Purge those evil foreigners

From the Guardian:

Leading foreign academics from the LSE acting as expert advisers to the UK government were told they would not be asked to contribute to government work and analysis on Brexit because they are not British nationals.
The news was met with outrage by many academics, while legal experts questioned whether it could be legal under anti-discrimination laws and senior politicians criticised it as bewildering.
“It is utterly baffling that the government is turning down expert, independent advice on Brexit simply because someone is from another country,” said Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrats’ EU spokesman.
“This is yet more evidence of the Conservatives’ alarming embrace of petty chauvinism over rational policymaking.”
Sara Hagemann, an assistant professor at the London School of Economics who specialises in EU policymaking processes, EU treaty matters, the role of national parliaments and the consequences of EU enlargements, said she had been told her services would not be required.

It's the end of the British Empire, at the hands of its own people. Late Roman historians, think of this.
Image: Stilicho, an obvious evil foreigner.

Griping about the word medieval

This past week I was in Kalamazoo Michigan for the International Congress for Medieval Studies. It was the 50th such Congress at Western Michigan University, and a certain number of sessions were devoted to looking back over the past half-century or so.

Sure enough, some of those sessions (which I should point out were very good and interesting) included a lot of griping and grouching about the misuse and ambiguity of the word medieval. You would think that a bunch of scholars who by their very nature of their discipline are experts in the evolution of the meaning of words would by now have gotten over the fact that though it doesn’t make a lot of sense to call “the Middle Ages” by that term, and that coming up with a really good, chronological definition of those ages is impossible, we are stuck with the words medieval and Middle Ages anyway. But no, there is a lingering feeling that it should be possible to nail down these terms – Middle Ages, medieval – once and for all. Or ditch them. If all the experts agreed, everybody else would have to fall into line – right?

You know that’s not going to happen.

Scholars of the Middle Ages, like experts in any other field, feel they should be in control of the terminology that defines their work and gives them legitimacy. But the truth is that any important subject is contested between a whole bunch of different individuals and groups who have an interest in that field. A single word – medieval – is shattered into a variety of definitions, many of which are out of date – at least in the eyes of people working on the cutting edge of, say, “medieval studies.” Old assumptions and terms and generalizations which current practitioners have rejected hang on in popular and nonspecialist discussions.

This can be intensely irritating for people who know that certain phrases and analyses lost their cogency back in 1927 and want to talk about what their friends are doing in the field now. Nevertheless people whose business is words should really accept the fact that words like “medieval” have a number of popular meanings, and when one of them shows up in current discussion (when, for instance, a Game of Thrones shows up and is widely labelled as medieval, even though the world of Game of Thrones is not our earth at all), the fact can be dealt with a good-humored way. It certainly would reflect credit on any field where a good-humored approach was the norm.

David Parry made the most sensible remark of the entire week when he pointed out that an imprecise word like medieval has a lot of cultural value for people who make their living interpreting that era. Indeed there is a financial payoff being associated with it. As he said, “the word makes students registering for courses press the button on the screen that says ‘enroll.’ The phrase ‘early modern’ doesn’t have that effect. ”

Scholarly editions and databases online

In the good old days of the early Internet, the appearance of a new site or resource often attracted a lot of attention. Now there are so many good resources that it’s quite easy for them to slip by without people who might really be interested finding out about them.

Here are three resources related to medieval military history and chivalry, one of my own particular interests. I am not surprised if you’ve missed them.

What looks like a brand-new one just caught my attention. It is a site devoted to the Spanish epic, the Song of the Cid (Cantar de mio Cid).  Its purpose is to make the text more accessible in its original language.  Thus its primary users will be students of medieval Castilian who want to compare the readings of the chief manuscript with a “normalized” text, to a spoken version, to an English translation. There is a lot of useful information packed into the site, and it is really pretty to look at, too. One gripe: it is not so easy to find the English translation. There is a button that takes you straight to it, but that button is not labelled. I rather think that was people who come to the site will be using the English version, even if they are not the core audience for whom the site was built.

A similar site has been around for a while. It is the Online Froissart, which like the Cid site presents textual material in a variety of ways, with once again serious scholars being the core audience. The value of the site is underlined by the fact that the the best print edition Froissart’s over a century old and still unfinished. Looking at book prices for much less specialized and complicated scholarly works, one wonders whether the print edition will be finished and if anyone will be able to afford it on that happy day. The editors of the site have broken down one set of barriers to this key later medieval work.

And how about Armour in Art?  It describes itself thus:  “ArmourInArt.com is a searchable database of medieval art featuring armour. Items in the database range in date from 1100 to 1450 and are located throughout Europe. Content is varied - frescos, altars, stained glass, reliefs, etc - anything that is not an effigy/brass or manuscript is included.”

Why those latter two exclusions? Because, Mr. Bones, there related sites to cover that of the material. See the links just above.

Even yet, the Internet offers us some good serious content along with the kitty cats and the child stars who have aged so badly.

Online intellectual content – the real thing!

Two interesting posts from long time correspondents (what do you call a person whose blog you read on a regular basis?).

Over at Hammered Out Bits, Darrell Markewitz, the Norse reenactor and craftsman, brings his own perspective to the question of interpreting small objects. This artifact sparked a discussion about what it actually represents or how it can actually be used to establish details of Norse costuming.

Says Darrell:

...no matter how much you work with artifacts, you never really understand then until you see them in life, actually before you. Reading the measurements does not really impact you. Almost everything is either way SMALLER, or way LARGER in actual truth, than what you imagine it is.

That's the core of his post, but it's actually worth looking at it to see why Darrell thinks this. Well illustrated!

Then there is Professor Grumpy over at Historian on the Edge. He is writing a new book about how historians have not only lost control of history, but are in danger of being excluded from it. Sounds cranky? More like appalling, actually. In the sense that he is describing an appalling situation.

This reminds me of a time maybe twenty years ago when a well-known Canadian scholar, an historian actually, was arguing that we should reorganize Canadian academia on the model of "real countries." Reading this summary of how a real country (UK) does things, I am just glad that we have avoided reality so far.

Anyway, I highly recommend Prof. Grumpy's first chapter, and I congratulate him on maintaining his calm in the face of a situation that he must find intolerable.

From Kalamazoo -- Miniature Manifestos

A new feature of the Kalamazoo conference this year -- the International Congress on Medieval Studies -- were some very short presentations by people talking about issues that really mattered to them.

Here's a piece from Historian on the Edge that spoke to me:

Item: History is not ‘relevant’
History does not tell us ‘how we got here’
History’s value lies in:
i. not believing what you’re told;
ii. understanding that the world didn’t – and doesn’t – have to be like this: there are other ways of doing things
                                       
iii. Ethical and political stances are implicit in both; to which we must be committed
History has no monopoly on these; what sets it apart from other arts, humanities and social sciences might uncontroversially be said to be its focus upon concrete situations and completed actions
And yet it is there that lies the aporia we must explore

Here's the whole thing.

And here's another.

Intellectual goodies on the Internet -- two sets of economics posts

Will McLean has a wide and serious interest in late medieval society, especially that of 14th and 15th century England.  Currently he is interested in how English noble households worked, and is investigating them through their preserved account books.  A number of people I know, and perhaps more readers whom I don't know, may find his explorations worth reading.  This looks like a good place to start; from there you might follow the "Economics" tag, backward and forward.

The very validity of the academic tradition(s) of economic thought is being debated, by economists most of all.  If at this point you are curious about what university students are actually being taught in introductory economics classes, then you might want to wander over to Brad DeLong's blog and follow the "Econ 1" postings starting, say, here.  Brad DeLong (who teaches at Berkeley) is a prominent controversialist and critic of much of what has happened in the United States in the last 10 years, so he is not a  neutral voice.  He has a lot to say on a lot of subjects, and if you follow him you will be exposed to a lot of material, including the arguments of people he disagrees with.  Some of this will be economic arguments that I find rather opaque, but others will be of wider relevance.

Image:  loafing -- and working -- around the old manse.