November

So, I gave myself October off from study, apart from going up to a lecture at the John Rylands in Manchester one weekend. I've read lots of fiction for the first time in ages, and made my Goodreads target for 2015.

But now it's November and I've had my birthday so time to look to the next step. Which is what?
I can't assume I've passed through my MA with no revisions, so I plan to spend November re-reading it and looking for mistakes the examiners will want fixing. So far I've fixed some glaring grammatical errors in my abstract. Hope that's the worst of it!

I'm also working on some personal stuff while the pressure is relatively light, or at least when I can do nothing about it... We shall see what comes of that soon, hopefully!

October

Rabbits and hares and white rabbits.

It's October, and a lovely autumn day here. I'm sitting in my office at work looking out of the window and there's a lovely sunshine out there right now. The leaves on the walk home are also a fabulous colour which really cheers me up.

Academically I'm in limbo stage, but still a student. As I understand it, here is how things go from here. Bear in mind this is for the MA by Research NOT the PhD.

• Submit hard copy (with all the forms) - DONE
• Hard copies are sent to my internal and external reviewers - probably going to be sent next week, I was told.
• Both reviewers have about 8 weeks to turn around their feedback.
• I receive the feedback and have one of about 5 results
• Pass with no amendments
• Minor amendments (e.g. typos, small changes to specific areas)
• Major amendments (e.g. rewrite sections, add in X element)
• Revise and resubmit (End to end revision and resubmission as a semi-new thesis)
• Fail
• I respond to the result, and act accordingly.
• Pass (unlikely)
• Minor - edit, resubmit within 3 months, sent back to internal examiner to accept
• Major - edit, resubmit within 6 months, sent back to external examiner to accept
• Revise and resubmit - edit, resubmit within 1 year, restart review process
• Fail - no PhD place
• Viva is unlikely but a slim possibility, mostly if an examiner wishes clarification on an area covered OR you are borderline failing (do you know your stuff just can't write for toffee?!).
• I start the PhD (unless FAIL), 1st of the month after the thesis is accepted (HOPEFULLY January 2016).

So until at least November I can do nothing except wait, which is completely nerve-wracking.

Right now I've got student status for the year, but no fees to pay until accepted or not. Financially this is nice as it means we can save the money for other important stuff (#1, finish fixing the house!).

Despite this, I cannot just stop dead. Here's my plans for the next few months:

• Make Christmas presents - sloe gin and maybe a flavoured vodka again.
• Rewrite my paper for Borderlines into an article. The paper didn't feel like it 'worked' well, to me, so I really want to go back to it, pull it apart and fix it.
• Create the database I'll need for the PhD research - I can't assume I'll fail miserably, so I'm just going to get on with it.
• Start databasing some of the data for my PhD - it will need doing some time
• Read for fun - novels and non-research nonfiction
• Do some sewing - I have patterns for a dress, top and a skirt I want to make, and now I have the time. (Simplicity 3847, New Look 6808, Simplicity 3673)
• Join an exercise class, or a dance class. Maybe belly dancing! Something to get me fit, but without boring me senseless, like I find I get in a gym.
• Level all my Warcraft characters to 100. What, I never said I wasn't a geek!

If I fail? To be honest, I'm going to do the research anyway, but I'll have less support etc. I am doing this for the pleasure, not as a career move, so why on earth would I stop doing something I already enjoy?

Terror!

Today I submitted the electronic version of my MA thesis.

This afternoon I will being going to the nearby university to get two hard copies printed and soft bound (no library copy yet thankfully).

Tomorrow I go up to hand in the physical version, and hopefully sort out registration for next year.


To Do

SCONUL application for next year. All my library books are due back either today or tomorrow and I cannot renew them until...

• University registration status confirmed
• SCONUL application can be confirmed once I have a current registration status
• Once I have my fabulous SCONUL email, I can renew my membership for those accounts.
• THEN I can renew my books (and probably have to pay overdue fines).

The International Medieval Congress in 2016 (Leeds)

Last Updated: 27 August 2015

For my own interest I'm gathering together here a list of any Calls for Papers (CfP) for the IMC 2016 in Leeds. The individual paper closing date is 31 August 2015.

31 Aug 2015	The Dominican Order in the Middle Ages	Ordernsgeschichte
31 Aug 2015	Academic Englishes and Academia in the Making: Who Will Write the Middle Ages and How?	Zsuzsanna Reed, CEU
1 Sept 2015	Artisans of the book and collaborative working methods	Manuscript Collaboration Hub
1 Sept 2015	The Long Lives of Medieval Art and Architecture	Amanda Dotseth, Courtauld Institute of Art / AVISTA
8 Sept 2015	Food, Feast and Famine, 3 sessions proposed	Royal Studies Network
10 Sept 2015	Topic: Names & Onomastics	Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources
10 Sept 2015	Session proposals for ICMA (ICMA members only) – scroll down	Janis Elliott / ICMA
11 Sept 2015	The Animal Turn in Medieval Health Studies	Sunny Harrison, Leeds
14 Sept 2015	Eating the Book: Manuscripts and Reading Habits in Anglo-Saxon England (Image)	Rachel Burns (UCL) & Francis Leneghan (Oxford)
15 Sept 2015	Interactions among towns and leagues of towns in the long thirteenth century	Dr Gianluca Raccagni
15 Sept 2015	Rethinking the Medieval Frontier	Jonathan Jarrett
15 Sept 2015	The Monastic Refectory and Spiritual Food	CESM
15 Sept 2015	2 sessions: Food and Feast in Medieval Outlaw Texts Ecocritical Outlaws	Kristin Bovaird-Abbo & Lesley A. Coote / IAHRS
ASAP or 15 Sept 2015	The Medieval Landscape/Seascape (blog)	Kimm Curran (Glasgow)
ASAP or 15 Sept 2015	New Directions in the Study of Women Religious (4 sessions)	Kimm Curran (Glasgow) & Kirsty Day (Leeds) & Steven Vanderputten (Ghent)
20 Sept 2015	Medieval Equestrianism: Theory and Practice	Anastasija Ropa & Timothy Dawson
[Unspecified]	Topic: Letters to Women (panel), esp. Letters to Jewish or Muslim women	@KRMaude
[Unspecified]	Medieval Ecocriticism	Heide Estes / Medieval Ecocriticisms
[Unspecified]	"If anyone is interested in putting up sessions for the International Medieval Congress at Leeds [...] under the auspices of the IPPS, please contact us."	Piers Plowman Society
[Unspecified]	Food + Death / Food in Death / Food + Wills	@Emy_Pica
30 Sept 2015	IMC Committee Deadline for Organisers of Sessions / Panels
[Closed]	Murder and Mayhem: Disorder and Violence in Italy 568-1154	---
[Closed]	Feast or Famine? What Presence did the Bible Really Have in Medieval Spiritual Writings?	The Society for the Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages
[Closed]	Mastering Knowledge and Power: Bishops, Schools and Political Engagement in Early Medieval Europe (650-1050)	Giorgia Vocino & Giacomo Vignodelli
[Closed]	Slavery in the Medieval World (PDF)	"Medieval Slavery" project
[Closed]	The Separation of Church and Church Bishops and their Communities in the Carolingian Era (8th-10th c.) (Thematic session)	SFB Visions of Community & the Network for the Study of Late Antique and Early Medieval Monasticism
[Closed]	Debating Relics: Reflections on Relics in the Middle Ages and Problems of Methodology	"Mind over Matter" project
[Closed]	Setting the Table: Medieval Tablescapes, Dining, and the Visual Culture of Food (scroll down) (Facebook)	Meg Bernstein / ICMA Student Committee

Any more I've missed? Leave a comment, or tweet @MEM_PG_Confs with the details.

#IMC2016.

New Term, New Year

This is a bit of a "new things" year for me... Since August I have

• Got a new job, with better hours for studying
• Moved to be nearer to New Job
• Given my first paper
• Organised a panel for the IMC
• Started reconnecting with old friends who I'd lost contact with for "Reasons"

In all it's a bit of a mixed bag:

New Job is awesome, fun and is no longer breaking my autistic brain. I'm once again working "back office", and although some of it is a stiff learning curve, I'm happy here.

Moving is a good-bad thing. On the positive side, I'm near work and I can walk home in under an hour; I'm close to family again so I can see small people grow up. On the other side, TGO is still Up North; our house is unsellable at present so he'll remain there for quite a while and I miss him LOADS, with the added effect of not earning enough to travel to see him more than once a month...

First paper went OK, I think. People were nice and asked questions too, which was a big "Yay!" moment.

Organising a panel has taught me lots of things, especially that getting a moderator is not as easy as it seems!

Reconnecting with friends has been frightening ("what if they don't like me now, what if I/we have changed?"), but ultimately very worth it.

This year I can see forwards too:

• Upgrade panel in March
• Planning on giving a paper at Borderlines in Belfast
• If accepted, giving a paper at the IMC in July

I got very isolated last year, so this year I'm making an effort to go up during Freshers Week and meeting people in the Medieval-Early Modern forum and the Postgrad / Mature Students association too. 

Onwards!

Book banning and the Anarchist's Cookbook

This popped up on the Library Link of the Day today.

After latest shooting, murder manual author calls for book to be taken 'immediately' out of print, NBC

I have to say that my basic stance is a big fat NO to banning any book. Most knowledge can (and will) be misused, whether that be The Anarchist's Cookbook, Fifty Shades of Grey or Winnie the flipping Pooh¹. I also feel that it is easier to blame the book than seek solutions (whether that be regarding gun control, alienation, mental health issues, bullying or whatever).

The list of banned books grows each year and I'd hazard to say that all are bloody stupid. I may disapprove of material published by

Hours

In the middle of a write up on QuadriviumIX but this just came to mind...

How many hours can one feasibly study for when also working full time? Given I'm a PGR student my times to study are fairly flexible, but what is reasonable to expect of myself?

24 hours per day, 7 days in a week, gives a starting point of 168 hours.
I'm straight away going to deduct 8 hours sleep and night because I know I need that, so minus 8x7 leaves 112
So far so good

Now I work at 37 hour week officially. Then add 2 hours each morning for up and travelling, plus at say and hour and a half home again in the evening. That's minus 37 + (3.5 x 5) = 54.5 hours lost.

Still leaves me 57.5 hours to study. In theory... :)

So my current self expectation of 24 hours ago week is probably quite reasonable and still leaves time for spending with TGO and basic living.

What was the point of this? Dealing with the unreal expectations of Evil Ex Manager who tried to put me off by telling me that he'd had to study 40 hours ago week minimum every week (and therefore by implication that I shouldn't do this). I feel less overwhelmed too by seeing what is available to me to use if I don't spend all my time swallowed up in tinterwebs.

I did it!

Still mostly in shock, but I did it! Didn't dare say anything sooner but it's finally real and hit me that it's real.

As of 30 September 2013 I have been registered on the MA by Research course at a rather good university in the Midlands :) *happy dance*

For a short while it looked like I wasn't going to be able to take up the offer, as I was originally registered to do the MRes, which has a small taught component, and my employers changed their minds about letting me have a day release (would have been doing 37 hours in 4 days instead of 5). My department have been awesome however and helped me to find a solution which turns out to be even better than the original plan!

So, I am studying part-time, meeting my tutor in school holidays when I can travel to her, or meeting via Skype otherwise. This is good!

I'm working on an analysis of wills from the Testamenta Eboracensia examining paternoster beads / rosaries (PN/R). Aim is to try to understand how the owners viewed the objects - as jewellery, a devotional object, to be left to men / women / children / servants / superiors? Yes, I have a lot of questions, but I'm hoping to continue this study into doctoral research, so I don't expect to answer even half at this stage.

Currently I'm working on a list of 21 wills which I know contain mentions of PN/R and logging basic data on a spreadsheet.

Next stages:

• Decide how the data is going to be logged in Access (TGO will be writing it for me thankfully!)
• Complete a literature review which can then be beaten into being an opening chapter
• Work out what the chapter structure will be (no idea at present)
• Arrange to got to York to view a few of the originals to see how faithful the TE transcriptions are to the originals
• Decide if / how many wills other than my pre-selected 21 I will analyse for comparison.

Well, should keep me busy for the next few years at least! :)

Oh, and I'm off to Quadrivium IX too, which is pretty scary for me, as I'm still heavily in the Imposter stage of my academic life..

Anyways, back to data extraction!

BL Yates Thompson MS 13 – Graphical stories 1

Recently I've been trawling through various manuscripts looking for marginalia to use in a possible future project (more on that another time, if it gets off the ground!). This evening / early morning I've been flicking through the BL digitisation of the Yates 13 mss, which has a long series of bas-de-page scenes. Unlike some mss these neither link to the nearby text nor are (semi) random images that the illustrator liked. All these seem to be depictions of events in a story-like format. I don’t know enough about this specific manuscript to know whether there is a known reason for why these illustrations are shown, but I loved them so I thought I’d share with the BL’s descriptions of the scenes alongside. The one that particularly caught my eye was a scene of hunting ladies, particularly because they show archery and hawking. There are three women shown, I think, which the last image seems to back up. I have identified them to myself as Blue Lady, Red Lady, and Purple Lady, because I'm creative like that! I may do the preceding story later as it’s a retelling of a short story of the 'elderly knight Enyas' (BL description) rescuing a damoysele from a Wildman, some of which have captions in Middle French. I've tried to lay the images out so you can easily see which were facing one another. For context, the text at this point is the part of the Hours of the Virgin. The manuscript itself is dated to the 2nd quarter of the 14th Century, and is in the use of Sarum.

Hunting scene story

Cy comence jeu de dames... (Here begins the game of the ladies...)
	f. 68r: Bas-de-page scene of a lady with a bow and arrow, and a hare, with a caption beneath reading, 'Cy comence jeu de dames'.
f. 68v: Bas-de-page scene of a lady shooting an arrow at a rabbit.	f. 69r: Bas-de-page scene of a castle, with two ladies in the battlements, and another lady sending her hound after a rabbit, which scampers up a hill at the right.
f. 69v: Bas-de-page scene of a lady hunting, beating a bush for rabbits.	f. 70r: Bas-de-page scene of a lady setting a net over a rabbit warren to catch rabbits.
f. 70v: Bas-de-page scene of a lady sending a hound into a rabbit warren in order to flush out rabbits.	f. 71r: [...] bas-de-page scene of a lady feeding the entrails of a slaughtered rabbit to her hound.
f. 71v: Bas-de-page scene with a lady tying two or three rabbits she has caught.	f. 72r: Bas-de-page scene of a lady walking towards a tower, carrying rabbits on a stick in one hand, and leading two hounds from a leash in the other.
f. 72v: Bas-de-page scene of a lady hawking by a golden fountain, beating a gong to frighten two ducks.	f. 73r: Bas-de-page scene of a lady hawking by a stream, releasing her hawk to fly at a duck.
f. 73v: Bas-de-page scene of a lady hawking observing her hawk bringing down a duck.	f. 74r: Bas-de-page scene of a lady hawking, bringing in her hawk with a feathered lure, while a rabbit flees to the left.
f. 74v: Bas-de-page scene of a lady hawking, carrying a dead duck in one hand and her hawk in the other.	f. 75r: Bas-de-page scene of a lady hawking, perching her hawk.
f. 75v: Bas-de-page scene of a lady hawking, bringing her hawk to another lady.	f. 76r: Bas-de-page scene of a huntsman kneeling before the entrance to a castle to inform the nobles within that game has been sighted.
f. 76v: Bas-de-page scene of two ladies riding out of a castle gate, followed by another horse.	f. 77r: Bas-de-page scene of two hunting ladies dismounted ; one holds her horse whilst the other carries a boar spear.
f. 77v: Bas-de-page scene of a hunting lady, piercing a boar in the throat with her spear.	f. 78r: Bas-de-page scene of a hunting lady blowing the mort, carrying a boar’s head on her spear.
f. 78v: Bas-de-page scene of a hunting lady whipping her horse, urging it onwards.	f. 79r: Bas-de-page scene of a hunting lady mounted, stringing her bow as she rides.
f. 79v: Bas-de-page scene of a hunting lady shooting an arrow from horseback.	f. 80r: Bas-de-page scene of a stag rearing on its hind legs, having been just shot through the throat by a hunting lady.
f. 80v: Bas-de-page scene of a kneeling lady in the middle of a hunt, with two hounds on a leash and a bow in her hand.	f. 81r: Bas-de-page scene of a grazing stag (the prey of a hunting lady).
f. 81v: Bas-de-page scene of a kneeling lady in the middle of a hunt, having just shot an arrow towards her quarry.	f. 82r: Bas-de-page scene of a fleeing stag (the prey of a hunting lady).
f. 82v: Bas-de-page scene of a hunting lady holding back one of her hounds.	f. 83r: Bas-de-page scene of a hound leaping on a downed stag (during a lady’s hunt).
	(End)
f. 83v: Bas-de-page scene of three ladies cutting up a stag they have hunted, whilst another lady blows the mort.

I admit to some small disagreements queries on these interpretations:

1. f. 75v - the bird looks more like a dead duck than a hawk. The beak is more hawklike than the other ducks shown, so I can accept this one with a bit of squinting
2. The ladies at the beginning have their hair covered, but the later ones don't. Why? A simplistic interpretation could be that it was meant to show them loking 'immoral' or even more 'manly'? Their dress seems definitely female so not at all sure what, if any, significance their uncovered heads may have.
3. What's with heads on poles? Both the boar and the deer heads are held aloft - just standard trophy taking?

IMC 2013

Two days done and thoroughly enjoying myself. Staying overnight this year for the first time which has proved to be a fantastic idea.

Sessions so far (which will turn into links if/when I get around to writing them up!)

Monday
Am- travelling
Lunch - 199 cookery books
219 multilingualism
334 osteoarchaeology
Round table: modern medievalists and avant-garde archivists.

Tuesday
Breakfast too good :-)
532 only caught the last paper but was a thoroughly interesting one on ladies in waiting of Philippa of Hainault.
630 Digital Pleasures II: Tools for dating and describing script - absolutely packed session!
712 Did they have that back then?
833 Water
Round table: Assessing the Mediaeval Digital Ecosystem

And now to bed, and no perchance about sleep! Zzzzzzz