Defining the Middle Ages II

A few quotes to add to an earlier post on the Middle Ages, which, I think, contrast nicely with one another even if each does not specifically address the medieval.

Brian Stock, Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (1996):

The Renaissance invented the Middle Ages in order to define itself; the Enlightenment perpetuated them in order to admire itself; and the Romantics revived them in order to escape from themselves. In their widest ramifications “the Middle Ages” thus constitute one of the most prevalent cultural myths of the modern world.

Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project” (1980):

…people also considered themselves as ‘modern’ in the age of Charlemagne, in the twelfth century, and in the Enlightenment – in short whenever the consciousness of a new era developed in Europe through a renewed relationship to classical antiquity.

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Defining the Middle Ages

How we define the Middle Ages obviously affects the methods and modes of our inquiry, but it also reflects a range of inherited ways of looking at the past. Ancient, medieval, modern, contemporary (by whichever name one chooses).

And while continuous re-imaginings of the past ensure that there will always be some form of popular, potentially even contingently cool, middle ages, nevertheless, by and large announcing that you make living in the academic study of the medieval leaves the general public perplexed. Indeed, the marginalization of the Middle Ages and medieval studies is so accepted that without a second thought study of the pre-modern past (and the pre-modern itself) is invoked to describe the esoteric, useless, inane and boring (for responses to this inclination see here).
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If this is the future, whither the Humanities?


This article from the Washington Monthly raises many questions, surely some concerns, and even perhaps in some quarters optimism. Can we have college for 99 bucks a month? The author, Kevin Carey, followed up with an appearance on NPR’s Talk of the Nation in a segment entitled Getting an education on the internet.

The entire piece explores the future of higher-ed in light of on-line learning. The prognostication:

The accreditation wall will crumble, as most artificial barriers do. All it takes is for one generation of college students to see online courses as no more or less legitimate than any other—and a whole lot cheaper in the bargain—for the consensus of consumer taste to rapidly change. The odds of this happening quickly are greatly enhanced by the endless spiral of steep annual tuition hikes, which are forcing more students to go deep into debt to pay for college while driving low-income students out altogether…Which means the day is coming—sooner than many people think—when a great deal of money is going to abruptly melt out of the higher education system, just as it has in scores of other industries that traffic in information that is now far cheaper and more easily accessible than it has ever been before.

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Grafton on Google

Something old...

Something old...


Something not new, but worth remembering for later. Anthony Grafton, the man famous for having a book wheel in his office, as well as The Book on Joseph Scaliger and Codex in Crisis, writes about some of the caveats related to Google books as as a ruling on the copyright settlement is awaited.

Will the juggernaut keep rolling? We’ll know later this year. But should it? It may be too late if and when we find out.

Lewis Hyde of Kenyon also chimes in here:

the parties to the Google settlement are asking the judge to let them be orphan guardians but without any necessary obligation to the public side of the copyright bargain. Quite the opposite: if Judge Chin grants them a pass to profit from orphan works, he will also be granting them a private monopoly in digital books.

International Graphonomics Society

So a medievalist walks into a conference filled with M.D.’s, computer science people, developmental and cognitive psychologists, and a bunch of forensic document examiners. That in a nutshell was my trip to the International Graphonomics Society in Dijon almost two weeks ago now. The group is interested in various aspects of handwriting such as fine motor control, developmental issues with respect to handwriting, and cognitive issues related thereto. Continue Reading

Restart…

What if you spent a long time learning and then fiddling with silly things–like an rss dragon icon, a header using Zapfino Extra as well as some Palaeographic fonts (Go Luxeuil!)–for your blog and then found out that you have nothing to say?

Wouldn’t you feel a little silly?