else no one can do for you? Where would philosophy have tended if Patočka or Heidegger had remembered eating and its natural end, a kind of being-toward-supper (Sein-zum-Abendessen?)? If Plato had imagined creation as something other than a globe consuming its own waste?

When the sequel to Derrida comes (something like this), if someone asks me his question, I know what I'd like to have seen: Adorno in his kitchen, and perhaps elsewhere.

The F-Word

by J J Cohen

So this summer we shipped our son away to the wilds of West Virginia for two weeks of camp. The house seems eerily empty without someone to pop out from behind the furniture to shoot elastics at us, or without the endless humor of sudden flatulence caused by his remote controlled fart machine.

Thank the gods for the internet. His camp has a website where daily pictures and a video are posted. Though he is not always featured, we glimpse his smiling mug enough to know how much he is enjoying swimming, hiking, camping, tennis, lacrosse, and so many other physical activities that I get tired just thinking about them. We can also send him emails. The camp prints these out and leaves them on his bunk for evening reading. He can reply on a special sheet of paper, scanned into PDF and made available for us to download the next day. Yesterday the following note arrived:

Dear Family,
Today I caught 4 fishes. One was almost a foot long! I had to pull for 5 minutes! Today, a few kids got yelled at for saying the f-word, and now I know it must be really bad. I used to think it was just a rude word you should never say, but now I know it's not. It was in the book Iron Angel, so please do something about that book, like throw it out, and you should punish me for reading it.
I'm deeply sorry,
xoxox

His contriteness broke my heart. He'd done a pretty good job of punishing himself, I'd say. So I replied:

Thanks for your your letter. I don't want you to be so upset about reading a book with "the F-word" in it. It is, after all, just a word. What matters is how the word is used. I trust you to know the difference. So I think it is OK to read a book with the word in it. You are a very smart kid, and you know how to read a book without thinking that everything in a book is how the world should be. Right? I love you. -- Dad

Should I have been harsher? I don't know. I'm not always as in control of my own "potty mouth" as I probably should be, so it is hard to preach verbal sanitization with much conviction. I remember vividly a conversation I had with his preschool teacher when I picked him up after a field trip. Miss Joan told me, with an amused smile on her face, that he'd been assigned to ride along with a friend and his mom. As the mother opened the door to place his car seat inside, he stuck his head into the vehicle and declared happily "Holy shit, this is a big mini van!"

I knew immediately from whom he had learned that cheerful exclamation.

Merry Medieval Monday: Unexpectedly Confronting the Past

by Mary Kate Hurley
(image: unexpected Medieval Italian Greyhound, from the Cloisters museum, that looks surprisingly like my own dog, Allegra)

Today was a beautiful day for working on my dissertation. This was especially true because I got to have tea with my undergraduate adviser, Gillian Overing, and there are very few meetings that I look forward to more. So of course, on this particular Monday, there was no doubt that there would be much conversation about the Anglo-Saxon past, and of course about the work being done that will orient the future of our studies. This certitude of medieval-ly oriented conversations is not what I wish to speak about today.

In an alliterative analogue to Festive Fridays, I thought Merry Medieval Mondays might be a adequate appelation for this post, and my topic is the unexpected encounters we have in which our medieval knowledge is useful. My story comes to you from this weekend, during which my immediate family congregated to move my younger sister to Raleigh. At a post-move run to the grocery store, I was picking up a few things and found myself behind a woman who was talking about "old words" and how nice they are, and the question of why they aren't used more frequently. Imagine my surprise when the next "old word" she chose to talk about was "troubadour." Imagine my even further surprise when this same woman decided to ask the entire line of customers if anyone knew what a troubadour was.

"Well, uh -- actually -- I do!" was my startled response. I was so shocked to be using my admittedly rusty knowledge of Old Provencal lyric that I didn't even do a very good job explaining what troubadours were.

So as the Merry Medieval Monday Question: When did you find yourself employing your knowledge of the medieval in an unexpected time or place?

Briefly Noted: Fratello Metallo

by Karl Steel

Some of you might not know that some time ago my colleague Nicola talked me into being in a metal band with him. Although we've not played any shows (yet), we have had the fun of condensing Paul Freedman's Images of the Medieval Peasant into one hard-hitting song that just might prove to be our hit (the title? "Peasant.").

Whatever we might be, we'll never equal what you're about to witness.

Jul. 17 - A Capuchin monk is a convincing lead singer in an Italian heavy metal rock band.

62-year old Friar Cesare Bonizzi describes himself as a "preacher-singer".

He's been singing for over a decade, and last month wowed heavy metal fans at Italy's "Gods of Metal" festival, where he performed with his band Fratello Metallo (Metal Brother) alongside groups such as Iron Maiden.

Bonizzi has released his second album "Misteri" or mysteries, inspired by a group of southern Italian women who sang about Jesus' mother Mary.

A heavy metal version of the song features on the album, but Bonizzi also sings about how alcohol can warm the heart, but then damage the liver if drank in excess as well as how important sex is to man.

Two questions: since the Capuchins are a post-medieval order, I'm uncertain of where to find the right answer. Is it technically correct to call a Capuchin a monk?

Second: anyone who gets me a Fratello Metallo t-shirt (medium please) will have my eternal gratitude, 4 delicious beers, or a song dedication: whichever you prefer.