(no subject)
I'm back in Vernon for the holidays (I arrived back last Thursday as planned), I've finished marking my exams, and I've made the annual Santa cookies with the assistance of Z, L, and Cormac and Marek in the decorating phases. Now I'm in the process of acquiring and wrapping my presents for people, visiting with everyone, and trying to breathe through my immensely clogged throat, because I seem to have acquired some sort of weird cold.
I spent yesterday making and decorating the Santas, which resulted in me failing to post my day's response to the December posting meme. But I'm here now to answer
elmyraemilie's question about how I came to work on Brittany.
How I came to work on Brittany is actually both a somewhat long and somewhat short story. The longer story is my interest in medieval history, which has fairly deep roots in growing up a history nerd and a Tolkien nerd. I went to university intending to study medieval things in some capacity, which after a near-brush with becoming a Classics major, evolved into wanting to study medieval history in particular, and into a history and Latin double major.
Brittany started to come into the picture after my third year of undergrad. I had a fairly significant fellowship as an undergraduate, which gave me funding to pursue independent research. I used some of the money to fund a session of volunteering on an archaeological dig in Ireland in the summer of 2005. The dig happened to be more or less on the Eastern border of Connacht. The three weeks I was there, we were excavating a late-medieval/Elizabethan castle built on an older ring fort - basically, a border castle. My first medieval history class, Craft of History: Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest with erstwhile advisor A, had already alerted me to the interesting shenanigans of medieval border lordship (see me in 2004 joking about marcher lords here, here, here, and here). As I was trowelling away in the lovely Irish mud, it occurred to me that I could study marcher lords/border lordship in grad school. I also found the particular border shenanigans between Irish-ruled and English-ruled parts of Ireland, which I was learning about during the excavation, totally fascinating, and I started to think about where else similar Celtic/non-Celtic border dynamics might have existed (I now know better than to use the C-word in anything but a linguistic context when it comes to the Middle Ages), and came up with Brittany.
I considered writing about border lordship in my undergraduate honours thesis, but ultimately decided to write about violence and the "feudal revolution," which may or may not have been a good choice in retrospect. As I was writing my thesis, I became vaguely curious about why Brittany never came up in the things I was reading about eleventh-century France, and why I hadn't come across any charters that had to do with Brittany (I worked a little on the cartulary of the abbey of Saint-Père de Chartres for my thesis).
In my grad school applications, I wrote about my interest in studying, among other things (my letters of intent weren't very focused), border lordship in England or France, although I don't think I mentioned Brittany. I didn't apply to many graduate programmes, but I did get into my current PhD program (as well as the MA programme in history at the University of Toronto, MAJOR BULLET DODGED THERE). When I arrived to advisor R's office for my first meeting of my first year of my PhD programme, lo these many years ago, about the first thing she asked me was "England or France?" I was like "when you put it like that, France," and then R asked me if I had any thoughts about research projects, and that is when Brittany officially became A Thing. As I posted about here at the time, I mentioned my somewhat longstanding curiosity about what was going on in Brittany in the eleventh century. Very shortly after that, advisor R sent me a preliminary bibliography, and a few days after that, she told me to email the historian who is now on my dissertation committee and known here as RBartz for more bibliography (I expressed how daunting that email was here here and squeed about RBartz's reply here). I dove in without the faintest idea of what I was getting myself into, and the rest is history.
This entry was originally posted at http://monksandbones.dreamwidth.org/742921.html. Talk to me here or there, whichever you prefer.
I spent yesterday making and decorating the Santas, which resulted in me failing to post my day's response to the December posting meme. But I'm here now to answer
elmyraemilie's question about how I came to work on Brittany.
How I came to work on Brittany is actually both a somewhat long and somewhat short story. The longer story is my interest in medieval history, which has fairly deep roots in growing up a history nerd and a Tolkien nerd. I went to university intending to study medieval things in some capacity, which after a near-brush with becoming a Classics major, evolved into wanting to study medieval history in particular, and into a history and Latin double major.
Brittany started to come into the picture after my third year of undergrad. I had a fairly significant fellowship as an undergraduate, which gave me funding to pursue independent research. I used some of the money to fund a session of volunteering on an archaeological dig in Ireland in the summer of 2005. The dig happened to be more or less on the Eastern border of Connacht. The three weeks I was there, we were excavating a late-medieval/Elizabethan castle built on an older ring fort - basically, a border castle. My first medieval history class, Craft of History: Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest with erstwhile advisor A, had already alerted me to the interesting shenanigans of medieval border lordship (see me in 2004 joking about marcher lords here, here, here, and here). As I was trowelling away in the lovely Irish mud, it occurred to me that I could study marcher lords/border lordship in grad school. I also found the particular border shenanigans between Irish-ruled and English-ruled parts of Ireland, which I was learning about during the excavation, totally fascinating, and I started to think about where else similar Celtic/non-Celtic border dynamics might have existed (I now know better than to use the C-word in anything but a linguistic context when it comes to the Middle Ages), and came up with Brittany.
I considered writing about border lordship in my undergraduate honours thesis, but ultimately decided to write about violence and the "feudal revolution," which may or may not have been a good choice in retrospect. As I was writing my thesis, I became vaguely curious about why Brittany never came up in the things I was reading about eleventh-century France, and why I hadn't come across any charters that had to do with Brittany (I worked a little on the cartulary of the abbey of Saint-Père de Chartres for my thesis).
In my grad school applications, I wrote about my interest in studying, among other things (my letters of intent weren't very focused), border lordship in England or France, although I don't think I mentioned Brittany. I didn't apply to many graduate programmes, but I did get into my current PhD program (as well as the MA programme in history at the University of Toronto, MAJOR BULLET DODGED THERE). When I arrived to advisor R's office for my first meeting of my first year of my PhD programme, lo these many years ago, about the first thing she asked me was "England or France?" I was like "when you put it like that, France," and then R asked me if I had any thoughts about research projects, and that is when Brittany officially became A Thing. As I posted about here at the time, I mentioned my somewhat longstanding curiosity about what was going on in Brittany in the eleventh century. Very shortly after that, advisor R sent me a preliminary bibliography, and a few days after that, she told me to email the historian who is now on my dissertation committee and known here as RBartz for more bibliography (I expressed how daunting that email was here here and squeed about RBartz's reply here). I dove in without the faintest idea of what I was getting myself into, and the rest is history.
This entry was originally posted at http://monksandbones.dreamwidth.org/742921.html. Talk to me here or there, whichever you prefer.