Why the Middle Ages Are Important

Back when I was still teaching medieval history at Nipissing University, I was asked to introduce a display on the Middle Ages put on by the North Bay museum @Discovery North Bay. I wrote this script but did not deliver it. Only a handful of people showed up for the opening, so I was able to lead them through the display and make the same points in a more personal way, while discussing the artifacts and reconstructions. It was fun, doing it that way. Nevertheless, coming across this script on my harddrive today, I found that I liked it. So here it is. Note the first paragraph, which explains what I found rewarding about working at a small, obscure university.
Why the Middle Ages Are Important
May 24, 2008
@Discovery North Bay, opening of "Once upon a time..."
I would like to thank @Discovery North Bay for the invitation to speak at today's opening. Nipissing University was founded by citizens of North Bay and the surrounding region because they believed their home region could make an original and worthwhile intellectual and cultural contribution to Canadian life. When the university and the community meet here on occasions like this, we are fulfilling the dreams of those founders.
Why are the Middle Ages important? I don't have to argue today that they are important because the exhibit itself is proof enough. It was not created by professional academic medievalists, but by museum staff who work with the public all the time, and their judgment was that people in Ontario want to know more about the Middle Ages. If their own contacts with the public were not good enough, they could point to such recent films as the Lord of the Rings, or the three different recent movie versions of Beowulf, or the wild success of the Da Vinci Code, book and movie both. None of these modern cultural products show the Middle Ages as they really were. They are all consciously or unconsciously legendary or mythological reworkings of medieval material. Tolkien knew medieval literature better than almost anyone, and was a brilliant and original analyst of Beowulf, among other things, but when he wanted to talk to a contemporary public, he created a whole new world, similar to northern Europe in the Middle Ages but in many ways vastly different. And it's not just modern people who have reworked the Middle Ages to make a point. The anonymous Beowulf poet didn't show his hero as a normal person in normal country in a normal time, but put him in a landscape full of monsters and superhuman challenges. Thus when modern film directors mess around with Beowulf they've got good precedent.
But “Once upon a Time,” even though its title evokes the Middle Ages as a source of modern dreams, is not a mythological treatment. Like scholarship in other forms, it tries to get behind the myths and legends and appreciate the people the Middle Ages in this case the later Middle Ages as the home of real people with real problems and real aspirations, who came up with solutions and created social institutions that are still alive in our own world.
“Medieval” is often used to mean something like “unfathomable cruelty,” a phrase I stole from Carl Pyrdum, a graduate student at Yale, but much that we are familiar with and value in the modern world originated in the Middle Ages. The people who invented the phrases “dark ages” and “middle ages” meant to put down the postclassical era, and inspire people to build a better modern world to rival the great accomplishments of antiquity. Yet we can hardly do without the heritage of the Middle Ages. To take two examples relevant to Canada, both parliament and universities came out of the efforts of knights and warriors on one hand and clerics on another to improve their own society. The original members of the House of Commons were knights, seeking effective and fair government, the original university students and teachers were members of the clergy, seeking to understand theology and law, universal and human order. The Middle Ages created things so large that we hardly appreciate their medieval origins: in pre-medieval times there was no England, no France, no Poland, no Russia. The Romans had fantastic public bathhouses but no mechanical clocks, yet by the end of the Middle Ages every important town in Europe had a public clock. Think of Big Ben next to the British Houses of Parliament and not far from Westminster Abbey or the University of London and you think about our practical medieval heritage.
I hope you enjoy “Once Upon a Time…” which highlights some of the more striking and beautiful accomplishments of the Middle Ages. But I hope you will take a moment, when looking at the artifacts and reconstructions, think about the people behind them: the real medieval people who are the subject of the exhibition, and the real modern people who put it together for you. You'll get a taste of the fascination of the Middle Ages today, but just a taste. I hope it will inspire you to look closer. One thing about history is that no matter how good a given reconstruction is, there's always more. Life is big and complicated and hard to describe. “Once upon a time..." can be the end of your journey to the Middle Ages, but I rather hope there will be a beginning or perhaps a new beginning.

Goodbye to Ravenhill

Ravenhill (sometimes known as the Last Homely House South of the Mattawa (River)) was the name we gave to our 95 acre rural property in Bonfield Ontario. We sold the place about two weeks ago. It is the home that I have lived in longest.

I am sad to be leaving. It really is very nice to have a huge piece of property, where you can take your dogs for a walk, raise sheep, allow medieval reenactors to camp (every year for 20 years), ride your horses. Never again.

On the other hand, as we got older, the disadvantages became more and more obvious. It is a lot of work to manage a property and a house in the Canadian countryside. Eventually it got away from us. My health is not what it once was, and my very healthy and energetic wife has limits, too, though our friends  may doubt that.

It also became increasingly expensive and inconvenient to be a half-hour to 45 minutes from about anywhere. (Even when you get to North Bay, you are basically in the no shopping zone.)

On top of that, the Bonfield environment has been turning sour. Most people in the village are perfectly nice people, but even working with our neighbors we were not able to stop someone bringing in a horrifically noisy dragstrip, or our Township Council from launching an experiment in unionbusting.

And then… There is winter. I’ve been proud of being able to deal with winter and even enjoy it, but the idea that I might never need to own snow tires again pleases me mightily.

Some of my friends reading this will think that they have lost something too. Well, I rather hope you feel that way. We put a lot of effort into making the last homely house the welcoming place it was for you. And we were very glad to have you there.

Red letter day

Starbucks in North Bay.

Green paint and other good things

Here in the Near North April and even early May can be pretty dry.The huge overlay of winter snow melts off, but that is not enough to start things growing. For that you need rain, and we often don't get rain for weeks at a time. April showers, forsooth! "April showers bring May flowers" is like a cruel joke imported from a different climactic zone.

Eventually, the rain does come, and in dramatic fashion the first really good rain turns things green *immediately.*   It is like green paint is falling from the sky.

Today, May 1, the green paint has fallen.

Yesterday, I had another pleasant experience, a surprise. You should know that North Bay does not have a Starbucks. The coffee market is absolutely dominated by Tim Horton's, a coffee/donut/sandwich chain that makes reasonable but hardly inspiring coffee. We do, however, have a good coffee shop called Twiggs. I discovered yesterday that I had missed the opening of the second Twiggs near the University. My wife and I sat around there and it was very pleasant. For one thing, there were young people, maybe even university students, not just old-timers like us. (North Bay has a rather elderly population these days.) And they were not dressed like they were just back from hockey practice. In other words, it looked like we were in a university town. Which in fact North Bay is.

I should be fair and mentioned that the wearing of hockey arena clothing that is so common in North Bay is not just a matter of a deficient fashion sense. Given what the weather is like here during most of the school year, hockey arena clothing is a sensible choice. But it's nice to see something else when the good weather finally rolls in. See my remarks on green paint.

"Spring" in the Near North, 2013

Morning temp:  -14 C
Snow: 6-9 inches on the ground
Trees: barely any budding
In the air:  a bug.

Yakutia laughs.

Walking the land, September 2012

Homecoming

As the most regular readers know,or at least suspect, I am back home after being away for three weeks. Once again I was out camping in Western Pennsylvania for the duration of the Pennsic War of the SCA.

While we were there we experienced some of the extreme weather of 2012. We got the wet and stormy variety. When we got there the landscape was too dry for open fires, but the first two downpours took care of that problem.

When we came back to the Near North we were wondering what we would find. This area is pretty dry much of the time and forest fires are a possibility. We were in luck. Our horse-sitter told us that there had been nine days of rain, and she hardly had to top up the water buckets. So we found a landscape where there was real grass growing.

A close look, however, reveals that there are still plenty of places where nine days of rain was insufficient to revive the grass.the lack of spring blackflies has translated into a lack of blueberries.

My good wishes to all the farmers and gardeners out there who are struggling with drought.

The Nero and Herod of Bonfield, Ontario

Last weekend the Lions Club of Bonfield held a Medieval Night to raise money to rebuild a footbridge in the park.  My wife and I put on our own medieval duds and went on over.  It was a lot of fun.  The Lions -- an international men's service club --supplied custom-made dinnerware, hats and other costume accessories, and really good food, featuring barbeque chicken and excellent, meaty ribs.

Part of the festivities was the presence of King Harold and Queen Tamela.  King Harold, who I bet had played this role before, spoke well and without too much phoney medievalesque affectation.  His main job was to raise money by finding excuses to put people in the stocks and then putting them up for auction. You could pay to release someone or to keep them imprisoned.  This worked very nicely.  Since I have just finished up teaching Gregory of Tours, I was delighted to hear King Harold addressed as "Herod," to which he quite naturally objected.  I don't know if the mistake was really a mistake or not.  This is a country township full of French Catholics and I am sure that a fair number of the attendees know perfectly well who King Herod was.  At least, that he was a bad man.

The Brueghel painting above was suggested by my wife who thought the whole scene was reminiscent of the Flemish painters, in large part because it was an old crowd (us included).  Speaking of age, after 20 years here, someone still felt compelled to comment on our funny accents.  True enough, we don't sound like North Bay area people, but still...

I heard something quite odd from one of those same people.  She said that when she moved to Bonfield from North Bay, some decades back, that she was warned  to buy a big mean dog and not go out at night.  I was surprised because she was too young to be talking about the really remote past, and in my 20 years there's never been anything happen to make  me feel that this is a rough place.  There used to be fights between French and English, but this was in the historic past by the time we got here.

Competence when it counts

This week, the weather story in Ontario's Near North is the same as it is in many places in North America, it's all about the usually warm weather.  Last week, however, it was pretty dramatic around here.  There was a great big dump of snow, followed by a big melt-off, followed by an episode of blowing snow.

What I particularly noticed was the way that the people responsible for highway maintenance sent all hands on deck just before the predicted warmfront arrived to prevent a catastrophe. People with plows were pushing a winter's worth of snow accumulation off the shoulders of our country roads so that when melting occurred, the water would run off into ditches and not onto the road, where it very likely would refreeze.  Other workers with shovels moved lumps of snow that were blocking drainage, or soon would be.

They did this unglamorous job successfully and there was no catastrophe.

Just like every year.

I celebrate this competence, so easy to take for granted.

Image: somewhere in the Great White North.

We could use more of this

From the Weather Network site, the sun rising over Lake Nosbonsing:

It's been a gray winter.

After 35 years

It was about 35 years ago that I was introduced to the joys of chocolate croissants in Toronto.  I'm pretty sure they were sold in only a few places, like the P'tit Gourmet, a really neat delicatessen specializing in French food.

Finally, chocolate croissants have reached Bonfield, Ontario.  Not exactly a French-style croissant, more like a North American crescent roll.  But not bad.

And get this, city people.   It costs 75 CENTS.  The one cheap thing for sale on the entire planet.

Nipissing University, pictures from September 2010

Every time I go on sabbatical, it seems, a new wing is thrown up at Nipissing University. I come back when everyone else has already gotten used to the alterations, and I feel like the new kid even though I've been here for 20 years. Not that I'm complaining!  Although I missed the good company I had out in the portable when I first came here (not to mention the peace and quiet), it took little effort to adjust to the good facilities of the H Wing. And now the R Wing is up and running; and although it's not really new anymore, this is the first year I've  had the opportunity to use it (one class in R the 313) and I am enjoying it a great deal.

How so? Well, it is a matter of the view.  We always tell people how beautiful the setting of our university is, and it  is quite true that it is beautiful. However, if you are inside the complex we share with Canadore College, you seldom get a good look at it.  Sure, most offices and some classrooms have windows, but they don't  exactly give access to a panoramic impression.  

Until now.

When I walk from my office in the H Wing over to my seminar classroom in the R Wing, both on the third floor, I get this gorgeous view of the pond, of Canadore College, and the trees of the conservation area  from the corridor windows.  Here are some pictures I took during one of our many rainy days in September; but sometimes a gray day really brings out of fall colors. I will let you judge; but if it doesn't come across to you it is probably due to my limited skills as a photographer.

Architects! Well done!

North Bay drivers pass a litter test

When you renew your vehicle license in Ontario, you get a little sticker, about a centimeter by 2 centimeters, that you put on the right upper corner of the metal plate to show when your license expires. The sticker is mounted on a piece of paper, and there is a smaller piece of paper that covers the adhesive backing of the sticker. Either of these papers could be dropped by a lazy or sloppy person, the though dropping the big one might be pretty obvious and even embarrassing if you cared about the public landscape. The little one, however, is so small that you would think that letting it fall on the ground would be the easiest thing.

This all occurred to me when I went to the bureau to renew my license plate and then came out to the parking lot to apply the sticker. As I stood there with a small, easily dropped piece of paper in my hand, I looked around to see if anyone in the parking lot had in fact dropped their trash on the pavement.

Not one had.

Image: a random North Bay parking lot.

Françoise Noël wins a prize!

Dr. Françoise Noel, longtime member of the History Department at Nipissing University, has recently been awarded the Ontario Historical Society's Fred Landon Award, for the best book on regional history in the past three years. the book is Family and Community Life in Northeastern Ontario, The Interwar Years, a study which is both solid in the scholarly sense and entertaining, especially for those interested in the grassroots history of our area. Family and Community Life is Dr. Noel's fourth book, which makes her a very productive scholar indeed.

This announcement gives me an excuse to reproduce the cover of the book, a wonderful work by a local artist.

Back in the Near North!

I am reminded

I have lived in Ontario's Near North for almost 20 years, but you only have to be away from it for a little while to forget how different it is from the places where most people live.

My stay in SW Ontario has been in a merely medium-sized city, in a pretty quiet neighborhood, and the windows of my office overlook a very fine garden.

But a flying visit to the Near North reminded me that at home it is QUIET and the nights are DARK and from my front door the sightlines are LONG. Not to mention being able to see the Milky Way.

Image: someone's photo illustrating Neil Young's "Helpless." Note the trees, rocks, and water.

Last day in May, summer's on its way...

...maybe.

Behind the house, today

Hoppaquin Hay (Quinn)

Hoppaquin Hay is a man-at-arms mentioned in Froissart's Chronicles. I like to think of him as "the famous singing cowboy of the 14th century." I threw out that name as a possibility when we got the horse, and soon enough he was known as (the Mighty) Quinn.

End of May, Bonfield, Ontario