Fencing Bear at Prayer

1. When white women (see Marie de France and Eleanor of Aquitaine) invented chivalry and courtly love , white men agreed that it was better for knights to spend their time protecting women rather than raping them, and even agreed to write songs for them rather than expecting them to want to have sex with them without being forced. 2. When white men who were celibate (see the canon lawyers and theologians of the twelfth century and thereafter) argued that marriage was a sacrament valid only if both the man and the woman consented , white men exerted themselves to become good husbands rather than expecting women to live as their slaves. 3. When white women (see Christine de Pizan, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the suffragettes) invented feminism , white men supported them (see John Stuart Mill) and even went so far as to vote (because only men could vote at the time) to let them vote, not to mention hiring them as workers and supporting their education. And before you start telling me a...

February 9, 2018 [watch here ] If our theme for this weekend is “What is Western civilization?,” there is another question with which I would suggest we need to start: What does it mean to be “civilized”? At a minimum—one might argue—being civilized means “capable of living in cities,” that is, capable of sustaining complex interactions with other human beings. Almost immediately, however, all sorts of qualifications spring to mind. Does being civilized mean renouncing violence as such or simply living according to the law? Or is it more about not being gross or physically offensive? Not being rude or undignified? Or is it more about being productive and having particular skills? What does it have to do with manners or morals? Is it possible to be civilized without being virtuous? If not, which virtues does it require? These are not idle questions. We live at a time in which many would argue virtue is in short supply, and yet in which signaling one’s virtue is all th...

I met Karl Steel for the first time a month ago at the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo. I was standing in the book exhibit near the display at Scholar’s Choice for my new book ...and there he was! The colleague who had so generously christened my fabulous Facebook friends “ Random Laypersons ”! I was delighted to finally meet him and tell him how much we enjoyed the joke . He was, shall we say, less amused. (Click on tweet images to enlarge.) I had no idea he had been tweeting about me for the better part of a year and half. Before I learned to search Twitter this past week , all I knew was that he had ridiculed my Facebook friends for being interested in learning from me. I know now that his interest in me was, shall we say, somewhat more persistent. He has, as it turns out, been tweeting about me since December 2016, when Breitbart  published one of my earliest blog posts about Milo . Karl’s take: I have clearly surrendered any scholarly credentials ...