In Press

Thanks be to God.

June 2008-November 2016

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Blogging with Tenure

Well, that was an exciting past several days! I hope for those that were following the thread on the Medieval Feminist Scholarship Facebook page that Dorothy Kim so generously started this past Sunday about last summer's post, that at least some of what I have said in my "footnotes" on chivalry this week has been helpful in clarifying where I was coming from in suggesting my original " talking points ." I still have several more, perhaps indeed, many more posts that I think need writing in order to develop properly my critique of our current scholarly and public conversation on the role of the European Christian tradition, including its ideas about women and what it means to be fully human, but I want to pause for a moment here and address something else. Fear.  When I wrote that post last summer and uploaded it with its intentionally provocative title, I knew very well what I was doing. I was issuing a challenge, throwing down a gauntlet, declaring to the w
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Talking Points: Three Cheers for White Men

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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
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Make the Middle Ages Dark Again

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I miss the good old days. You remember. Back when the only thing people knew about the Middle Ages is that they were Dark and filled with evil barons wresting a living off the back of their serfs, not to mention lecherous clergy imprisoning young maidens so as to rape them and then accuse them of witchcraft. You remember, right? What it was like when the Middle Ages were Dark? The Roman Catholic Church made slaves of everyone, stripped them of their sense of dignity and independence and made social status a matter not of achievement, but birth. The Church hated science and industry and did everything in its power to keep people in chains. It guarded its authority with the sword and the stake, stifled all innovation, and fed the common people lies. And why were these Ages so Dark? There were no universities, no towns, only castles with dungeons. Monks huddled in their cells thinking dark thoughts about sin, while Vikings stormed across the countryside, raping and pillaging and ca
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A Connecticut Wizard in King George’s Court

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It’s been haunting me. I knew I had read this story before, I just couldn’t put my finger on it... There was another thing that troubled me a little.   Those multitudes presently began to agitate for another miracle.   That was natural. To be able to carry back to their far homes the boast that they had seen the man who could command the sun, riding in the heavens, and be obeyed, would make them great in the eyes of their neighbors, and envied by them all; but to be able to also say they had seen him work a miracle themselves—why, people would come a distance to see them. The pressure got to be pretty strong... Next, Clarence found that old Merlin was making himself busy on the sly among those people.  He was spreading a report that I was a humbug, and that the reason I didn’t accommodate the people with a miracle was because I couldn’t . I saw that I must do something. I presently thought out a plan. By my authority as executive I threw Merlin into prison—the same cell I had occupied
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Sister Mary, the Devil, and Me

Well, that didn't take long.  Here I have been biding my time, looking forward to the day when I could start blogging again, planning all sorts of re-entry posts about who I am now, how I have changed over the course of the year, what it feels like to have almost a complete draft of my book done, and BANG!  Here I am writing about being attacked by the devil again .  How apropos. It happened to Sister Mary of Ágreda , and she is a much, much more gifted writer than I will ever be.  (Mainly because she understood the true nature of her gifts--they came from God, as she well knew; I still have the presumption to imagine that what I write somehow depends on me.)  As she tells it in the introduction to the second part of her masterpiece, The Mystical City of God (Mystica Ciudad de Dios, first published in 1670 ) : 1.  When I was ready to present before the throne of God the insignificant results of my labors in writing the first part of the most holy life of Mary, the Mother of
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