Mostly Medieval:Images and Reflections

The first thing I am doing in my work on the book this summer is writing a new introduction.  My thought is that doing this will help me to frame the book clearly, first of all for myself I continue working on it, and then for its eventual readers. Below are the first three paragraphs of the new Intro and so the projected first three paragraphs for the book as a whole.  My goals here are to get someone interested in actually reading the thing and then to lay out some big ideas for the book as a whole - the theoretical perspective plus some sense of the argument.  Let me know what you think. 7/1: I did a bit more fiddling with this - added a sentence and moved some things around. I've highlighted the new sentence. She stands with her weight shifted slightly to her left and with that hip pressed outward and upward, in a version of the classical contrapossto pose.   She puts that pose to a different end, however, propping a baby up on her hip and securing him

  I'm returning to the image that I used in my first post in this blog in order to mark a return to the blog itself.   I've not written anything here for a good long while now and am very aware of that.  I've been wondering whether I want to continue to writing here or not and why.  Thinking about where I am now compared to where I was when I started this and about what I might want this platform to do for me now. I've not been writing here, first, because I've been doing other things.  Primarily service work, chairing a couple of committees and so getting my department and college ready for a major curriculum change that will be going into effect in the Fall.  Looking back at my first post here, I wrote about not wanting to get dragged into service and hoping to use writing in this forum as a way of resisting that.  That didn't work out, obviously, but I've also changed my attitude towards service somewhat - seeing it not as a time-sink but instead