Luther's Faculty Research Symposium is Coming Up!

Are you interested in sleep? Are you interested in what happens when a doctor falls asleep in 1605, and somehow magically ends up preaching a sermon for an hour and a half--with witnesses? If so: stop by the Luther College Faculty Research Symposium at 3:00 this Saturday. I'm giving a short talk on Richard Haydocke's experiences as a sleep preacher, and how they intersect with the strategies of diagnosing a sleeping speaker in Macbeth.

For details and a schedule, click on the FRS banner below:

Teaching with Lingfish

One of the joys (and difficulties) of teaching students about the early modern period is that there are so many subtle differences between 1600 and 2014. In Shakespeare's time, spelling wasn't standardized, mass production didn't exist, and blood-letting was a sensible medical practice. Without taking up too much time in the classroom, how can we as teachers underscore these important differences, which can help students gain a foundational sense of the time period they're about to study?

As one possible solution, I propose lingfish. Lingfish are great for a couple of reasons. First, it's fun to say "lingfish." Second, they're apparently great with butter. And, third, the students probably won't have any idea what they are. (I confess: I didn't have any idea what they were, either, until I took a paleography seminar at the Folger Library, and we transcribed a very fishy dinner menu.) This lack of familiarity means that you can introduce students to a range of fantastic databases and online resources, which will help them learn what lingfish are. (And also, you know, where to look for help with strange early modern words and concepts, in general. Which is the sneaky pedagogical goal.)

Here are some fun things to ask your students to do with lingfish:

1) First, explain that spelling was not standardized, and that vocabulary was pretty flexible. Students will therefore need to type "ling," "lyng," "lyngfish," and "lingfish" in each of the resources below. (They should also try "fish," on its own, which produces some delightful results.)

2) Then, split your students into small groups, and ask each group to find information about lingfish (or fish in general) in each of the following online resources. This shouldn't take very long, and each group can share an interesting fact with the rest of the class.

Resource #1: The Early Modern Recipes Collective. [Because people did really weird and interesting things with fish. Importantly: lingfish aren't featured in this collection. This is a deliberate plant, because it allows you to discuss what to do if you're not finding your specific word or concept right away.]

Resource #2: Luna: the Folger Shakespeare Library's searchable digital archive of manuscripts, correspondence, and more. [Because ling transactions were worth writing home about. And students get a kick out of seeing early modern handwriting.]

[Image courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library.]

Resource #3: The OED. [Because, after all, it's important to know what lingfish is, and how folks were using it in literary contexts. Jonson, Shakespeare, and Pepys are all cited here. (Also, fun fact: "ling" can mean different things in the US and the UK, and that transatlantic difference can be important to highlight.)]

 

Resource #4: EEBO. [Because everyone should have the experience of typing "lyng" into a search engine that does variant spellings, at least once in his or her life. Bonus: you get to talk about strategies for refining a search. And, also, about the probable happiness of sailors on ships that have been "victualed, with 32. sortes of Ling."]

[Image courtesy of EEBO.]

 Enjoy!

 

What I did on my summer vacation (and, um, my spring semester!)

After a couple of months of focusing on research and teaching, I'm excited to surface and share what I've been up to. On campus in the spring, apart from developing two new classes ("Literature and Medicine" and "Literature by Women"), I helped to plan a day-long birthday party for Shakespeare, featuring three live scene performances and an "insult smackdown." Here's a YouTube clip of me talking about the events:

Especially after hearing Coppelia Kahn's thoughtful SAA talk on commemorating Shakespeare, my colleagues and I were enthusiastic about staging the texts themselves. 

My year's Shakespeare theme continued when I spent the month of June in Washington, DC, taking a paleography course with Heather Wolfe at the Folger Shakespeare Library. We learned to read secretary and italic hands, and spent hours in the reading rooms, poring over manuscripts. For our final project, my class transcribed selections from the miscellany of Henry Oxinden, c. 1642-1670. Here's what my chosen opening looks like:

 

(For a larger version of the page, displayed on the Folger's fantastic (and free!) Luna manuscript database, just click on the image.)

Finally, I'm capping off my summer in three ways. First, I'm finishing an article on watching the sleeper in Macbeth. I'm also taking part in a summer reading workshop for teachers of Paideia (an introduction to the humanities course). My group has just finished We Need New Names, a compelling novel about diaspora and identity that won the PEN-Hemingway prize earlier this year. Finally, I'm preparing to welcome my first group of advisees to their new college careers. So it's been a busy but productive few months!

Happy Twelfth Night!

There was a great social media post earlier today: "Because it's Twelfth Night, Nature has decided to become the Lord of Misrule." (Hence the -60 windchills tomorrow, etc.) And that got me thinking a bit about the Elizabethan calendar--which seems to have a whole different attitude toward winter than we do now. While they celebrated the New Year on March 25th, with lots of fancy gifts to the queen, we've decided to plonk the same holiday just a week after Christmas, when our weather is at its coldest, and the nightly darkness hasn't really begun to recede. I'm beginning to wonder if the Elizabethans didn't have the right idea: spread out the holidays, and celebrate newness when the daffodils are actually coming up.

There's another ramification, as well. Because our New Year (January 1) actually happens before Twelfth Night/Epiphany, we tend to bundle both celebrations up into one snowy/cold idea of renewal, mystery, and frenetic buying of fitness equipment--that is, if we even think about Twelfth Night at all any more. For the Elizabethan court, though, Twelfth Night (associated with the gifts delivered by the Magi to the Christ Child) was a time of snuggly indoor dramatic revelry, with carbtastic cakes and momentary reversals of position. As a release valve in the middle of the winter season, Twelfth Night provided a way to confront the dullness and unrelentingness of winter, without implying that one was supposed to feel renewed, or even "new," in the midst of subzero temperatures. As a person who gravitates toward warmth and little flowers, I like this idea.

However: the best thing, I think, would be to combine the Elizabethan and contemporary New Year celebrations, while keeping Twelfth Night (preferably with lots of plays by Shakespeare). All that needs to happen is for March weather to start in January. (Or, failing that, maybe I could try to grow some early daffodils.)

"Shakespeare's Hand": Collaboration Studies and Shakespeare

There's an article in the New York Times this week called "Much Ado about Who: Is it really Shakespeare?" The subtitle is "Further Proof of Shakespeare's Hand in the Spanish Tragedy." It's a great exploration of the modern, tech-driven scholarship that's exposing the intricacies of early modern collaborative authorship practices. But it's also a fascinating example of the ongoing glorification of Shakespeare as, well, "Shakespeare." In other words, the article is simultaneously saying that collaborative authorship existed and holding Shakespeare above his peers--as a supreme collaborator, or first among equals.

Here's an example. Near the end of the article, a quotation from the scholar Douglas Bruster explains the ramifications of locating Shakespearean text in the play The Spanish Tragedy--largely written by Thomas Kyd. Bruster says, "...once you realize that it’s Shakespeare’s handwriting that’s responsible for the misreading, it’s no longer a bad line... It’s actually a gorgeous passage." On one level, Bruster is saying that the printer read Shakespeare's handwriting incorrectly, and inserted textual errors that mess up the inherent loveliness of the poetry. It makes absolute sense, then, that fixing these errors would improve the reading experience.

On another level, though, the quote (framed within the context of the article) could be read to pivot on the identification of Shakespeare himself. Here's how it reads with the framing in place:

"Mr. Bruster once counted himself among the many scholars who have thought the passage in the quarto was simply too poorly written to be Shakespeare. “But once you realize that it’s Shakespeare’s handwriting that’s responsible for the misreading, it’s no longer a bad line,” Mr. Bruster said. “It’s actually a gorgeous passage.”"

Within this crucial framework, it's Shakespeare's handwriting (not, say, Kyd's), and therefore the passage can now be read as "gorgeous." Moreover, assessing whether something is Shakespearean becomes, implicitly, a matter of assessing its literary quality: while Thomas Kyd could conceivably write something bad, Shakespeare, clearly, would never do such a thing.

All of this points to an interesting problem for the larger scholarly community. When we explore collaborative practices, whose collaborations do we privilege, and why? (And where do we find aesthetic beauty, and what's at stake in that beauty, or in newly identifying beauty where it previously didn't seem to exist?)  

Things I Learned While Writing About Sleep

At the close of my project, I thought I'd take a minute or two to reflect about what it meant to write a dissertation on sleep. When people have asked me about my project, they tend to have a slightly disbelieving smile on their faces: "You write about looking at sleeping people?" ["And you talk about this for two hundred and eighty-eight pages??"] Indeed, yes--and I've learned some unexpected things from doing so.

1) Talking about sleep is great. It's recreational. College students in particular really enjoy that element of my topic: "I'd love to have a nap right now!" or "Man, I wish I could think about sleep all the time." Sleep is a desired state of being, and many people self-identify as lacking sleep--or, at least, lacking as much sleep as they'd like to have. So sleep is a fabulous conversation-starter, and almost a modern rhetorical commonplace.

2) Talking about watching the sleeper is weird. The same college students who are interested in sleep, in general, look at me very strangely when I say that I specifically wrote about watching people sleep. I'd like to tie this, in part, to the modern (roughly post-Cartesian) emphasis on a person's internal experience of sleep, which has almost completely subsumed the early modern idea of watching and (ideally) safeguarding one's bedfellows. (The early moderns definitely did think about a person's experience of sleep, as well--but they also often contextualized it within a community setting, in ways that we no longer frequently think about.) In other words, the idea of watching a sleeper is "weird" from a modern stance because the idea of being watched in a vulnerable state openly challenges the idea that the internal person always retains power over himself. It makes folks uncomfortable. There are overtones of surveillance, peeping-tom-ness, judgment, and maybe even desire--signalling both its complexity and the multifaceted nature of its ethical ramifications.

3) Sleep can't be detached from communities. Whether I'm talking about sleep or actually sleeping, there are always people nearby, and their presence makes sleep an essentially ethical and relational matter. Although the sleeper himself or herself does not actually perceive this community, its existence forms the vital context against which the sleeper signifies, and within which the sleeper can be either safeguarded or harmed.

Jonson's CXXVIII, "To William Roe" (Saturday Sonnet)

I've been thinking this week about poetry's role within a community. If lyric is sometimes an expression of inwardness, after all, it also anticipates an audience, and even sometimes engages with that audience directly. This engagement, in turn, can foster a sense of community--particularly among absent friends, connected by the lyric and its material/remembered presence. Here, as an example, is Jonson's CXXVIII, "To William Roe":

Roe (and my joy to name) th'art now, to go
countries, and climes, manners, and men to know,
to extract, and choose the best of all these known,
and those to turn to blood, and make thine own:
May winds as soft as breath of kissing friends
attend thee hence; and there, may all thy ends,
as the beginnings here, prove purely sweet,
and perfect in a circle always meet.
So when we, blest with thy return, shall see
thyself, with thy first thoughts, brought home by thee,
we each to other may this voice inspire;
This is that good Aeneas, passed through fire,
through seas, storms, tempests: and embarked for hell,
came back untouched. This man hath traveled well.

Models for Academic Communities of Dissertators, Part Two

Like the early modern period (see previous post), our own era has one or two helpful models of community that could be applied to dissertators as well. Here they are:

• Twitter. I love Twitter. It forces me to think in small units (i.e., units smaller than dissertation chapters). And then it lets me share those small units with other people, who actually--improbable as it may sound--are also interested in Ben Jonson's birthday. There are two benefits here: 1) the forging of a larger scholarly community, through direct interpersonal interaction, and 2) the production of a  record of these interactions. So I can go back through my tweets and remember when Ben Jonson's birthday was, and who else is interested. Twitter is great.
• Facebook. Also useful, but less professionalizable than Twitter. It still produces a record of interaction, though, and provides almost instant access to my local team of Latin language experts. (Salve, guys!) For that alone, Facebook is invaluable. But slightly less cool than...

• The Borg. Wouldn't that be fabulous? Borg-ness would be particularly helpful while teaching. Instead of saying "Well, Billy, I'll have to look that up and get back to you by e-mail," you could say "Fabulous question, Willliam. According to my colleague in the history of science, that happened in 1625. On a Tuesday."

So there we have it. Early modern and modern models of community, for folks who stare at laptops most of the time.

Models for Academic Communities of Dissertators, Part One

The early modern period had a range of useful ways to think about community, and (in my sitting-by-myself-at-a-desk-with-my-laptop mode) I'm wondering if any of them would help create a sustained/more official approach to community for grad students who are writing most of the time. So, in no particular order, here we go:

• Compulsory weekly attendance at an event? (For the Elizabethans, this was church: you heard a sanctioned, official sermon, saw a bunch of local people, and--if you were Shakespeare's dad--avoided the group entirely, so as not to get thrown in jail for debt.) This could work for dissertation writers: we could substitute mock job talks for sermons, and ban debt collectors while we're at it.
• Eating together? (This is also church-driven--in fact, by a process called communion. In the 1600s, whether you thought the bread and wine was metaphorical, literal, or (trans)figurative, you got together with like-minded folks to partake pretty frequently. While we do have "brown bag" events in my department, they're geared toward learning a specific skill or interacting with a guest speaker--we could have regular eating events with no agenda, just for the sake of communing with each other.
• The maypole? Okay: this is mostly aimed at my desire to see department members skipping around with ribbons. Still--there are some department intramural athletic teams. Maybe I could go into training, learn not to trip on myself, and join them.

Next time: Non-early modern models of community for dissertators (with possible Star Trek references...)

Finding Community after Coursework

I took my prelims (the exams that many schools call comps) in Summer 2010. During my three-month study period, I figured that I was making a big transition: I was going from writing a few 20-page seminar papers per semester to writing one giant, whopping, massive document for a long long time. What I didn't realize, though, was that the circumstances of my writing would also change. When I wrote seminar papers, I interacted with groups of my peers (plus a set of professors) a few times a week. We had all read the same texts for each class meeting; then, we spent hours discussing them, situating them in context, and debating the published criticism. Looking back, it was a fabulous way to kickstart my writing process. I have notes in my textbooks about the viewpoints of ten or twelve really smart people, and those notes encapsulate vivid intellectual exchanges, in a community setting.

Now, there's been a shift in the way that I write, and also in the way that I perceive writing. Instead of reading a common text, and hearing ten or twelve opinions about it at once, the onus is on me: I select a text myself (one that has to do with sleeping people). I mine it for data, and find out what others have already written about it, and create some writing of my own. Then, I share that writing--but on an individual basis. I have a fabulous dissertation partner and a fabulous advisor, who both read my work at least twice a month, and who offer their reactions. I'm really lucky to have both of them, and the one-on-one feedback has taken my writing to a more thoughtful and polished level.

At the same time, I'm also starting to wonder about the possibility of group-based togetherness after the coursework stage of the PhD. It seems pretty difficult to imagine ten or twelve dissertators, postdocs or professors coming together fourteen times per semester to discuss fourteen books--it wouldn't be a streamlined use of time, for a start. Still, the classroom model is the foundation of our scholarship, and I'm not sure it's wise to jettison it entirely after reaching a certain stage of the PhD. Thoughts?

Welcome!

Hi! I'm Nancy, and I'm a PhD candidate in Early Modern English literature at UW-Madison. I'm currently writing a dissertation about watching people sleep. (It sounds a little weird, until you realize how often sleep comes up in Renaissance Literature--in Macbeth alone, Duncan gets murdered in his sleep, Lady Macbeth sleepwalks, and Macbeth goes a little nuts from sleep deprivation.) By doing my research, I'm learning that community contexts are vital: community members protect vulnerable sleepers from nasty things like murder (well--unless you're Duncan, that is), and they cultivate an ethos of caring for other human beings in the process. Because my research is so community-focused, I thought it would be a logical step to join the larger online community of people conducting research in the early modern period, to find out about the latest exciting developments and learn more about  digital approaches to humanities work. I'm looking forward to getting started!