Medieval, medievalism, and medievalist radical professionalism
Source: https://www.twitter.com/erik_kwakkel/status/910141541724966912
Radical professionalism (4): it exists and it’s medievalist
humanities
Radical professionalism (3): what it is and what it could be
Images above: the Winchester Psalter, British Library Cotton MS Nero C IV – Herrad of Landsberg, Hortus deliciarum – The Tree of Life, Gua Tewet, Borneo
“Radical professionalism” goes beyond “professionalism” and returns “professionalism” to its deep true conservative sense. This is the last (I hope) of a series of posts. The project started with thinking about con– and pro– words in spring 2016, in relation to local (university) current events. The first “deliverables” were some images at the end of a self-flagellating work in progress post in July and a preamble in mid-August. Then followed two posts looking at what professionalism is not, on false values that will be very familiar to readers of Medieval allegory and satire: a first post on neutrality (false balance) and a second post about appearances (seeming, or: false being and false value(s)) and their connection to appropriateness, propriety, and property. There were two other entremets posts (here and here). This present post looks at what professionalism is; and what, in the shape of a radical professionalism as modelled by radical academic professionals, it could be. (more…)
“Le Roman de la Rose”: fear, danger, & walls vs. #bridgesnotwalls #NoWallsNoBan #LoveTrumpsHate
Teaching the “Roman de la Rose” in hyper-really allegorical times: Apocalypse Now
Previously on UBC Medieval Studies 301A: European Literature from the 5th to the 14th Century – “THE LIBERAL ARTS”:
Expanding an excerpt from the previous post, going beyond embedded screenshots, welcome to The Middle Week of the course en direct. 17-23 October 2016; with classes on the 18th and the 20th.
At the midpoint of the term, the course, and the book: expect chiasmic hinges. A week before Samhain: expect a thinning of the veils between realities. I didn’t expect that this would be the class where we digressed the most from The Rough Plan and where those digressions were all relevant: this was the set of class notes that expanded the most, from the preparatory pre-class version to the full version after the week’s classes. I certainly didn’t expect that this would be the class that really brought us all together, in delighted fascination at the actual mathematics of the number 666, as shown by an actual mathematician (whose final project was an allegory, a dystopian speculative fiction short story).
Expect the unexpected, as ever, in teaching.
Experimental Medievalist Teaching: a talk for @UBC Early Romance Studies Research Cluster about #mdvl301a (part 2 of 2)
III. A MEDIEVALIST TEACHING EXPERIMENT
(Continuing from part 1. Long. This is what I’ve been working on from September through December.)
The rest of this talk was about a practical experiment in medievalist teaching last term. MDVL301a was a third-year undergraduate course in Medieval Studies, on 5th-14th c. European literature. The image above was at its beginning and end and visually centred the course. Further investigation of the image—reading, research, contextualising—sets up some key questions and critical comments about education (higher / advanced and otherwise). The image is from the 12th-century Hortus deliciarum by Herrad of Landsberg: an encyclopaedic work containing and about knowledge, for educational purposes, written by a scholar-teacher with others (including students) as a collaborative work, in an institution of advanced learning founded in the 7th century. Not a university. Not a university academic. By people who are excluded from the medieval university, yet are persons of privilege and high rank. And yet: part of the same world of learning, composed of people and networks devoting their lives to learning; a world that is also one of lifelong learning.
The course combined three principal elements:
(1) From the 5th-century start, delimitation, confine, bounds…
A theme: THE LIBERAL ARTS
- Through a literary work: DE NUPTIIS PHILOLOGIAE ET MERCURII
- What are the liberal arts?
- What is a liberal arts education at a university?
- What is a university?
- What are these things, what’s their point, what do they mean?
- What can the medieval liberal arts tell us about its present-day relative, and how might higher education in the present day learn from its medieval cousin?
(2) From the 14th-century end of the parameters, borders again…
A literary work, at the centre of the course: LE ROMAN DE LA ROSE
- that looked back to the 5th century (and before, and all over Europe)
- and forward to the 14th century (and into the 15th, and the first recorded debate about vernacular literature in Europe; and indeed further beyond the usual limits of the medieval)
(3) Bridging the 5th- and 14th-century “ends,” an overarching structure…
A form: THE ROSE
A mode: ALLEGORY
- a course that was shaped something like its material
- circular and spiral shapes, wheels, and globes
- serving as a gateway (the circular Stargate, the Chinese and Bermudan Moongate) into an other world and other ways of thinking and being:
- non-linearity, rose-structures, in movement, with multiple points of view, multiplicity and polyphony and polysemy, allegory, and satire
- seeing and thinking imaginatively, metaphorically, poetically
- and a conjunction of creativity and criticism that can enable people to stand, defend, hope, and survive against hypocrisy and whatever else Life and Fortune send our way
