Fencing Bear at Prayer

My father served as a surgeon in the US Air Force for two years during the Vietnam War. Stateside, he was stationed from 1970 to 1971 at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha; in Thailand, he was stationed from 1971 to 1972 at Udorn . We stayed in Omaha while he was abroad. I was only five when we moved to Omaha, so my memories of those years consist primarily of swimming lessons, skating, giant snow drifts, and being baptized —but there is another memory that sticks out that is somewhat less usual. There was a party for the doctors and their families out by a lake. After dinner, we kids—there were lots of us, all fairly young—had been shooed outside to play in the gloaming, but after exploring the grounds and exhausting the potentials of tag, we got curious about what the grown-ups were doing. We snuck back inside. The lights were down. They were watching a movie! On screen, there were surgeons in their greens standing over a patient, a woman. As we watched, her belly started swellin...

Now that we’ve celebrated the birth of Our Lord, it is time to review the lies that have been told about his servants this past year. One servant in particular. You know whom I mean. My colleagues in medieval studies can’t stop talking about him! The above Facebook post links to an article published back in September 2017  by another of my medievalist colleagues arguing that “to target Milo at a fellow human being”—which he implies I did by writing about the things others have been saying about me on social media and tagging Milo on my Facebook share—is “a solicitation for harassment, including likely violent threats.” His proof? A list of things that he says Milo has said, with helpful links to his (my colleague’s) sources. This same colleague has recently challenged me on Twitter—where I cannot respond, he has me (the “Famous Medievalist”) blocked!—with a link to his original article (see below for the full piece, along with the beginning of the Twitter thread): Okay,...

This is the season for wonders. In a special issue of the Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality , Jennifer Edwards, Associate Professor of History at Manhattan College, has published a thoughtful reflection on the ongoing argument in medieval studies over what is—and is not—appropriate for us as scholars to say about feminism. In her essay “#Femfog and Fencing: The Risks for Academic Feminism in Public and Online,” she talks in detail about my blogging this past year and a half. While she most certainly does not endorse anything that I have said about feminism or Milo, she describes me with a generosity and compassion I had long ago despaired of in interactions with my academic critics. On my intervention in the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship (SMFS) Facebook thread that Dorothy Kim hosted about my “ Talking Points: Three Cheers for White Men ” in January 2016, Edwards notes: To her credit, Brown responded calmly, with some humor, and with ...

I don’t want to write this post, but I think I need to . Back in September, I did a post that you may have read entitled “ How to Signal You Are Not a White Supremacist .” My point was to answer the concern that certain members of my academic field currently have about how we, as medievalists, should signal to our students that we do not endorse the use of medieval imagery for the purposes of present-day political arguments, specifically those having to do with the claim that “white” people are in any way superior to other people simply by virtue of their skin color and/or ancestry. The suggestion had been made by certain of my academic colleagues that for members of the academy who do not fit certain criteria—“white” or of Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, or other European ancestries now associated with “whiteness”—there is little need to signal that they do not endorse this type of appropriation, but for all those of us who do—the vast majority of us in medieval studies —not to make explicit...

It is one of the most famous passages in medieval intellectual history, Peter Abelard’s description of his decision to abandon knightly combat for philosophy. As Abelard explained at the outset of his autobiographical  History of My Calamities : For my part, the more I went forward in the study of letters, and ever more easily, the greater became the ardour of my devotion to them, until in truth I was so enthralled by my passion for learning that, gladly leaving to my brothers the pomp of glory in arms, the right of heritage and all the honours that should have been mine as the eldest born, I fled utterly from the court of Mars that I might win learning in the bosom of Minerva. And—since I found the armory of logical reasoning more to my liking than the other forms of philosophy, I exchanged all other weapons for these, and to the prizes of victory in war I preferred the battle of minds in disputation.  This passage has been much on my mind these past several months, as I...