The topic of this blog post is 2012, or more accurately my 2012. When I think about next year, I am both thrilled and terrified at the same time. Thrilled because it will be a year in which I am able to test the academic role that I have been working myself into over the last couple of years. Terrifying because this testing also requires a lot of unknowns. My initial response is to suppose that these two feelings are in no means contradictory; indeed I should be thrilled that next year will be so scarily novel and challenging.

If postgraduate study is supposed to be training and preparation for a later role (as an academic, an alt-academy worker or whatever life brings), then surely qui audet adipiscitur. Unfortunately the excited-afrighted feeling that I am getting is currently manifesting itself as a sort of baseless, sourceless anxiety. I’ve thought long and hard about where this anxiety is coming from, and the answer seems to lie in range of unknowns. As a result, I thought that it might be prudent to face 2012 by listing my challenges in order to acknowledge them to myself and to others. I am one of those people who likes annual reviews because they are a mandated look back at what one has achieved, so this is sort of a reverse review of what I need to achieve in 2012:

1. Naturally, madam thesis refuses to let me escape from her clutches. I have drafts to rewrite, Latin to translate and a philosophy of water to formulate. By this time next year, I will only have approximately five months left before submission, so I am aiming for a full draft of the thesis excluding intro/conc/bibliography etc.
2. Because I am a sucker for punishment, I am also taking part in the postgraduate teaching internship program at my university in 2012. For those of you unfamiliar, postgrads in the Arts at my university don’t really get teaching until or after they have done an internship, in which we do a teaching and learning training course, give a couple of lectures, do some curriculum development and tutor. I am undertaking the internship with a diverse and fantastic group of people, and really look forward to working with them all.
3. Furthermore, I have kind of *accidentally* ended up with three articles to write next year: one co-written with a friend on the premodern scientific and religious influences on twenty-first century water management, one on Gaston Bachelard and his successors in 20th/21st century materialist and elemental philosophy (i’m a bit of a fanboy when it comes to Bachelard, so wheee!) and one for a themed journal edition on ‘Imagining Europe’ that, although not immediately looming, requires some thought. I know, boo freaking hoo James, you have publication opportunities. Yeah, well I still have to contend with peer review.
4. I am editor of a graduate journal, and have to nurture the 12 articles that have made it to peer review. One has passed corrections, and i’m looking forward to seeing a few more make it through. We also have a sweet conference to plan for June.
5. Finally, as if I needed more, I am going to the US not once, but twice. Once for Kalamazoo in Michigan in May, once for the New Chaucer Society in Oregon in July. My contribution to these conferences is an organic extension of my thesis, and so this is an opportunity for me to get out there and meet some great people in my area, my heroes you might say. Exciting but anxiety inducing.

Phew it feels good to write all of these things down. As you can see this is a lot to do, but no more than a tenured academic has to deal with. In a way, I feel like next year will be the litmus test for academic life. Will I sink or swim, brave readers? I’m generally good at rising to challenges and so i’m optimistic, but expect a lot of grumbling and musing on here next year. I think that 2012 will be one in which I find that Fluid Imaginings is a real asset, and I hope that you’ll all join me.

In the short term i’m looking forward to taking a short break during January and going to a Latin summer school in Sydney later in the month.

Valete Omnes,

James

Hello Readers,

I’ve been hard at work writing my thesis and doing various other tasks, including processing journal submissions.

I also went to a very interesting masterclass run last week by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of the Emotions on ‘Interpreting Emotion in Early Modern Objects’. We had some very interesting speakers, several exciting collaborative ‘break out’ sessions and a lavish lunch. This part of the year is very exciting here at UWA, because in early December we now have an ARC (Australian Research Council) symposium on ‘International Medievalism and Popular Culture’ coupled with a Masterclass on Medievalism and Youth Culture, both of which I will be attending. Heady days to be a medievalist in the antipodes!

I am also very much looking forward to a quick five day trip to Sydney in January to take part in Latin Summer School hosted at the University of Sydney. After that I begin a teaching internship for 2012, the details of which i’m sure you’ll glean in future months.

In the meantime, I placate you with a small section from my rough first draft for chapter four of my thesis. Enjoy!

Turbulence and Tranquility within Medieval Thought

In physical as well as cultural terms, the sea is a very different place from the land. Although our bodies are approximately two-thirds water, water is a hostile element that threatens human life. Many ancient texts define the sea through its basic inhospitability to human life, especially in traditions that link the sea to primeval chaos.¹

As Steven Mentz suggests, there is a certain menace to the ocean that goes hand in hand with its positive properties. In the section to follow, I will outline some of the specifically medieval moral and cosmological implications of an ocean inimical to human life. Part of this uncertainty lies within the notion of turbulence, the core theme of the wider chapter.

Turbulence took on a series of historically specific nuances within the internal dynamics of medieval cosmological thought. Since, as Michel Serres has demonstrated, the very notion of fluid turbulence emerges from the fundamental necessity of a vibrant, motive cosmos to remain perpetually active, turbulence was in effect a disorder of divine stability emerging from a rupture. Although the eternal empyrean was perfect, static and still and thus not burdened by the vagaries of ad-hoc interaction, the roiling soup of worldly life seething below was bound by its very nature to generate its share of vortices, surges and storms.

The fickle and ever-flowing world was a fitting vision of temporal change for the medieval platonist of the twelfth century, for it placed reliability and solidity squarely within the realm of God and the Forms. The very nature of a changeable world introduced a whirling rush of affairs that distracted one from the unchanging divine, and thus placed the former firmly above it in a form of motive hierarchy. Stable was good, unstable bad. Whole was good, divided was bad. These were the traits of a Neo-Platonic Trinity, a divine concretion against which the whole flowing mess of the temporal cosmos was set in unfavourable comparison.

The moral status of the postlapsarian temporal world was such that the calm and immutability of the superlunary heavens was impossible. Above the sphere of the moon, the stars moved in perfect circles, the aether was unchanging and all was still. This was only fitting, for it was not in the nature of a perfect and eternal being to be inconstant and changeable. The sublunary world had no such consistency, comprised of elemental and hylomorphic flows of matter constantly shifting and reassembling to form the fabric of nature. Furthermore, the sin of Adam and Eve had consigned the human race to dwell in a fickle and laborious world on the sweat of their brow, for the natural world would not aid them, nor would it offer its gifts without struggle. The same was true of water. The perfect calm of stilled waters and the amenability of the rivers, oceans and lakes of a prelapsarian world had given way to the changeability and dangers of a world in flux, governed by cycles of generation and decay.

It is natural for the seeming tranquility of the world, the outer facade of orderliness of solidity, to give way to turbulence. Within medieval allegory, this turbulence is given a distinctly emotional quality: the storm is wrath incarnate. Like a resentful prisoner kept incarcerated by an inattentive jailer, the nature of tranquil water is to burst into action and rage against its imprisonment, as is its nature. Only the laws of God and Nature prevent a second flood, only the becalming effect of spiritual goodness can hope to tame the raging seas of life. If we recall the Serresian image of homeorrhesis as the natural state of flow, then this moral ocean appears as a distinctly discordant entity. Stability is a localised effect, and this can never be otherwise. Eventually there will be a perfect storm for every traveller, and only those with the spiritual skills to navigate the mare vitae can hope to survive.

Although the turbulent moral imagery of oceanic allegory constitutes the object of interest, is is also important to briefly outline the implications of an opposite, laminar, mare pacifica or sea of peace before moving on. Within the tranquil waters of a still and unchanging ocean divorced from the vicissitudes of temporal life, human souls could explore, learn and play like schools of fish. Within such an ocean, quite impossible within a postlapsarian world and yet evocative of salvation, the waters would act as an all-encompassing baptistry, imbued with the force or tonos of Christ the Saviour. Indeed one name for the ocean within early Christian theology was the ‘baptistry of the sun’, blessed by the rays of a salvific star representing Christ ‘the Orient’ rising from the East.²

Let us spread our sails, then, and set out to sea. For Reason, not inexperienced in these waters … shall speed our course: indeed she finds it sweeter to exercise her skill in the hidden straights of the Ocean of divinity than idly to bask in the smooth and open waters where she cannot display her power.³

An image of a becalmed ocean created a striking contrast with the image of the turbulent ocean. In many ways, these two oceans were inversions of each other. The ocean of divinity was a realm of safety and spiritual exploration, whereas the ocean of life was a realm from which one was to escape in order to reach calmer waters. This contrast is explained by Drewer in her comparison of salvific imagery, in this case the image of the soul as a fish swimming in an ocean with which it must interact for good or ill.

Patristic writers hold simultaneously two contradictory views of the qualities associated with the image of the sea and its waters. In a positive sense the sea is viewed as the “living water” in which Christian souls flourish. Tertullian writes in De Baptismo: “We little fish, after the image of our Ichthys Jesus Christ, are born in the water, nor otherwise than swimming in the water are we safe”. At the same time, the waters have purely negative connotations either as the sea of this world, or as the bitter sea of sin. Clement of Alexandria refers to the “hateful wave of a sea of vices” from which the “chaste fishes” are saved. Jerome tells the neophytes that they “by the word of God are lifted out of the abysmal waters of this world like so many fish.⁴

This counterbalancing and interplay of turbulence and tranquility, of the benign and malevolent qualities of the ocean, formed an image of moral life that was a hybrid of the two.In the section to follow, this chapter will focus more specifically on imagery of the turbulent ocean, the more problematic of the two forms of spiritual and oceanic allegory that appear within medieval discourse. Although I have separated out a particular moral thread within discourse on the ocean in order to present a vision of fluviality, it is important to recall the constant negotiations between stability and motion inherent in the idea of an ocean or, indeed, in any vision of water.

Apologies once again for my delay in updating my blog, but I suspect that there will be more blogging in me in months to come.

The purpose of this post is to bring a recent piece of writing by yours truly to your attention: a book review of the wonderful book How to Publish your PhD by Sarah Caro. I highly recommend this book to postgraduates and early career researchers looking to navigate the complexities of academic publishing. In future I hope to continue contributing to PhD2Published, a project originally founded by Dr. Charlotte Frost, but which has now taken on a life of its own. The site presents a daily news report, and contains a large and growing repository of articles from a wide range of academics. The extensive and themed links list (on the right side of the page), makes the project worthwhile in and of itself. It has become as much a repository of information as it has a regular digest, and should be read as such.

In coming months, I hope to create a writing and publication project with a corresponding strategy, and use 2012 as an ideal time to implement my plan. My goals are two-fold: I a) hope to make myself more accountable by sharing my experience publicly, and b) hope to post something that may be of interest of or use to other graduates starting out on their PhD journey or nearing the finish line. More soon on that when I have further information!

For now take care, and expect more in the not-too-distant future.

Best,

James

Today I am pleased, for I have recently completed a thesis chapter draft, entitled (at the moment) “Your pen poured forth good words”: The Material Imagery of Water in the twelfth-century Ars Rhetorica.

Since this task is what has largely been occupying my time, I haven’t much else to say right now. As a result, I have decided to post a section of my intro to give you a taste of what I have been working on. I do this in the hope that it will give me some new ideas and that someone will offer feedback if they have anything that they would like to add. The following extract is from an introductory section on ‘Natural Properties within Rhetorical Meaning’.  Pretty rough stuff, but I hope you like it.

Valete!

James

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The traits of the Chain of Being, from angel to earthworm, drew upon the balance of elements within the composition of bodies. The objects within natural order all interacted through their peculiar qualities. The element of water, together with its co-elements fire, earth and air, gave matter its peculiar being, dictating its shape, disposition and role in relation to other forms of matter. Always existing virtually in its pure form within all composites, from the very first day of its creation, water and its fellows mixed in the elementata, forming increasingly complex entities. Water was an abstraction of matter, created as the purest, simplest, and most divine form of matter. Created by the vis naturae or ‘power of nature’ embodied by God at the beginning, the elements enabled the ordered, structured and hierarchical cosmos imagined by Christian thought. Moreover, these elements provided insight into the nature of God, for by understanding the initial or primeval causes of ‘things’, one could know more of their divine cause or origin.¹

Through a shared bond, the composite parts of medieval cosmology created a synergy of meaning that was both metaphysically and scientifically understood. For Evelyn Edson and Emilie Savage-Smith, “elemental combinations led, in the medieval mind, to numerous correspondences—another characteristic of the universe, that all is connected.”² By using a human faculty, in this case the power of language, to draw upon the meaningful and unique qualities of entities within nature, the human being could tap into the fundamental traits of nature.

This point is well illustrated in the Catholicon, a 13^th century dictionary compiled by Joannes Balbus that, although slightly later than the period covered by this chapter, provides an ideal example. Given that the Catholicon was still in use in the 15^th century when it became on of the first incunabula (1460 in Mainz), it is not unreasonable to assume that it drew on preceding influences. Moreover, Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter have traced many of its concepts to classical grammarians such as Priscian. ³ John, in describing the structure of grammatical structure at the beginning of his text, sketches out a lengthy rhetorical and mnemonic image of a hydrological cycle.

When discussing Priscian’s description of the parts of speech, John claims that the ‘accidents’ of a part of speech such as a noun (gender, number, case etc.) are not part of the species or primitive category of grammar, but are derivatives (derivativa) or as we might understand them, subsets. He makes use of figurative rhetoric to argue that this structure is to be taken metaphorically (transsumptive):

For “primitive” is taken from a spring [fons] where water coming through hidden channels first [primus] appears. “Derivative” is taken from the stream [rivus] that flows forth [de] from the spring itself. Hence just as a stream can be deduced from another stream, so one derivative originates from another. But spring and streams [rivi] flow down to produce a river [flumen]. For all rivers come out of the sea, and finally return to the sea. And the sea does not overflow [redundat]. Similarly, all sentences [orationes] take their origin from grammar, and they return to the same, and yet grammar is not redundant [redundat].⁴

The dynamics of nature offer a veritable treasure trove of inspiration for imagination. In the case of Joannes Balbus, the structure of speech and grammar took on the qualities of a river system and its qualities, a metaphor, a mnemonic and a rhetorical use of of water. Speech had long been associated with a ‘flow’ of eloquence, tying the pouring of words from the mouth with the enriching flow of a river. Plato’s Timaeus, a text much read, glossed and commented upon in the twelfth century, stated this notion more explicitly:

Our makers fitted the mouth out with teeth, a tongue, and lips in their current arrangement, to accommodate both what is necessary and what is best: they designed the mouth as the entry passage for what is necessary and as the exit for what is best: for all that comes in and provides nourishment for the body is necessary, while that stream of speech that flows out through the mouth, that instrument of intelligence, is the fairest and best of all streams.⁵

The art of rhetoric –the adornment of this ‘best of all streams’– appears as a naturally flowing image. It is therefore unsurprising that this fluid faculty, be it a flow of words from the mouth or a written report of these words, should lend itself to a fluid narration of thought. If human beings –be they contemporary or medieval– come to think in fluid terms, then the thematic qualities of their narration of ideas undergo a shift towards liquidity.

My recent silence has been as a result of a period of introspection and adjustment that has left me uninterested in blogging. A series of changes in my life such as returning to Australia from the UK, moving house, changing workload and taking over as editor of a graduate journal has left me feeling somewhat disorientated.

Part of this confusion comes from the fact that until the end of the year, my workload is greatly reduced. Although naturally one can spend an almost infinite amount of time on PhD research, the reality is that i’ve been juggling tasks for so long now that it feels weird to only be doing my PhD. They say that if you want something done you should ask a busy person, and there is something to that saying. When I am busier I get more done on everything that i’m doing. A powerful sense of leisure has come over me, a feeling that is not an accurate representation of the situation. I am not at ease, I have a thesis to finish! Since I have comparatively less things to think about on a daily basis, it feels sort of lazy, sinful even.

I have moved house to a very warm, supportive share house and like being at home, which is an interesting contrast to recent months in which home has essentially been a place for me to land, refuel and take off again. As a result, I have to renegotiate my work/life balance while simultaneously renegotiating my thesis workload.

Having said that, i’m making steady progress with my current draft. I think that in essence, I need to start working like I did in the first six months of my PhD, where developing my proposed topic was my sole priority. I have some kind of weird multitasking PTSD, which needs to be overcome before I can feel engaged and productive again. I am also left with this inescapable feeling that my PhD candidature is about 50% done, which makes me feel distinctly ‘middle aged’ as a postgraduate. Maybe this is a mid-PhD crisis? Does that mean that I have to avoid the academic equivalent of dating a younger woman and buying a Porsche?

Next year promises to be mental (which I am perversely looking forward to), with a few big conferences and a lot of tutoring. Weirdly enough, the anxiety that I have too much to do bothers me much less than having too little to do (or feeling as such). 2012 will be awesome, but before it can come about I have to make the most of 2011′s remaining months. This means coming to terms with my environment, work ethic, thesis and lifestyle. Fun, interesting, but a source of anxiety!

Well enough about that! I’ll leave it there. I can feel a thesis theory post coming on, so keep your eyes peeled!

Best,

James

If you are a postgraduate or have been awarded your PhD in the last five years (what we call an Early Career Researcher in Australian academia), then please consider submitting an article to Limina, the postgraduate run journal of Historical and Cultural Studies here at UWA! The CFP can be found here, and the due date for submissions is the 17th of October!

Today i’m sitting around looking at my thesis, and marveling at what an odd creature it has become. I now have four confirmed chapters (well five, but one of them is a theory chapter) relating to a variety of topics from a variety of perspectives. After thinking about it a while, I decided that it might be time to put a synopsis of my thesis up here. I’m doing this in the hope that forcing myself to spit out a description of my thesis will give me some ideas.

I am also hoping that anyone who might be out there with some feedback will come forward and say hello. I’m at the stage where I know what kinds of ideas I want to engage with (or have engaged with) but need some inspiration. So without further ado, I present a short outline of my thesis!

Working Title: The Poetics of Water in Twelfth Century Western Christendom: A Multidisciplinary Collection of Essays

Abstract:

Water’s diversity is, in some respects, a key to its meanings. Here is an object that is endlessly transmutable, moving readily from one shape to another: from ice to stream, from vapour to rain, from fluid to steam. It has an equally broad range of scales of existence: from droplet to ocean, trickle to flood, cup to lake.¹

–Veronica Strang

The influence of water over the imagination comes from its multiplicity: it has a symbolic potential – beyond that of any other element in the natural world – for change, and it is this quality that gives it such symbolic value. Within this ontologically mysterious substance, abstraction and empiricism are combined, the observable traits of water serving to narrate the complexities of abstract principles, with a reciprocal transfer of symbolic meaning through which the sensible and empirical world becomes filled with human imaginings.

Why water? What is it about this fluid, ubiquitous and ambiguous entity that makes it the focal area of interest for an enquiry into the twelfth century? The answer, I propose, lies in the very traits I have described; water possessed to the medieval mind, and still possesses to us today, the traits of a dynamic system coupled with the ability to hold moral or ontological meaning. Water has meant many things to many people in diverse contexts throughout European history; indeed this is the reason for its significant qualities. It has the flexibility and, if you will pardon the pun, the fluidity, of form, valence, context and function to capture the imagination and draw the eye. Many treatments of water in academic discourse have held a certain premise to be true: that water’s meaning may be taxonomically analysed as a reducible entity, significant through the tropes and symbols that it forms and expresses.

Water, it seems, is a thing of great sophistication, both in nature and within the human imagination. To that end, it has been deemed profitable to explore and catalogue aqueous traits in order to better understand it. Water is a symbol of rebirth, water creates and destroys, water can be pure or impure: the debate has continued in this fashion for decades. This is a worthy endeavour in its own right but one, I argue, that only takes the interpreter so far. Once traits are listed in detail, it is possible to see the meaning of water in context, as human beings use it, be it in books, or in architecture, or in landscapes. Yet once the thrill of this new knowledge has faded, the world of intellectual history is left much as it was discovered. We learn more of what water can mean, but little of why it might mean these things. It is within this niche that I self-consciously position this thesis. Water is a topic of great interest within contemporary discourse, and yet is poorly understood as an ingredient of human thought; as a medium rather than a message. Many questions remain to be answered before the interpretation of water can be enriched. How does water express narrative? What is is about water that allows it to act as a surrogate for abstracts? What kind of abstractions can it narrate? Finally and most importantly: How can water illuminate new vistas within High Medieval thought?

It is the above questions that my thesis proposes to address through a series of interrelated and yet free standing essay-chapters. These essays make use of a parallel thematic and multidisciplinary structure focusing on five separate and distinct narratives of twelfth century thought. Each essay has its own goals, its own priorities and its own distinct areas of interest, and each makes use of a different disciplinary approach. Despite their uniqueness, each of these chapters shares a common goal that will converge by way of conclusion: to provide a wide range of prismatic visions of High Medieval thought through the poetics of water.

I’m back in Perth and basking in the natural beauty and profoundly confused weather of our winter. The magnum opus of my trip to the UK is over, and now I am turning myself to new endeavours. I have taken over as the submissions editor for Limina, the Journal of Historical and Cultural studies here at UWA. We will be putting out a call for papers soon, which I encourage you to apply for if you are a humanities graduate student (I will post the CFP on here).

I also find myself with the pleasant position of being in ‘just me and the thesis’ land for at least the next six months (aformentioned editing aside). As the title of this post suggests, I am looking at a whole new vista of PhD research opening up behind me. Behind me I have two varied and interesting years of finding my feet and bumbling around, ahead are two more years of tutoring, frenzied PhD writing and publication ‘strategery’ (thanks Stephen Colbert for inventing such a great word!).

To this end, I am hoping to become more actively involved in the PhD2Published  community, of whom I have long been a great admirer. I am about to begin a review of How to Publish your PhD by Sarah Caro, a very interesting little book that I look forward to reading. Today I have also been thinking a lot about the Shut up and Write movement, and cultivating a budding enthusiasm for starting a group here at my university. I really need to shut up and write my thesis, since I have a series of deadlines stretching ahead of me.

Should this make me anxious? No, I have decided, it should not. Writing has always been my favourite part of the PhD experience. The problem lies with the fact that I feel somewhat out of practise. Getting back into top writing form is high on my list of priorities. Like boxing, I think I need to do the mental equivalent of a training montage. If I make a sequence of scenes of me preparing to write, the time will compress and i’ll be done, right? Alas, no. Once again, Hollywood has ruined my ambitions with its unrealistic portrayal of reality.

It is on this note that I shall take my leave, dear readers. It seems like yesterday I sat in the same place that I do today, writing this post. I feel that I have done many things that have allowed me to grow and learn, and feel quite different to that past version of myself. And this seems cause enough for contentment in PhD land, a world where self-doubt and disappointment constantly threaten to take over.

Best to you all,

James

My deepest apologies for being silent for so long, but the last few weeks have been quite busy to say the least. Last week I visited Dublin and had a very nice time looking around the city, and the week before I was at the London Summer School in Palaeography, which I would highly recommend to anyone interested in brushing up on their document analysis. I wouldn’t say that it is for the complete beginner, but I found it extremely useful. We spend a day at the Victoria and Albert museum looking at their amazing manuscript collection and medieval and renaissance exhibit, and I was fortunate enough to go to the ‘Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe’ exhibit at the British Museum. Once again, highly recommended.

Today i’ve been thinking, as the title implies, about the implications of travel for scholarship. Since i’ve been on the road for quite a while staying at hostels etc, I am an odd mix between a student and a backpacker right now. For the time being, here are five advantages and five disadvantages of this process that I have identified:

Pros

1. Wireless is available everywhere. I have an iphone that I can tether to my laptop for 3G internet, or I can just look for the nearest Starbucks
2. The simplicity of travelling without huge piles of books. I am a very low paper student, so this doesn’t bother me much.
3. Travel is good for your creativity. I always feel inspired when on the road.
4. I am learning to travel in a minimalist fashion, and to study in a minimalist fashion. This article has been very relevant to me of late.
5. I have really got to test my computer based scholarship practices. I have found that stashing lots of information on the cloud has allowed me to have most of my notes/books/drafts etc. available to me.

Cons

1. Constant change isn’t particularly good for one’s concentration. Since my surroundings keep changing, I feel like my brain is keeping me overly alert, thus stopping me from settling into a comfortable pattern.
2. Having a research space to call my own is valuable, even if only for administrative purposes. As those of you who see me around campus know, I wander back and forth with my laptop quite a lot, preferring to work from a base and roam the campus. And yet like an aeroplane (wordpress tells me that I can’t spell it this way, but I am Australian so that ain’t how I roll), a scholar still needs a carrier or runway to return to in order to refuel.
3. It is difficult to be alone. I don’t really care about this, but I think that a scholar needs some quiet time to get certain tasks done.
4. I haven’t got anyone to talk to about my research. I learn a lot from discussion, so this is a big loss for me.
5. Even if books aren’t always necessary, I love having a nice pile of them. Call it a crutch, but i’m sure that many of your will agree.

This post is something of a continuation of a post from a few months ago. I have been looking over the very interesting beginnings of an online conference on the interdisciplines site entitled ‘Global Humanities’. One of the papers, written by Noga Arikha (author of a book on the Humours that I thoroughly enjoyed reading more than a year ago) calls for a return to the idea of the ‘republic of letters’. In the concluding paragraph of her introductory passage, Arikha makes a point that speaks to me:

The acceleration of the flow of information corners the access to this sort of knowledge, and the humanities choke beneath the proliferation of data that crunches against the deep time needed to study, question, wonder, and learn about human nature, as opposed to numbers. And it is perhaps the ease, precisely, with which history is forgotten in our fast times, that breeds in our governments the anti-humanist short-sightedness of cutting funds to humanities research and education. Whether or not humanities departments are themselves to be blamed, nothing less is at stake here than cultural memory, and a more humane future.

As i’ve argued before, one of the panaceas for the problem of a changing and often disheartening humanities is a change of focus. We are humanists, and I think that if we think of ourselves as such (rather than as the shambling revenant corpse of a 19th c. wissenschaft) then things start to look different.

Naturally this is not a new idea. There are many centres, organisations, programs and curricula that take this very seriously. And yet I think that, as Noga Arikha has reminded us, we are part of a connected republic of letters. And it is these letters, a flow of language, of ideas, of dynamic forces, that make us who we are: the humanities are after all litterae humaniores (the ‘more human’ letters). Nevertheless, I think that it is an idea that needs to be not only experienced, but actively integrated into our metacognitive practices on a daily basis.

How then can we protect the cultivation of humanity? One thing I learned from studying research commercialisation for a few months last year is that the money and science people aren’t as ignorant as we often think. The model of GAAP (generally accepted accounting practise) is coming under increased pressure to account for so-called ‘intangibles’, value adding forces that do not appear on a balance statement. Just as the GDP model has come under attack for not accounting for environmental impact, and India has addressed this issue, so too must we be ahead of the curve. Sociology tells us that sustainability requires social capital, anthropology stressed the need for cultural capital, and maslow’s hierarchy of needs has long demonstrated that meeting social needs is a core skill for self-actualisation. They get it (not always where it counts, but that takes time). My question for those of us who work in the humanities is: do we?

We are not impotent pawns in the game of shadowy money men, but connected, interested, passionate and potentially potent. All of us can take part in a process of asserting the importance of endeavours ad cultum humanitatis (to the cultivation of humanity).

As a final point, i’d like to end with a spurious etymology and an analogy. First i’ll quote Cicero (taken from here):

“The cultivation of the mind is a kind of food supplied for the soul of man. [Lat., Animi cultus quasi quidam humanitatis cibus.]”
Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero)

Source: De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (V, 19)

It is interesting to not that alternative meanings of cultus are tilling, protection, nurture, worship, honouring, adornment and so on. Thus, if we wish to pursue studium humanitatis, we must also learn to feed it, nurture it, grow it, protect it and propagate it as well as worship and adore it (which I think we do pretty well). Maybe what we need to do is figure out where the vacant lots are in the monolithic landscape of 21st century thought. When we find one, we should take a page out of the book of a modern urban eco warrior. Don’t beat vainly at the gate of the fence, grab a seed bomb and throw it over! We must work with the barriers placed in our path rather than beating away impotently at them, help each other out instead of squabbling. Guerilla humanities has a certain appeal. Obviously this is a fairly feeble analogy, but one that has given me food for thought.

Take care!

James

p.s. A few new posts have popped up of late on this topic, such as this one from Ecology without Nature and this one. I agree that we should be coming up with new approaches, not endlessly pontificating about the matter. I do disagree with dismissing the idea of being a ‘global citizen’, but I prefer Arikha’s republic of letters.

York Minster, York, UK - Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Hello All,

Last week was amazing, and I had a great time. In addition to a graduate conference on monday, I had the privilege to attend a workshop at the Warburg institute in London on the topic of ‘The Nile in Medieval Thought’. It was a preliminary presentation of research for an upcoming publication, and I was extremely impressed.

Unfortunately, I have been having so much fun of late that my return to Australia from the UK has become acutely close. The last few months have been some of the most stimulating of my adult life, and I will always remember them. Although I have much still ahead of me (a conference, a summer school on Palaeography at the London Institute for Advanced Studies, a little trip to the continent, a two week intensive Latin summer school, and possibly one final conference), I felt that I would like to reflect on some of the things that I have learned -both about myself, about academia and about the UK- in the last five months:

1. First, I have learnt above all that I really love being a PhD student. Getting out there, having ideas, meeting like minded people, going to inspiring places: I love it! This has given me a better idea of what goals I should pursue.
2. Second, I have really found it a privilege to meet the other postgraduates at the York Centre for Medieval Studies. They come from all over the world and study very diverse topics, but their erudition, brains and good humour are a great inspiration.
3. Third, I have learned to love York, a truly beautiful city. I will always leave a piece of myself in her crooked streets and weathered stone, and it will wait for the day I return.
4. Fourth, I have learned what it is to feel like a proper scholar. Doing latin, going to conferences, talking shop: all of these things seem to be coming together.
5. Fifth, I want to do it again!! I didn’t take the exchange options that I could have as an undergraduate. I am a contrary person, and have only ever done things because I wanted to. Now that I know what I want, I want to study overseas again. Maybe another exchange to the US or a postdoc. Dare to dream.
6. Sixth. I still call Australia home. Seeing the natural beauty (it really has been beautiful while i’ve been here) of the British isles has kindled in me a pride in my country, my state, my city and even my university that I haven’t been aware of before. I look forward to going home and seeing my home with new eyes.
7. Seventh, I want to leave Australia. This sounds contradictory in light of #6, but I want to get out and see more of the world. Not just see it, but live there. This may be because I feel like I want to go out, experience things while I am young, and then return home later. It may also be a plan to flee my student loan (shhhh). Just kidding Australian government!
8. I am both more English, and more Australian, than I thought. As a first generation Australian with dual UK/Australian citizenship and an English/Scottish family, I am a bit more of a pom than most of my fellows. When I come here I feel more Australian, and yet I feel at home more than I thought I would. I imagine my third culture kid friends will tell me to cry them a river, but an interesting observation nevertheless.
9. Universities Systems are Different/Universities Systems are the Same. As the dichotomous slash implies, these two statements are fused together into some form of nonsensical mass. University cultures really do differ, but never in the way you expect.
10. Finally, being an Australian postgraduate is a blessing and a challenge in equal measure. Australia’s isolation makes it hard to stay on top of the latest conferences unless you are a frequent flying serial keynote speaker professor. On the other hand, our PhD program seems to compare quite well. The funding is generous, there is a lot of optimism (or naivety), and we make good use of online resources. I feel a lot more grateful for my university than I have in the past.