Fencing Bear at Prayer

My tattoo artist is going to hate this. Okay, yes, I have a tattoo artist, and yes, she has done more than one tattoo for me. I am not going to tell you where or of what (a fencing bear has to have her secrets!). Suffice it to say that I sit like a rock and can do so for the better part of an afternoon. More than once. Okay, more than twice. Okay, we've done four, all about four or five hours' worth of work (are you impressed?). But I love Ink Master . (My artist hates it, she says it is nothing like the artist community that she works with, and she really really really can't stand how Dave Navarro talks about the artists' clients as "canvasses.") My husband says it is only because I have a crush on Chris Nuñez, one of the judges, and I'm not saying he is wrong. (Chris is the one on the left. Dave is in the middle. The third judge is Oliver Peck.) But the important thing is why  I have a crush on Chris, don't mind that Dave calls the clients "...

Several of my friends have remarked over the past few days how impressed they were that I was able to stay so calm during the engagement on the Facebook thread . Well, let me tell you, it wasn't easy! I was supposed to be at a fencing tournament today [ now, yesterday--FB ] at our club, but instead I have spent the day on the couch with Roger Scruton and a cold, my sinuses throbbing and my head in a whirl. Which is only to say, being a Happy Warrior takes it out of you. So how did I do it, stay so calm in the midst of the storm? A few training tips for those brave enough to step with me onto the strip.... 1. Arm yourself . If you are going to be a Happy Warrior, you need to know everything . I'm not kidding about this. There is a reason that after the Apostle Paul saw the Lord on the road to Damascus he went off to Arabia and did not return to Jerusalem for three years (Galatians 1:17-18). He was studying! (Okay, I'm getting this interpretation of what he says from Marg...

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...

I saw a video on one of my friend's Facebook feeds the other night, one of those videos taken with a mobile phone that can now be uploaded to the world from anywhere in the world. It was one of a number of videos taken at the same time--you could see all the other people in the scene holding up their phones, too--so I don't know how many of them there are of this particular incident. The scene is a street and there are about a dozen or so men standing round, most of them with their faces covered by black ski masks. In the middle of the group, there is an older woman, dressed in a black gown with her hair covered also in black. She is carrying a red backpack. The men, according to the description of the video that my friend gave, are talking with her about how offensive they find it that she will not cover her face, too. All of the men are carrying guns. I cannot watch this video, it is too awful. Because my friend told me what happens. After talking with the woman for a few m...

Which brings us to text number four. Whose idea was it that knights should not be murderous thugs? Certainly not the Vikings. Okay, I know, I know, the blood eagle thing is a myth , which only goes to show that eleventh- and twelfth-century European Christians were just as capable of fabricating horrific stories about their ancestors as their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century descendants were about them (:: cough cough droit du seigneur   cough cough  Iron Maiden cough ::). But off the top of my head, I cannot recall any pre-Christian Viking texts celebrating how gentle a heroic warrior was. Of course, off the top of my head I cannot recall almost any pre-Christian Viking texts...oh, right, because there aren't any. Almost all the evidence we have other than archeological about the Vikings comes from sources written after they or their victims had converted to Christianity. Okay, I know, I know, the Vikings were not just violent thugs either. They also engaged in sophis...

Onward! Or, rather, further backward in time, to our third text. So, colleagues in my academic field have made the very good point of late that whatever medieval writers like the anonymous author of the prose Lancelot of the Lake  might have said about how Christian knights should behave--honorably, chivalrously, courteously, and so forth--for some undefinable but arguably most likely most part, they didn't. Quite the reverse. As Richard W. Kaeuper has shown in his Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry   (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), the knights of the Middle Ages were far from the knightly gentlemen imagined by the likes of the Victorian Kenelm Henry Digby in his   Broad-Stone of Honour, or Rules for the Gentleman of England  (first published 1822). While Digby eulogized the knights of the " Ages of Faith " (the term seems to be Digby's coinage ) as embodiments of the very essence of Christianity, their service of God grounded...