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Nov 15, 2011 13:09

My cold has remained relatively minor, as these things go (all colds measured on the scale of the awful awful cold I had over the Canada Day weekend in Prince George in July 2000), but it gave me a pretty miserable afternoon at the archives yesterday nevertheless. Apparently my unhappy sinuses don't like being bent over manuscripts and computer keyboards in a room that already had the tendency to make me sneeze! Luckily I had two kleenexes in my pockets, because I was a sneezy, snuffly, eye-watery mess. Actually, if I'd been the all-seeing French archivists, I'd have kicked me out. My nose is less runny and more dry and stuffy today, so hopefully it won't be as bad this afternoon. Lesser-known medievalist skills: not sneezing on the eleventh-century documents! I didn't, miraculously.

Right now I'm eating delicious leftover quinoa-squash-root vegetable stew with red wine and dill, after starting to read the dissertation with the table of contents that made me want to give up on being a medievalist when I read it on my way back to France. It didn't seem so bad this morning. It actually seems like it's going to be very interesting, but with a slightly different angle than what I'm considering (more monastic agency and competition, more focused on priories themselves, etc), which is kind of a relief. In any case, I really do have to work on starting to seriously engage with the French scholarship and not just trying to find ways of dismissing it, because when it comes down to it, there is not much in the way of new English-language scholarship in my field. I have to find a way to talk to both Francophone specialists and Anglophone non-specialists. Of course, before I can really do that, I'll have to decide myself, based on my sources, what I think about eleventh-century society. Unlike my French counterparts, I'm not so sure there's a base of conclusive work out there that I can build on. It's so daunting!

Anyway, back to the archives for the afternoon, as soon as I finish my tea. I wish it would unstuff my nose.

france 2011-2012, we historians aren't real people, not this crude matter, clever people wouldn't even try, fun with charters

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