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Weather around Sherwood Cottage continues to be wet. Water is standing in the backyard; yesterday evening, it flowed through it. Water is also standing between the house and the driveway, as well as in the side-yard. I begin to think that the house itself is the low-point on the property, the work of time and fracking-waste-disposal-induced earthquakes conspiring to have the cottage slowly sink into the earth from which it ultimately derives. It is perhaps a slow sinking, but it is hardly a comfort to think that I might awaken one morning in a basement when I went to sleep in a house without one, only to drown as the water seeps in and rises around my feet.

As noted earlier, I need to continue to report on events at the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies. While I was there, I presided over a general session and a Tales after Tolkien Society session, as well as attending a number of other panels and presenting a paper for the Society. While Society work will be addressed on the Society blog, the other materials can be addressed in this webspace. To wit:

My first task at the Congress was to preside over a regular session, Looking Back at the Middle Ages; it happened Thursday at 10 in the morning, making it one of the first at the Congress. Given the kind of work I typically do, which traces the manifestations of the medieval in later periods, my presiding over the event makes sense, and I was glad to get to do so. All three papers were good, with the first two serving (among others) to remind that much medievalist discourse is undertaken to serve nationalistic purposes and that many of the complaints that are currently made are far from new. The third served as a reminder of something that became a bit of a theme at the conference: the perceived divide between the amateur and the scholarly is something that needs to be diminished.

That theme was addressed, if somewhat obliquely, by a panel I attended shortly afterwards, a roundtable treating public medievalism. The several presenters laid out what it is that they do, why they do what they do, and the benefits and perils attendant upon their doing so. Medievalism, including public medievalism, is a polyvalent term, having multiple meanings with which to contend, and the reach of public medievalism (as opposed to scholarly) has a number of perils even as it does much to attract attention to the medieval and the study of it (as I comment repeatedly on the Society blog). Writing for a broader public and in shorter form necessarily means that the finer details of argument be elided; one presenter offered an example of an immense citation history that he had to skip because of the constraints imposed on his public discourse. Differing impacts of the public and private work also came up; number of citations made to a work argues in favor of that work and the worker who does it when the time comes for tenure and promotion, and those who do public medievalism are more likely to be cited than those who do not.

I do have my notes from the other non-Society events I attended compiled and ready to translate to this medium, but other things are beginning to demand my attention. I am sure that I will have more to say in the next few days.