Look a post wow!

[melannen]

Oh, look, a dreamwidth post from me!

So for the record, I haven't abandoned you guys for tumblr, it's just that 'doing the last follow-up for the book giveaway' became The Thing I Was Putting Off. Finally did that today! Everyone should be followed up - if you asked for books and haven't heard from me, let me know, please!

And the good thing about having such a resilient yet vital Thing I Am Putting Off is that it worked as motivation for me to do other stuff! So, let's see...

I guess the most important is that I am now in Evanston, IL, petsitting! Have been for almost three weeks, even. Evanston is such a nice place to live (even when it is TOO HOT) and I am trying to do EVERYTHING while I'm here, we'll see how that goes.

Also if anyone of you will be in the general Chicago area before the end of August and want to meet up in person, let me know! Fan meetups are fun, and I even have an apartment I can ask people to now!

As one of my Chicago Adventures I spent pretty much all my cogent hours last week attending this : The Middle Ages In Translation: Mellon Symposium (pdf). Well, I say 'attended', I meant 'lurked', I pretty much spent the week sitting in the back of the room putting off 'don't talk to me' vibes as hard as I could.

But it was really interesting! I mean, history conference, *always* interesting, but they were using "translation" in a very broad sense (riffing off the medieval Latin "translatio", which means both translation in our sense and other kinds of transfer and tranfiguration) so it ended up basically being a five-day con about Transformative Works and the European Middle Ages.

Score.

Anyway, I went to, uh, twenty-seven talks, so I'm not going to try to talk about them all here, but I'll list the ones I attended under the cut, and if anyone wants to know more about one of them, leave a comment before I forget it all and I'll give you a very biased account that probably completely misses the point and includes all the questions I would have asked if I'd felt like I had the necessary context to ask non-stupid questions!

Sessions

9 a.m. Rita Copeland(Classical Studies and English, Univ. of Pennsylvania)
Translating Antiquity
Actually about: extant translations from classical Latin texts into vernacular languages, how and why they were used and made

10:15 Katharine Breen(English, Northwestern University)
The Vices Always Die Twice: Translating from Pagan to Christian in
Prudentius’s Psychomachia
Actually about: wow, that Psychomachia sure has a lot of really gory violence between half-naked women, huh?

11:30 Joshua Byron Smith(English, University of Arkansas)
Clerical Creations: Latin Authors and the Making of the Matter of Britain
Actually About: How the recieved scholarly tradition that Arthurian mythology got to France via Breton minstrels rather than translated Welsh texts is bull hockey.

2:30 Heidi Gearhart(Assumption College)
The Practice of Art and the Written Word:
Translating Technical Knowledge in On
Diverse Arts
Actually About: "How-to" texts on medieval arts and how they were used and transmitted

3:30 Shirin Fozi(Univ. of Pittsburgh)
Abstraction and ‘Aesthetic Attitudes’ across
the Twelfth-Century Alps
Actually about: this really weird carved stone lintel that some neopagans have decided is a tree-of-life with a vagina on it, but isn't really.

4:30 Jeffrey Hamburger(Art History, Harvard University)
Hrabanus redivivus: Berthold of Nuremberg’s Marian Supplement to De
laudibus sanctae crucis
Actually about: Medieval sudoku puzzles and infographics

9 a.m. C. Stephen Jaeger (German and Comp. Literature, Univ. of Illinois)
The Romantics Were Right After All: Walter Scott, Kenelm Digby and
Others as Interpreters of the Middle Ages
Actually about: English romantics' version of the middle ages, nationalist politics, and concepts of masculinity

10:15 Gábor Klaniczay(History, Central European University)
Translating the Middle Ages into Postmodern Nationalism in Central Europe
Actually about: sparkly Hungarians and medieval re-enactors

11:30 David Shyovitz (History and Jewish Studies, Northwestern University)
A Bloody Cover-Up: Vegetarianism and ‘Animal Migration’ among
Medieval Christians and Jews
Actually about: Jewish (and Christian) doctrine on whether cruelty to animals was a good thing or not. Also: zombies, bestiality

9 a.m. Eva Hoffman(Art History and Middle Eastern Studies, Tufts Univ.)
Translating Scientific Knowledge: Exchange of Image and Text in Greek and Arabic Manuscripts
Actually about : illustrations in medieval herbals and what they tell you about how the text was used

10:15 Jacqueline Jung (Art History, Yale University)
Gothic Sculpture and the Translation of Charisma
Actually about: differing portrayals of the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins in Northern European cathedrals

11:30 Christina Normore(Art History, Northwestern University)
Translating the Madonna of Cambrai
Actually about: this one painting of Mary that everybody else totally ripped off (without even reverse-image-searching to find author credit, omg)

2:30 Seth Hindin(UC Davis)
From the Wilds of Russia: Exoticism and
Cross-Cultural Exchange in Late Medieval Sculpture
Actually about: how artistic portrayals of the Russian trade in squirrel fir make it look a lot more exciting and adventurous than it actually was

3:30 Vanessa Crosby(Northwestern Univ.)
Eastern Silk, Western Brass: Cross-Currents
of Trade and Commemoration on Late
Medieval Funerary Monuments for
English Merchants
Actually about: the copying of patterns from Eastern silk brocades in Flemish brass engravings in England

Robert Lerner(History, Northwestern University)
The Prisoner of Avignon Carries On: John of Rupescissa’s Vade mecum in
tribulatione (1356) in Seven European Vernaculars
Actually about: this one crazy prophet who was inciting a peasant uprising against the rich, and why his stuff was a bestseller despite the church being Very Unhappy about it

9 a.m.Claire Waters(English, University of California at Davis)
Teaching, Translation, and Transformation in Thirteenth-Century French
Verse
Actually about: ...I have apparently forgotten this whole talk. It was interesting? It was about French verse in manuscripts vs. French prose vs. Latin verse, and teaching? Augh, I want to remember. :/

10:15 Daniel Hobbins (History, University of Notre Dame)
Authorial Colophons in Late Medieval Manuscripts: A Translation from
Scribal into Authorial Practice
Actually about: how the practice of authors trying to ensure they got credit for their work developed, and why this is often misleading for people studying the manuscripts, and how this carried forward into modern printing practices

11:30 Susie Phillips(English, Northwestern University)
Translating Mischief: Laughter and Language Lessons in Premodern
England 2:30 Jessica Berenbeim (Magdalen College,
Oxford)
Actually about: Wow, medieval phrasebooks were REALLY CRACKY

2:30 Jessica Berenbeim (Magdalen College,
Oxford)
The Discourse of Documents in English
Medieval Art
Actually about: how people thought about written legal documents as objects of power when written legal documents were first becoming really common

3:30 Lyle Dechant (Yale University)
The Lovers’ Conversation: A Dialogue
between Text, Image, and Social Practice
in the Thirteenth Century
Actually about: this particular image of a man and a woman that occurs in close variation in a lot of medieval manuscripts, especially songbooks, where it originated and why it was so popular

4:30 Barbara Newman(English and Religious Studies, Northwestern)
Translating the Trinity (and a long-lostsaint): On the Origins of the
Rothschild Canticles
Actually about: this little book of Christian meditations with REALLY INTERESTING and REALLY UNUSUAL illustrations, and the exciting detective story of how she figured out where it was made.

9 a.m. Richard Kieckhefer (Religious Studies and History, Northwestern)
Translations that Kill: Conflation and Confusion of Regional Terms
for Witchcraft
Actually about: all the different terms that are used to mean 'witch' in witchcraft tracts and trial records, and how they didn't actually all mean the same thing in their original context, but the witch-hunters conflated them all together into one concept

10:15 Suzanne Conklin Akbari(English and Medieval Studies, Toronto)
Translatio imperii and the Poetics of Periodization
Actually about: this one manuscript about the history of Empire and how it portrays the idea of empire being handed down from Alexander to Flanders, and where it got its 'history', and what that says about the concept of Translatio Imperii in other medieval works.

11:30 David Wallace (English, University of Pennsylvania)
European Translations, 1348-1418
Actually about: So he edited this book about European literature in that period! And they had to come up with some way of organizing the chapters geographically in a period when nation and ethniticy concepts were really in flux. So they used 'routes of transmission' connecting cities instead, and they made this really cool website with Google Maps!

2:30 Ottó Gecser (Eötvös Loránd University,
Budapest)
Translating the Plague: From Learned
Medicine to Popular Interpretations
Actually about: Medical texts on how to treat the Plague, and how they got transmitted and used in other ways in the years after the height of the Black Death.

3:30 Sarah Kernan(Ohio State Univ.)
From Cooking to Text and Back Again:
Translating Between Action and Text in
Late Medieval French and English
Cookbooks
Actually about: whether medieval cookbooks were actually used the way modern people use cookbooks, and if not, what were they used for?

...oh hey, only one I totally forgot! Not bad, considering I didn't remember the existence of caffiene until Thursday.

Comments

[siegeofangels]

Ooh, the Wallace sounds really interesting. Is this it? http://www.english.upenn.edu/~dwallace/europe/index.html

Even just looking at those maps gives me so much information and so many thoughts about influence and transportation and division. Wow, that is cool.

[melannen]

Yes, it's really cool! I'm going to play with the map some more.

I don't know how much of what was in the talk wasn't in the map, but he talked a lot about how the different routes were connected and why they decided to organize them the way they did, and a lot about the Council of Constance and the way it ... consciously constructed nationalities? Which was cool.

Also some neat behind-the-scenes stuff about editing a major academic book like that, and the work that goes into herding a bunch of academics with different specialties, and the decisions you have to make, like forcing everybody to use standard transliterations of names, which is giving me lots of thoughts about tag wrangling.

Also apparently 78 out of 82 people have turned in their final drafts of their chapters. I'm *really* glad I'm not one of those last four. :D

[j00j]

Evanston! I am from there. Sadly not anywhere near Chicago or I'd hang out.

Unsolicited things to do, abbreviated, mostly Evanston version:

The Northwestern campus by the lake is a very nice place to walk (also check out the Deering library-- that's the old, neo-gothic part, not the hideous Brutalist part. They have a replica Gutenberg press outside Special Collections. ), but you've probably figured that out if you've been at a symposium there.

Carmen's or Giordano's are good places to experience Chicago style pizza if you haven't done that and you eat dairy. Personally I'm a big fan of the spinach-stuffed pizza.

Cozy Noodles is good if you like Thai and restaurants with weird robots and other toys.

Check out the Rose Garden at Lake and Oak-- it's a lovely place to sit if it's not too hot, and there's a fountain.

And my #1 funky Chicago thing I suggest people do is Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, which is 30 plays in 60 minutes, new ones added weekly (based on a die roll), performed in the order demanded by the audience, you pay $9 plus the roll of a die (yes, there's a lot of randomness here). Further explained on that page.

[melannen]

I have done the library and plan to go back a lot! Because ACADEMIC LIBRARY. (the 70s part of the library is... interesting architecturally do.) And it is a very pretty campus with lots of little interesting garden niches and things.

I've done Giordano's pizza and Crazy Noodles too! Crazy Noodles was not as robot-heavy as I'd been led to expect.

I will have to check out the Rose Garden, though. And the play thing sounds... interesting?

[seekingferret]

Yes! Too Much Light is awesome, or at least the NYC version was and I'm told the Chicago version is awesome too.

[melannen]

I kind of feel like it might be too awesome for me! My knowledge of theater is strictly limited and plebeian - I don't know if I'd have enough context to understand how awesome it is.

[seekingferret]

It goes by so fast that doesn't matter. You enjoy the things you enjoy, you stare perplexedly at the things you don't get, and in two minutes you've got another thing to try to figure out.

[tazlet]

The Romantics Were Right After All: Walter Scott, Kenelm Digby and
- Others as Interpreters of the Middle Ages

I'll always want to hear more about this.

[monksandbones]

Meee tooooo!

[melannen]

See below. :D

[melannen]

Okay, so, the "others" in this talk was... well, it was pretty much just Walter Scott and Kenelm Digby. Which was kind of disappointing because I wanted French romantics because Les Mis, darnit!

*ahem* Anyway, as I said in my capsule summary above, the basic thesis was that yes, the Romantics had an idealized and completely unrealistic concept of what chivalry was, but so did actual medieval people; they used it for political and nation-building purposes in the Romantic era, but so did medieval people; the code of chivalry was never really something that people lived by, but then, the actual knights didn't either; etc.

Also, apropos the above, there was a lot about how the 19th century medievalist romantics were all very politically conservative, to the point that they were automatically associated with the Tories (and with the pro-slavery medievalists in the American South). Which on the one hand made *perfect sense*, with the idealization of an aristocracy and the hearkening back to a 'better time' and the attempting to create and identity-myth for England and the concepts of 'duty' and 'honor' that were developed in the Romantic chivalric texts and came to their eventual flower in the senseless slaughter of WWI - and yet, it was *completely* counter to the idea of the Romantics that I'd built up in my mind- as counterculture, politically liberal, peace & love Bohemians - and to my experience of medievally-obsessed poeple in modern day (who in my experience are about equally split between super-duper-liberal and super-duper-conservative, at least in the US.)

But I did get the impression that said political lean was very much an English thing - that the political leanings of medievalism varied greatly country by country (in which case I wish he'd specified 'English Romantics' in his paper description...) (surely that greatest of English Romantics who died fighting for democracy wasn't a reactionary pro-monarchy conservative? Clearly I need to research this more.)

So, that aside, what do I remember about specifics? I hadn't known very much at all about Kenelm Digby and "The Broad Stone of Honor" before this talk, but it was fascinating to hear about - The Broad Stone of Honor as this *massive* compendium of excerpts and stories about chivalry and gentlemanly behavior, compiled as one man's life work over the course of the 19th century, and a great bestseller found on every gentleman's bedside table. I really really wanted to think about Digby through a fannish lens, because both his work & the people who loved it seemed like they were engaging in a very fannish way, but that was really not the tack the presenter was taking; he went back to the ways the book constructed masculinity.

I was also amused by all the contempt for the... craft? involved in the book from the assembled scholars - I mean, yes, it sounds like it was an utter mishmash of poorly organized and poorly explicated excerpts from all over the place, but this was a crowd that had been waxing rhapsodic about medieval florilegia and collections of exempla, which were the exact same thing! I would have loved some more explicit comparison there, too, instead of just people laughing at Digby's bad reviews.

The Walter Scott was mostly about Ivanhoe, with a few mentions of other novels; my main takeaway there, I'm afraid, is being astonished that of an entire hall of medievalists, nobody would admit to having ever read any Walter Scott for pleasure. Do they not care about the middle ages??

Anyway, one point he brought out was that both Digby and Scott were explicit about stating that no, what they were doing was not about history; they weren't primarily in it for historical accuracy; they were interested in pulling out all that was best, all that was beautiful, about the middle ages, and reshaping it into a dream for there day. Which is basically just another way of saying "this was the SCA!" but again, presenter didn't make the connection. (and in fact, when SCA came up in passing in a later presentation, most of the people either didn't know what it was, or were trying very hard to pretend they didn't, which was another thing that puzzled me slightly about a convocation of medievalists...)

He talked a lot, in fact, about Scott's article on chivalry for the Encyclopedia Britannica, in which he seems to have conveniently and frankly deconstructed the foundation of his own work for the edification of readers; I really want to read that now, but I couldn't find a copy that didn't involve giving Google my soul. :P

In the process of looking for it though I discovered the existence of The Knight and the Umbrella, which I also really want to read now.

[skywaterblue]

Yes! I live in Chicago and always need new meatspace friends. It is super easy to get back and forth from Evanston, and a number of my friends who have graduated up the life ladder to marriage and babies live there, so if you want to hang out, we should!

I am pretty broke until Thursday, but I'm planning on going to see 'Samsara' in HD at the Gene Siskel on Thursday, and BrainFrame 2 on Sunday. Also this next weekend is Wicker Park Fest, if you want to experience the Chicago street festival thing.

ETA: And if you haven't discovered it yet, The Brothers K coffee shop is a good place to spent time. (And run by two brothers named Kim, not particularly Russian lit themed, heh.)

[melannen]

Yes, we sohuld get together! I'm pretty broke in general, so that works out. I stopped by the Siskel film center when we were changing trains near there! Their Ghible restrospective was very tempting (but Samsara looks interesting too...)

What is Wicker Park Fest like? From the website it looked kind of ... overwhelmingly crowded.

[skywaterblue]

I also want to see From Up on Poppy Hill because I missed it last time. So we could do that?

Wicker Park Fest is usually hot, crowded, drunk people listening to local bands while browsing craft booths. It's just a street fest - but heh, I live here so I have to 'go' irregardless. If we could find a patio spot at one of the bars, that can be fun.

[monksandbones]

Oh man, that sounds awesome! C. Stephan Jaeger, be still my nerdy medievalist heart!

[melannen]

I very carefully didn't look up any of the names before I went, that way I didn't know who I should be nervously fangirly around. :D

[stellar_dust]

Yay I'm glad you're having fun! What about Evanston makes you like it so?

I would like to hear more about (well, many of them, but especially relevant to my current needs): Jaeger, Shyovitz, Jung, Berenbeim (does she mention Iceland omg??), Wallace (url plz and does he mention Iceland?)

ok I see the link above re: wallace. Hrm. shall have to investigate more.

p.s. call mom. and charge your phone.

[melannen]

Mostly that I can walk places and where I can't walk I can bike. And it's shady and there is a lake! and a library!

...honestly that's about all I've got around to so far.

See above for Jaeger. And you can probably get everything Wallace said about Iceland out of the webpage? Berenbeim didn't mention Iceland - she was working mainly with a small collection of documents (mostly legal documents) from England. I'm afraid I was kind of sleeping during the beginning of her talk so mostly what I got out of it was anecdotes - like a joke about a bunch of peasants who got a charter that granted them freehold, and got really drunk at the party afterward, and decided to use the wax seals as candles, because they thought the writing held all the power, not the seals. WRONG

Also some analysis of stories (and one particular story, I wish I could remember the name of the guy to google it back up) where people make deals with the devil, and how, at just about the time that written charters became common enough that most people would have seen one, the deals change from verbal deals that are all about magic and can only be broken by a miracle from God, to written contracts, physical objects, that make it possible to invalidate the contract simply by destroying the physical object (... if you can), and what this said about the way the balances of religion/law were changing.

There was also some stuff about the decorations *on* charters, and what that meant. Specifically two things: first, that the illumination on a charter was, suprisingly often, somewhat contradictory to the text - so her main example was a land grant to an Oxford college from the King, and the illumination showed the grateful clerics recieving a magnanimous gift from the king, but if you read the actual charter, it's the result of a protracted series of lawsuits that resulted in the college having to pay the crown hundreds of pounds in order to get title to land that should have been theirs to begin with. (someone brought up in the question section that there's apparently a period of time in medieval England where there are hundreds and hundreds of papers documenting paternity suits that the plaintiffs *lost* - where the man being sued for paternity could prove he wasn't the father, and as a result the plaintiffs were officially certified fatherless bastards, and how for a long time everybody wondered about this, and why you would even bring suit if everybody always lost, until somebody made the connection that, serfdom was passed down through the male line - so if you were certified fatherless, you were free. People brought these suits on purpose, to lose them. So in general you should never take a legal document at face value.)

Secondarily, she talked about why these documents would have been so highly decorated in the first place, since most of them would have been folded and locked in an archive except for maybe once every couple of years. I didn't actually get much of a clear conclusion from that part - just that, usually, a major charter would be 'unveiled' at some sort of public reception, so the illumination was there to make it look impressive at the unveiling. Also that the illuminations would probably not have been there when the charter arrived - that usually these would have been a noble's court handing the charter down to some lesser group, and the people recieving the charter would then pay to decorate it and throw the party in order to show off their new legal right.

[melannen]

Shyovitz was pretty cool!

Okay, so there's a bit somewhere in the Torah about how, if you take the eggs from a bird's nest, you should leave the mother bird alone in return for her eggs, and God will bless you. And apparently this was a pretty tricky verse in the middle ages, for both Jewish and Christian theologians, because they both took it as an element of doctrine that God approved of cruelty to animals. (I think it was something about the Genesis bits about man having dominion over the animals? IDK, it was one of those things that was clearly based less on the Bible than on cultural pragmatism, and also probably existed more in the heads of the ethicists than in the actual practice of people.) Anyway, so most of the people writing about ethics were saying that not only was compassion for animals not mandated, it was actually a sin, because, uh, reasons, I forget what they were. (Even the not-eating-meat people were doing it out of ascetic principles, not anything about the animals.)

But there was this one offeat Jewish sect in, uh, Germany somewhere? who went in completely the opposite direction - they believed that animals had souls, that they were more pure than humans, that meat-eating was part and parcel of the fall of Mankind, they actually read the Bible and pointed out all the places where the Bible says you should treat animals with compassion, and so on. They were vegetarian, obviously (and also apparently really into mortification of the flesh in general.)

The zombies come in because, if you posit animals have souls (as these people did), then what happens when animals die and come back to life? (Many animals do this, of course. Especially weasels. Read your Physiologus.) Their solution was that when they came back to life, they came back without their souls, which had gone on to heaven withotu them.

Apparently the question of the kosher status of zombie animals was a major point of discussion in the Jewish community - if you killed and ate a revivified animal, were you eating freshly kosher butchered meat, or were you eating carrion that had been dead for days? the answer to that question of course depended on the status of the souls of animals...

(It became clear at this point in the talk that somebody could write an entire paper just on revenants and Jewish law in the middle ages, and that EVERYBODY in the room desperately wanted it to exist. Especially the presenter.)

The bestiality comes in because apparently this Jewish sect believed that in the bit in Genesis where Adam tries all the animals but is unsatisfied until God made him Eve? Well, they believed that he actually *tried* all the animals, if you know what I mean, wink wink, "biblically".

[melannen]

Jung was another one I was half-asleep for, alas. There were lots of photos of sculptures in cathedrals! :D This was one where I had the same issue I did with a lot of the Art History presentations, though - she was trying to make grand sweeping points about changes over time in art and the things art said about society, but she had only like three examples, so it's hard for me to buy the 'grand sweeping change' vs. the taste of individual artists and donors without further evidence

But anyway, she was mainly looking at a couple of different groups of wise/foolish virgins in a couple of Northern European cathedrals. Apparently at the beginning of her period of study, the usual portrayal you'd see was of the wise virgins as decorous, and matronly, and modest, and happy but in a serene and dignified way, whereas the foolish virgins were dressed in flashy stylish clothes and acting flirty and being silly just like those girls in the back row in church who care more about boys than sermons. But then there's this one particular somewhat later portrayal, where instead, the wise and foolish virgins look and are dressed exactly alike; the only difference is that the wise virgins are happy and the foolish virgins are said. So there's some difference in the way the story was being interpreted, and the people seeing the sculptures were supposed to find themselves in the story, with the change in the portrayal of the virgins.

She also talked about some other sculptures and the way in which expressiveness and placement of the sculpture had a 'charismatic' effect of drawing people into the portrayal, and also the way that sculpture (as opposed to painting) was really the main storytelling medium of the cathedrals.

(yes, I called mom. also the problem is that I did charge my phone, I just failed to notice that it had turned itself off in the process.)

[brigid]

My husband lived in Evanston for years, it's one of the places he's considered "home." We've talked about moving there, that was one of our goals for a long time, but now we have Other Plans unless he switches job location.

I live in Albany Park and am a stay at home parent, so I'm pretty available during the day... and am right off the brown line. :)

[melannen]

Excellent! You have any suggestions for time and place? I've been keeping my plans very flexible, but if you leave it to me I'll never get around to actually planning anything. :)

[brigid]

My favorite meeting place closed down, reopened, and closed down again so alas I am out of ideas.

Do you like board games?

[melannen]

I love board games!