Fencing Bear at Prayer

I'm getting ready for a trip that I am taking to England next week, which means, of course, that I am making lots of lists: things to remember to pack, things to take care of before I leave, books to bring, music to put onto my iPod, libraries that I want to visit, manuscripts (particularly books of Hours) that I want to see, places that I want to go, people that I am going to want to look up. This is a lot of lists and might seem like a burden to be getting on with. But, in fact, it is remarkably pleasurable. There is something extremely satisfying about a list. I know that I am hardly the first to notice this about lists. There's even a song about it. And I'm sure I've read articles about the theory and meaning of lists.* But they fascinate nevertheless. What is it about a list that makes it so compelling? I've been keeping a list on my iPod of blog posts to be. Some of these I think that I have already written (they tend to change as I write, so I may co...

Fencing Bear 2018, with the book that I was starting on the summer I wrote this blog post It is difficult to describe how heart-constricting this question is for a scholar at my university. It is, in a word, the single most damning thing that someone can impute of another's work, suggesting at a stroke not only that one's material is uninteresting, but, even worse, that it is insignificant, irrelevant to the Big Questions that Real Scholars should be asking themselves. Having struggled for eight years to transform my dissertation ("narrowly" focused on the way in which the Song of Songs was used in praise of the Virgin Mary for the better part of seven hundred years) into a Big Book (physically, at least; almost 700 pages) on the origins of the early and high medieval European devotion to the Virgin Mary and her son Christ, I had thought myself at long last immune to this question. Naively, as it turns out. There I was this spring at a reception for some of...