The Mediaeval Kangaroo

In place of actual content, I have written a bestiary entry for a kangaroo, as it could have been understood had mediaeval Europe been aware of it.

This is for the class on the mediaeval bestiary that I am teaching to a bunch of year 10 students tomorrow - I will give them this description, without telling them the animal, and have them draw it. The results should go some way to explaining why the crocodile in bestiaries variously resembles a dog, a fish, a large bird and a snake.  And the point is also, of course, that the bestiary entry is really about the meaning of the animal, not (what we would consider) the animal itself.  A large part of the aim of this lesson is to teach them about allegory as a basic tool of mediaeval thought.

They are a very good group - they guessed today what animal 'vellum' was made from based on the name, argued about whether Henry VIII was a Protestant or a Catholic, volunteered the printing press as a possible date/event to mark the end of the Middle Ages then (as a group) came up with good reasons as to why that might be so significant a cultural shift (then one pointed out that we're in the middle of a similar revolution at the moment, re. internet and digital information, completely pre-empting me!), asked spontaneously about several myths of the Middle Ages (how real was King Arthur, did they think the world was flat) and managed to volunteer all of the languages spoken in mediaeval England without prompting.  And when you have the answers "Middle English?" "No, OLD English." "French!"  "No, they spoke French in France," and "Latin", it is very satisfying to be able to say "you are all absolutely correct, here's why".

Kangaroo follows.

Of course, there ought to be a few fanciful etymologies for the name, but firstly that would give it away, and secondly I think even Isidore would be stretched to come up with a Greek+Latin derivation for a word that derives from an English misinterpretation of an Aboriginal phrase.


This creature has the face of a sheep and the ears and fur of a rabbit.  Its tail is still like a log, and it is stiff so that the animal can stand upon it.


Its back is hunched like a hill, and it has hands like a child's, but black.


Its eyelashes are long and thick like a camel's, to keep out sand and dust.   When it is hot, it licks itself like a cat.


The ape gives birth to two children at once, and it loves one while it hates the other; but this creature has always one child older than the other, and loves both equally.  For it feeds each according to its needs, giving the elder one kind of milk from one teat, even while it feeds the younger another milk from a second teat. By this we understand that each man should be taught the Word of God according to his capacity to understand them.  He who is young and innocent is best taught with simple fables and allegories of beasts, but he who knows more of the Lord and can better understand his ways may be nourished on the words of the Fathers of the Church.


When this creature bends its head to eat, it stands upon four legs, and, its head being low to the ground, can see nothing about it, for its eyes are covered by the grasses.  But when it stands tall it can see for many miles, and no predator may take it by surprise.  Thus the devil creeps upon those who bury their heads in gluttony and desire, but those who stand tall and see clearly he cannot surprise.

Murimuth Learns a New Word

So, I have been mysteriously silent of late.  This is the silence of a) trying to finish a thesis proposal while running frantically about getting ready to go home for a month and b) stressing about finances and whether it will actually be in any way possible for me to stay in Canada for long enough to finish my Masters, with money even more not-there-at-all than it has been for the last year and c) being lazy and not thinking about anything that is not my thesis proposal[1].

I am now sitting in a very pleasant little coffee shop[2] near the beach in Adelaide, sipping GOOD coffee which has been nowhere near North America and its evil evil coffee-betraying habits (sorry, people, but it’s true), waiting for my sister’s hair appointment to finish.  She takes approximately an hour and a half longer than I do, because of the colouring.  We have had a morning of family haircuts, because A Very Special Family Event is happening on the weekend.  We will soon go home and get down to little details like cleaning out the cobwebs from behind that painting in the hall, making sure all the outdoor chairs are adequately oiled and preventing the beagles from investigating the fact that the side fence is being replaced and that their domain has therefore expanded dramatically.

Meantime, I have been looking at microfilms of the two manuscripts I’ll be working on – Cotton Cleopatra D IX and Additional 54184 – and translating Murimuth’s chronicle (well, parsing it and annotating difficult passages so that I can read it easily).  It’s rather interesting watching the pace of his narration slow dramatically with the opening of Edward III’s declaration of war against France.  [Over x of the y pages of the chronicle are devoted to the ten years Murimuth lived after the war began, leaving only z for the years from 1305-36.]  That said, a good deal of the bulk is his careful transcription of letters and proclamations related to the diplomacy of the war; but even with these excised, his own narration is far more detailed and interested – and, one feels, impassioned – than it is for the first three decades.

An interesting feature of this is the expansion of his vocabulary.  Words are appearing that are in no Latin dictionary I can find, mostly imported from the vernaculars.  His martial and naval vocabulary in particular become much more nuanced, and seek out new words for what seem to be new concepts.  Some words are simple enough.  ‘Admirallus’ may not appear in the dictionary, but in the context of the sea battle of 1340 at the [mouth of the Swinbourne?], this is hardly ambiguous:

… [comes] Huntyngdoniae, qui fuit dux et admirallus navium de Quinque Portubus, et dominus R[obertus] de Morley, qui fuit admirallus et dux navium borealium…

The Earl of Huntingdon and Robert de Morley were commander and admirallus of, respectively, the fleet of the [Five Ports] and of the north. I don’t think it’s necessary to spend too much time hunting obscure fourteenth-century Latin word usages to determine that admirallus doesn’t mean a small kind of brass teaspoon.  But I find it interesting that he still feels he must say dux et admirallus, as if admirallus lacks the cultural weight to stand up on its own[3]. 

Another term that he embraces more whole-heartedly, however, and that did confuse me slightly at its first occurrence, was galea.  The first time it appears, we are informed that fifty galeae attacked the city of Southampton on the Monday following the feast of St Michael in 1338.  Apparently a galea, in Latin, is a helmet; so I hypothesised that this may be a usage similar to ‘lance’, denoting a soldier or a particular unit of armed men.  But mark the sequel!  for the armed men carried away everything they could to their helmets.  And then they set fire to all the houses, and returned to their helmets.  Clearly, there was a flaw in this theory, unless Phillip of France had pioneered a really large make of helmet in which his men could paddle.

So I went to the OED and looked up ‘galley’.  That confirms that a mediaeval Latin galea/galeia existed, derived from ancient Greek but with the ultimate etymology unknown.  But apparently it wasn’t very common, and for Murimuth it was quite recent: there is one attribution for c. 1300, and one for c. 1330.  The Anglo-Norman dictionary has it attributed a few more times, towards the end of the 1200s.  So it seems to have been circulating as a concept only reasonably recently, suggesting (perhaps?) a new kind of warship, a new trend in ship-building, which only really forced itself on Murimuth’s notice when it suddenly became relevant with the naval battles and coastal attacks of the early years of the  Hundred Years War.  Thereafter, he uses it frequently, and seems to distinguish consistently between galeas  and naves. 

Everyone becomes an armchair strategist in times of war, I suppose – but Murimuth seems to have been sitting as close to Westminster as he could as often as he could, getting close access to all the most recent war news and letters, professionally interested in the manoeuvring of diplomacy and its subtleties as well as in the more dramatic aspects of the war.  And, of course, he’s in his sixties and seventies, and enjoying it – it was 1338 when he proudly began to insert, alongside the annus domini and the regnal year of the current king and of the pope, his own age as a counter (sixty-four, in that year). You can just see him sitting around pontificating on exactly how the war is going and correcting everyone with precision, and becoming an expert on the precise terminology and functions of everything related to war.

 

--------------

 

[1] Which I think I will post.  It may interest some people at some point in some tiny measure of its being.

[2] Which uses GOOD milk for its coffee, sells pre-made soups and sauces made on-site that actually look good, and offers cooking classes like ‘Pasta and Risotto’, ‘Vietnamese and Cambodian’, ‘Balinese’, ‘Simply Spanish’ and ‘Moroccan Spice’.  Cook’s Pantry, it’s called.

[3] No, that’s not a mixed metaphor, so long as the weight is appropriately distributed for optimum balance.

Guest blogger post

From Elizabeth.  She is fascinated with why adults spend so much time pushing buttons on their shiny things that open and close.  She opened my blogpost-composing program all by herself, and proceeded to contribute the following:

 

 

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I should also point out that she is very conscientious about her spelling, and called up the spell-checker at least five times while writing. She also tried to make a category for it (something like 23b4, I believe), but the silly  enter key was mysteriously stuck (possibly something to do with the fact that she was leaning on shift).

She is now performing similar operations with her little (musical) keyboard, and trying to play it with her mouth.

Comment moderation on.

Sadly. Tired of the links to suspicious auto-downloads that were turning up on every post, and the occasional porn. But in recompense I have removed the word verification thingie, and the requirement that you be a registered user.

Bloggers with faces and pre-Carolingian Baptists (in the sixties)

Further Things I Have Learned In New York:

- CUNY is fun. And has fun people at it.

- Some bloggers are real people, and are actually moderating your panel (hi Jenn!).

- Mediaeval music theorists also used Venn diagrams.

- You can tell at the start of the day which of the speakers from the first panel will be interested enough to stick around for the rest of the day, and which will vanish soon after giving their own paper.

- More people will appear for the papers immediately preceding and succeeding lunch.

- No matter how interesting the papers, those chairs start to hurt after five hours.

- Friends of the Saints is a fun group to join for an evening's discussion after the conference, even if you haven't done the reading.

- Most importantly.  If you (hypothetically speaking) wander into the room where such a group is meeting simply because you want the free wine and cheese, despite not being any  manner of historian, do indeed sit down at the back of the group to shield the single focus of your intent, but do not feel obliged to comment on the proceedings. Really.  There is a reason we haven't discussed Protestants or Baptists yet.We're not being discriminatory, it's just that we're discussing the pre-Carolingian relics trade.

- In entirely unrelated news, some discussion leaders are very very good at taking random comments and assimilating them into the discussion as if they were actually relevant and helpful. Now, there is a skill I envy.

New York, New .... Jersey?

Things I Have Learned So Far While In New York For A CUNY Grad Conference:

- There are two Penn stations. When the man at the air train tells you to get off at Penn Station, he actually means do not get off at Penn Station, but rather stay on the train and wait for the next Penn Station. Otherwise, you will find you are still in New Jersey.

- Always book a hotel right next to the Empire State Building. That way, you can step out of the train station and go 'hm, Eighth Avenue, but is Fifth this way or ... oh, what is that I see looming right over the skyline over there? Right, that way it is.'

- There are many jobs in the world that I Do Not Want. Current top is standing on the street corner holding up the sign that says 'Dunkin Donuts ---->'.

- There really are a lot of yellow taxis.

- No wonder America spawns so many superheroes that fly or leap from building to building. Their streets are canyons.

- They really do offer you cheesecake for breakfast. The place I'm sitting in now even looks like the place where they have the wager over cheesecake or strudel in the Frank Sinatra film of Guys and Dolls. (I am being non-iconic and eating yoghurt with fruit and muesli.)

- It is possible to get decent pizza in New York. As, not three inches deep and drowned with cheese and containing vegetables (if any) that have not been freeze-dried for years.

- And I haven't even gone to the conference yet. Registration is in 45 minutes. The question becomes, after a night spent waking up all the time to the dulcet tones of New York car horn conversations, will I have the brain left by 3 pm to give an engaged and energetic performance? Well, if not, one simply regards it as a performance and falls back on old stage training!

101st post.

Well, the last one was one of a series, so I couldn't really make a big deal of it being the hundredth.

So, it's been a busy semester, and not quite over yet - I've still some marking to do. It's also looking to be a challenging one next semester. The university has only offered me one marking position, which is almost $10/hour less than a TA position and only 37.5 hours total, as opposed to the 130 of a TA position. I had three marking positions last semester and barely scraped by, and now a) I'm to be moving out and renting next semester and b) on a third the income. So I shall have to go begging an RA position.

In addition, of the two courses I'm taking next semester, the mediaeval one is (theoretically, at least) to be conducted in French, and the other is - very modern. 18th century! They have regularised spelling and all!

Motivated by this, and the fact that I have a whole lot of thoughtful notes in my notebook for last year's Restoration course that I never did anything with, I've started a new blog called Protestants and Printing Presses (and other Newfangled Fripperies). It will only be updated intermittently, but it a mediaevalist-encounters-the-early-modern blog, as I'm chary of turning this one into an anything-goes blog. All my early modern posts from here have been exported over there, but they remain at their original locations as well.

And, in searching EEBO for woodcuts to use as a background to the title, I found a highly amusing title page which immediately turned into an inaugural post.

Meanwhile, I have some more posts on the Gilte Legende waiting to be polished up for here, and a delicious-looking book on mediaeval women and the gaze which I am looking forward to reading and responding to, so I may actually get a slight little holiday before next semester starts!

Merry Christmas to you all out there. I'm having one!

Chaucer, out of the mouths (et al) of babes.

Let it be known that 12-day-old Elizabeth is already developing literary opinions. She likes the Knight, is indifferent to the Squire, abhors the Shipman, dribbles at the descriptions of the Franklin's feasts and passes gas at the Cook. Most promising, she gets very excited about the Clerk, waves her arms enthusiastically at the idea of having more books in her room than pretty things and claps her hands to her mouth excitedly at the talk of buying books even without being able to get a benefice (tenure?). Let us hope she doesn't emulate him so far as to borrow money for books and forget to pay it back.

Alcohol: shame and usefulness.

So, how do the rest of you find it? This whole, brain-doesn't-switch-off, over-activity-of-the-grey-matter, how-do-you-stop-thinking-all-the-time thing? You see, alcohol may be frowned on generally, but it can actually be really useful when it comes to relaxing. Whether it be because you're practising your vocal exercises for a singing exam, and your mother is disturbed and distressed by your confession that it's far easier when you've had a half-cup of wine but it makes damn sense because it switches off the instinctive muscular tightening and clamping that is sabotaging your performance through over-thinking everything and the inability to trust your body to support your performance unsupervised; or because your stomach is cramping horribly because, well, that's what it does once a month, and your body doesn't consult you first to ask whether you've got, say, a paper due to be delivered (performed) tomorrow and you just need to turn brain and muscle off because you've done as much as you can for the time; or just because it's the end of the day and your brain hasn't realised yet and keeps doing interesting things with texts which, yes, are interesting but I'm trying to relax now and go to sleep please shut up...

... Am I alone in thinking this is somehow shameful? Or am I alone in thinking it's maybe, within moderate limits, acceptable?

Thought for the day

It is rather pleasing to be living with people who respond to your solemnly and elaborately and slightly tipsily detailed explanation as to why the blossoming of western vernacular literature and the fact that we are not now speaking Latin is ultimately due to the mystic and passionate powers of garlic with "I think I love you".

And that this is given equal weight with your suggestion to mix the haloumi juice in with the melted garlic butter with which the naan are to be brushed.

Perplexing things about living in another country

- There are squirrels running everywhere, and no one cares.
- Pedestrian crossings do not make a noise when they change from 'don't walk' to 'walk'. I'm having to get into the habit of actually watching the signal.
- Where is the coffee?
- Getting used to a cat in the house rather than a dog. And consequently, to not jumping up and going to yell at her if you hear her eating or scratching in another room - she's eating and disposing of the eaten as she ought to be, not getting into the garbage.
- Rabbits ignore you. They sit beside the path and watch you placidly, and if you walk towards them, they'll eventually deign to lollop away a few metres, rather than transforming into a panicked flash of white tail heading for the nearest cover. And, here's the thing - they are not ill.
- No, really, that substance is not coffee. Where is the coffee?
- Retraining one's brain to default to calling people - and thinking of them - by title + surname, rather than just first name.
- I have no dog.
- Alright, that's an espresso coffee, but is it so hard to make it a good one?
- Crossing roads is dangerous. Suddenly I have to retrain every instinct about where the traffic is coming from. And apparently you can make a right turn (ie, a left turn) at a red light here.
- Having multiple university libraries available at once, just a short walk from each other.
- Squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, rabbits and deer - and woods just across the road! This would be a prime dog-walking area!
- If I had a dog.

Real life does its intruding thing, again

So, on Sunday I took just my boy down to the park, leaving the other beagle and our young brittany at home. And he hadn't had a walk in the morning, because I'd been working, so he was terribly enthused and went into happy hyperzoom mode as soon as we got out of the car, and - then he was lying on the ground screaming in pain.

Turns out there was a nail sticking out of a post at just beagle-shoulder height, and he had an inch-deep hole in his side, and our vet closes early on a Sunday (it was only 4 pm!) so I had to take him to the emergency clinic, and yes, that was as expensive as it sounds.

So now Oliver has seven stitches in his shoulder, though he seems to have forgotten it hurts at all and doesn't understand why he has to stay inside and keep warm and rest and not, eg, go rolling around in the mud outside with the puppy.

(Yes, his lip regularly gets stuck like that, mostly when he's trying to look serious.)

I have told him that when it heals he will have a terribly manly scar, just like Major in Footrot Flats. As his personality when it comes to pretending to be terribly manly (just so long as no one bigger than him comes along) is very similar to the Dog's, I think he should be pleased. Here is the Dog standing up to Major in an Oliver-like manner:


And here is the Dog's snapshot of Major's scar.

So Oliver will look manly like that, just as soon as the painkillers wear off and he stops falling over every time he tries to lift his leg.

Anyway. He's doing alright so far, which leaves me free to contemplate other things, such as the fact that he just cost me $1030. So much for savings. Looks like going international to do my postgrad courses may be off the cards after all, so it's back to replanning my future. Again.

In other dog-related news, we just heard that Annie, one of our two old terriers who still live with our parents, has died - probably also on Sunday. It isn't really a surprise, but it would have been nice if it could have happened when my parents weren't on holiday in Europe.

So, all up, between panicking over dogs, nursing dogs and mourning dogs, not been a terribly productive week here.

Fire, flood - and now an earthquake.

We must be still waiting on pestilence and famine.

When I was growing up, it never occurred to me to be afraid of the weather. Thunderstorms, rain, extreme heat or cold, were fun, or excuses for warm blankets and fire and hot chocolate, or for running around on the lawn under the sprinkler and dinner at the beach.

The last two years have changed that. Today, the air smells of smoke, branches are down on roads and power lines around here, and the sky is the colour of dirt.

We have a little rain now; but that isn't good news. For the firefighters still at work out there, it complicates access and hinders backburning, while not being heavy enough to affect the bushfires. Here, it has dampened roads that have been dry for months, lifting the oil on them into a thin, treacherous film that makes driving terrifying. I've just come back from seeing my sister's play before it goes off to the Adelaide Fringe. It was a short drive, but twice on the way there a car in front of me skidded, lost control, swerved out of the lane and narrowly avoided crashing. I felt my tyres lose purchase five times, once just starting up at the lights - and I was driving slowly, carefully, and got new tyres two weeks ago.

You'd think, in those conditions, that people would have the sense not to tailgate, but apparently not.

I think we're all just waiting to see what the sky throws at us next. Apart from branches and singed leaves.

Stories

I don't understand.

I just can't begin to comprehend, on a real level, either how this could happen or what it means, for everyone out there who is affected by it in realer terms than I am.

I walk up and down the main street here, in inner suburbian Melbourne, and everyone is standing in clusters, swapping stories. Making connections. Trying to understand, or just acknowledging, sharing, trying to feel as if we're doing something just by feeling some little shadow of the grief and loss with them. I sat in a coffee shop and read through every article in the Herald Sun on the fires, and I was in tears by page two, and I had to keep going out of some weird feeling that I had to, at least, hear the stories. Some form of vigil, or acknowledgement.

I can't write - I tried. I'm too distracted to do anything resembling real work. It doesn't seem real at the moment. It will pass, I know, it will recede as everything does, into a memory of sympathy and statistics. But while it's still real, oughtn't we try to keep it open? There's so little that we can really do, and I've already done what I can in donations, and can volunteer myself for various relief work in the next few days when the fires die down and the aftermath sets in, but I can't escape the feeling that more important than the material acknowledgement is the knowing, the feeling. Not letting the story fade.

But I still feel, inescapably, helplessly, like I ought to do more, do something.

Perhaps we're meant to.

Stories from today:
- A man, already on fire, was saved by his beloved horse when he was pushed over the fence down into the creek below. He was sure the horse must have died, given the impossible flames he would have had to run through; but when he climbed out of the creek once the fires had passed, the horse was standing in the middle of the panic with minor burns around his eyes and nose.
- Someone in the paper reported being approached by a badly burned man, blackened, skin hanging off him, carrying his baby daughter, who wasn't touched. He said "I've lost my wife, I've lost my sons, please make sure she's okay, she's all I've got left". They didn't see him again.
- A man I passed on the street is waiting to drive up to see if his holiday home is alright.
- One man was driving, fleeing the flames, but with the smoke so thick he couldn't see the flames were also in front of him. The first thing he knew of it was when the car in front of him, carrying his neighbours, just - exploded. I don't know how he survived. I doubt he does.
- Julia Gillard, our deputy PM, renowned for her unshakeable demeanour, had a shaking voice and a tissue in hand when she spoke about the bushfires yesterday. Our Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has labelled the arsonists mass murderers.
- Several radio stations, usually frivolous in their subject matter, have had people calling in to tell their stories, voices shaking, in tears, sometimes unable to finish. It doesn't matter. We know what they mean.
- A woman in the coffee shop was waiting for news of her cousin.
- The town of Flowerdale was "forgotten" by the world - emergency services abandoned them on Saturday evening when the fire trucks were called away to a nearby town, and in the chaos no one got back to them until journalists arrived last night, to find the survivors huddling in the central pub.
- A distant friend of my grandmother had a stepdaughter who was presumed dead, but he refused to believe it. He hired a helicopter and flew over where she'd last been, hunting, and eventually returned with her - alive. And the whole town celebrated, even those people who had never known her, because one person had returned alive who had been supposed dead, and for one moment the ever-climbing death toll missed its foothold and slipped a step back.
- And a picture that is a story all by itself, taken from the Herald Sun:


Police now fear that the death toll may rise to 300 or more.

131 deaths, and counting.

This is not what my blog is meant to be for, and apologies to anyone who just wants mediaeval matter, please feel free to skip, but... stories need to be told. Skip to the end to just get to the donation links, if you're so inclined.

For those of you who don't know, this weekend saw the worst bushfires in Australia's history. Ash Wednesday 1983 was our previous record: 76 deaths. Huge swathes of New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia were burned, and across the Bass Strait in Tasmania, my parents could smell the smoke.

But the death toll for the fires that are still burning across Victoria and New South Wales stands, so far, at 131 [Update: 173] - in a time when we are better prepared, better organised, better informed. And the count is still rising. Bodies are still trapped in cars, crashed on roads as they tried to flee fires that came on faster than anyone could guess, driven by fierce winds and exacerbated by a hotter, dryer summer than any on record. There are undoubtably many bodies still trapped in burnt-out houses, but emergency crews have more pressing priorities than digging them out. Saturday was our hottest day on record - 46.5 where I live, 47.8 in other parts, doubtless furnace-like from radiant heat where the firefighters were.

My aunt and uncle live in Wandong. They're lucky - their house and their neighbours' are apparently the only two left standing in the town [Update: their neighbours' house is gone, and theirs now stands alone in a mess of black]. The official death count for Wandong is four - and the town is tiny - but from the snatches of conversation we've had with them (phone lines are out, of course, so they have to use their mobile batteries sparingly - they know many more people who have died. They evacuated on Saturday afternoon with the flames on their doorstep. They had waited too long, because their beloved border collie, lame in two legs, had fled in panic and they couldn't find her. They were also desperate for news of their block of land, not far outside the town - they knew the fires had been through that area. They keep four horses on it, have been restoring the old buildings on the land (both of them work for Heritage Victoria) and gradually restoring the native bush in the area. They went up to the block Saturday night, found the horses miraculously alive, and spent all night fighting spot fires there. They lost everything on the block, years of love and hard work, but the horses are still alive - I don't know in what condition [Update: Liz says next time there's a fire she'll stick with the horses - clearly they know what to do. The horse float in the shed on the block is burned to cinders, but the land rover right next to it is untouched]. Sunday [Update: and Monday, and Tuesday], they spent helping move everyone's livestock (at least that which didn't need euthanasia) to other areas, and fighting every-present spot fires, and Chloe (the collie) miraculously turned up at a friend's a long way away.

They are the lucky ones. Many of their friends are dead, almost all have lost their houses and near on everything they own. Some were uninsured. Many plantations, farms, land blocks in the area are devastated, and of course most places of employment in the town are burned out. Wandong is effectively destroyed as a community. And the pattern repeats itself across the state.

I think most people didn't realise the scale of this until they read this morning's newspapers, and heard the interviews on the radios with survivors and victims. All day, I've been having the same conversations with customers at our bakery - swapping stories, commiserating for relatives' or friends' losses, marvelling over escapes, repeating over and over "Isn't it awful? You just feel so helpless". Everyone feels so shell-shocked. It even creeps into ordinary exchanges that you usually wouldn't consider - "Good morning, how are you?" "Oh, I'm well, I'm fine - at least compared to so many other people out there today".

When I came home from work, I went through my wardrobe to see what I could spare. I ended up with five big garbage bags full of clothes, blankets and linen (alright, so my wardrobe may glut slightly) and another bag with miscellaneous things like childrens' books, umbrellas, sunglasses and handkerchieves, which I'm sure a lot of people will need right now. The Salvation Army is collecting anything people can spare to distribute to families who need them. If you're in Victoria, please consider it - I know most people can't spare much, but when people have lost everything, even a spare shirt so you can wash the one you've got on must mean something, mustn't it?

Monetary donations can be made from anywhere in the world to the Red Cross or the Salvation Army (or here for non-Australian donors). If you're in Victoria, again, consider donating to the Myers Bushfire Appeal (just go in to any Myers store): they'll give your money straight to the Salvation Army, but double it with their own money.

I will go and ring my grandmother again. She lives in Drouin, in Gippsland - one of the larger fires is burning through the Bunyip national park near there, but it's heading away from her now. We will swap stories, again, the same ones we've been telling other people all day, passing on the stories we heard in return. Because that's what people do - we reach out with out voices, we share stories, we make meaning.

Merry Christmas from the Kilpatrick household!

Every family has Christmas traditions, right? Each has something unique that they do that they can be fairly sure no one else is doing right at that moment. For example, two years ago as we hung our newly iced gingerbread men on the christmas tree, we could be fairly sure that no other family in Australia had a gingerbread Lucia di Lammermoor, swaying sensuously in her blood-spattered white nightdress. I think I even managed to make a dagger for her, possibly out of slivered almonds.

This Christmas, gingerbread forms were dictated rather by chance. For example, someone lost his head accidentally. So of course, he had to be consoled by translation into an approprate semi-Christmas figure:


He isn't wearing a dress. The Green Knight is far too manly to wear a dress. It is an embroidered robe. With almond embroidery on the belt.

His flashing red eyes did run a little, though.

Unfortunately, we didn't have any horse-shaped cutters, so his colour-coordinated steed lacks a little grandeur:


But his friend/adversary is very pretty, in appropriately Christmassy colours, and with an almost-pentangle on his shield.

I'm not sure why Gawain has no eyes. Either there was some solemn symbolism about his inability to see truly due to being distracted by earthly beauty, or I had used all the cashous by this time.

In any case, he probably got the better deal:
Poor Grendel is not only missing an arm, and some claws from his remaining hand, but he was strung up to the tree upside down - and as a result, an enterprising beagle has nibbled his head.

In fact, limblessness and missing bits seemed to be a theme this year, right down to the story my younger sister told with some of the old Christmas tree ornaments:



From left to right, Mrs Dobbins (missing her legs, an arm and the loop of string on top of her head due to her enthusiastic habit of rolling down the street), Clive the Headless Rocking Horse (ran afoul of a beer company for criticising its objectification of women, a subject about which he feels very strongly despite the fact that he is neither female or human), various soldiers who lost their bits in battling the evil chicken minions of the Easter Bunny, and another horse who's quite literally gone off his rocker and also has to wear his head slung over the left side of his rump for fear of over-balancing. I don't remember his story, except that he now runs a bicycle shop.

A slightly more serious attempt at decoration (I disapprove of Yule logs that involve feral plants like holly):


... and my two dogs worn out after a long morning beach walk.


Not that Snowy went on the walk. He was worn out by all his quiet sleeping while the rest of the family (including both beagles) was on a morning beach walk. He's seventeen, blind, deaf and doddery, lives with my parents because he'd be far too disoriented if I took him with me to Melbourne, and we've been expected him to die suddenly for about three years.

He quite likes Oliver, though I don't think Oliver really notices him.

I also think it's fair to say that we were the only family in Adelaide or farther playing the dictionary game from the Oxford Latin Dictionary (we found it's easier than the English, because it's much easier to find a word that no one knows), and making up family line-by-line stories involving Chrétien de Troyes, Cleopatra and Amanda Vanstone.

It works like this. Everyone in the circle has a piece of paper. They write a man's name up the top, followed by the word 'met'. They fold the top down to hide the name from the next person, then pass the paper on. On the next paper, they write a woman's name, then fold it down and pass it on. Everyone contributes a sentence to each story, following a consistent pattern to preserve some coherence. In this case, the pattern was:
[man's name] met [woman's name] at [place]. He [said/did something]. She [ditto]. [repeat actions, alternating he/she, a certain number of times agreed in the group]. The upshot was that... [something happened].

For example:

David John Kilpatrick [my father] met
Cleopatra at
Windsor Castle.
She raised one finely plucked golden eyebrow at his choice of garter.
He tickled her tummy.
She rose onto her tiptoes and wiggled her ears conspiratorially.
The consequence was they got married and had lots and lots of babies and two rather scrawny cockatoos.

Or:

Margaret Thatcher met
Kevin Rudd [our Prime Minister] at
the Chelsea Flower Show, where he was judging the cyclads and she was dressed as one.
He remembered that he'd always had a phobia about that kind of female and began to run around in circles, squawking and flapping his arms about.
She replied, "But sir, where do you put your Grumpy Old Mysterious Stranger Who Holds The Information Necessary For The Quest, But Who Talks Only In Cryptic Epigrams?"
He rabbited on a bit longer, but finally shut up when they started playing some of his favourite music.
She raced after him, intending to catch him by train, but then remembered that she'd previously rigged all the points.
The upshot was that he joined the Australian Labour Party and developed a terrible phobia of floral print.

I don't know how we got such an appropriate final line, given whoever wrote it can't have known that the story had previously contained either a Labour PM or flowers.

Merry Christmas and New Year, and may you lose no limbs, or even claws!

A quarter of a century old today...

... and, corresponding with that milestone, another, possibly smaller, possibly greater. After all, I did work rather harder to achieve it.

Results for this semester were released yesterday, but I learned them today:

Mediaeval Body: 87%
Mediaeval Representations: 86%
English thesis: 88%

And my first semester results:
Research Principles and Practices: 85%
Latin Paleography and Codicology: 83%
To Hell with Dante: 89%

So, with an (unweighted) average of 86.3%, I think it's fair to say I passed.

I am pleased with my thesis mark. I think that is a good mark for a thesis.

So. Now for the future.

Notes for a PHD proposal

So, in between busily scribbling bits of thesis, I somehow have to find brain space to think about next year and PHD possibilities. Here's my current thoughts.


Gentle words: choosing the non-violent approach.


Summary

In the final book of Malory's Morte Darthur, a desperate and bereaved Gawain tries to provoke Lancelot into battle with accusations of adultery, falsehood and betrayal. In failing to defend himself, Lancelot risks validating the accusations and attracting the additional charge of cowardice - and yet he, the best of Arthur's knights, deliberately chooses not to take up arms against his friend and his liege lord, even if this choice undermines his very being as a knight. I propose to explore literary and cultural perceptions of the choice of non-violence in the changing world of England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Considering the centrality of violence and force to both the chivalric ethos and to an effective justice system, I will also examine the effect such a choice might have on the formation of masculine identity and power. By studying literature such as political tracts, anonymous romances and saints' lives in addition to the more consciously constructed literature of writers such as Chaucer, Froissart, Malory and the Gawain-poet, I mean to examine the way in which the latter engaged with and rewrote cultural assumptions and constructs evident in the former.


Points to consider:

- The language of the formal university or theological disputatio was dominated by terms drawn from combat and physical dispute. Karras details the culture of masculine formation in late medieval universities and the transferral of aggressive response patterns from the physical military setting to the verbal university debate[1]. How was the non-violent choice depicted in this less literal setting? Did the virtual absence of women from the scene and the ban on marriage (where applicable) change the dynamic by depriving men of one possible way to prove their masculinity?

- Given the lower visibility of women in literature and the greater passivity of the female role in society and the home, can we determine to what extent these precepts were applied in the construction of feminine identity?

- Legends of saints' lives often celebrate the choice of non-resistance, the decision to suffer martyrdom unresisting for one's faith. This is one instance in which the author almost invariably commends the character unequivocably for the decision, though other characters in the narrative may mock or chide the saint for it. But is non-violence in the name of God an act of challenge and combat in itself? To what extent is the peaceful option as endorsed by religion used as an extenuating circumstance or justification for choosing to avoid violence in other situations?

- A fourteenth century political tract on good kingship would have it that "mercy with oute justise is no verrey mercy, but rathir it may be seid folye and symplesse. And also justise with oute mercy is crueltie and felonye, and thefore it is convenient that these II vertues be ever ensembled"[2]. This emphasis on judicious balance is paralleled by literary moments such as Theseus' careful retention of the power of both justice and mercy in The Knight's Tale and Froissart's depiction of a suspiciously similar Edward III during the siege of Calais. How do writers in the thirteenth and fourteenth century express concern with the upsetting of the scales of mercy and justice, or use their writing to explore and impose a more acceptable ideal?




That's all that springs to mind for now. It's a first draft, of course, and will probably be rewritten substantially. Of course, it would help if I knew what a PhD proposal is meant to look like... but finding out would involve research, which means time!



[1] Karras, Ruth Mazo. From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in late medieval Europe. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2002. 67-108.
[2] "The III Consideracions Right Necesserye to the good governaunce of a prince". Ed. Genet, Jean-Philippe. Four English Political Tracts of the Later Middle Ages. Camden Society, 4th Series (1977), 18. 200.

A career choice...

You know those conversations that abruptly change the way you see your whole future life?

I had one of those a week ago today. A good friend of mine said, "Hannah? Come to Ottawa for your PhD." And we joked about it, and chatted about it, and I wandered over to look at the Ottawa University website, and the Canadian immigration website, and... somehow in there the conversation turned serious and it became an option. Given I live in Melbourne, it's rather a drastic option.

It would be a four-year course. A study visa lasts the length of the course to which you've been accepted, and I believe can then be extended to permanent residency and potentially citizenship, if one is a good and productive member of society. Four years is a good deal of your life to devote to another country, but the employment prospects for a... mediaeval researcher? mediaevalist? obsessed person? ... are a good deal larger there than here, which is why it is, in effect, a career choice. I'd be approaching thirty by the time I finished my doctorate, would have put down roots both professionally and in my personal life, and have to accept now that it's likely I'd never really be moving back home.

So, this last week, while trying to concentrate on expanding the very rough draft of my Honours thesis (trawthe and ambiguity in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) and research for an essay on the criticism levelled against Edward II in his own time (which means reading as many contemporary sources as I can possibly lay my hands on, because the one I didn't find would be sure to disprove my line of argument), and while reading for and participating noisily in my two coursework seminars for this semester (this week, Malory's and the alliterative Morte in one and saints' bodies and relics in the other), and of course working at making other people's coffee in order to earn enough money to feed my beloved beagle (and, I suppose, myself)... my mind keeps wandering back to frantic details of freightage, Ottawan real estate, cost of living, scholarships, disposal of furniture and other "assets", which books to take, which clothes, what the flora and fauna are like over there and how it would relate to walking a beagle about (ticks? thorns in his ears? lynxes?).

Somehow in that time, it seems, the decision has already been made.

Providing, of course, that I can get a scholarship.