Mostly Medieval:Images and Reflections

I've been thinking a lot about scholarly processes lately; about the how, rather than the what, of what we do.  I started focusing on this issues while working on my contribution to last year's Babel Working Group meeting in Santa Barbara and it led to the session that Asa Mittman and I organized for this year's Babel meeting in Toronto and my own contribution to that session.  The session as a whole is summarized in a post on the Material Collective's blog and so the point of this post is to highlight my own contribution.  This took the form of a video entitled "To Free Writing" which is available here .  The text in the video was developed through my process of freewriting, which I documented in additional videos ( Freewriting 1 , Freewriting 2 , Freewriting 3 ,  Freewriting 4 , Freewriting 5 , Freewriting 6, Freewriting 7 , Freewriting 8 , Freewriting 9 , Freewriting 10 , Freewriting 11 , Freewriting 12 ).

I'm back to the idea of "writing in public" and so of posting parts of the book as I write them, if only as a tool to get myself to actually write them.   The chapter I'm working on now is in many ways the hardest: it's the one I started with, but I've never been happy with it, and so a lot of my anxiety about the project is lodged in it.  Now I think I've finally figured out how it should work, but I'm still struggling to get myself to work on it.  Here is the Intro which includes an overview: let me know what you think. The woman stands with her head bent down and turned slightly to her right.   Her thick locks of hair continue this downward movement as they extend down and out over her chest and shoulders.   One lock on her left side stands out as it extends straight down, crossing over the prominent horizontal bars of her ribs, and leading to her breasts.   Here the shape of this lock of hair is repeated, reversed, magnified, and multi...

I head home from Paris tomorrow.  I've done a lot of work here: finished drafting an article and wrote my talk for Kalamazoo.  But I've also taken a lot of photographs of the city and done a lot of knitting, producing two now of these yarn-bombs for lamp posts (I'll install the second tomorrow morning before heading to the airport.  It was intended to replace the first, but since it's actually still there, the second will have to go on a different lamp post).  This blog post is meant to tie those last two pursuits together, very visually.  It's also, then, a meditation on one of the things I love about this city; the textures, the patterns, and the details in the architecture, the street furniture, and the street itself. Yarn-bomb in the Place Louis Aragon on the Ile St. Louis.   Crosswalk on the Rue St. Antoine. Yarn-bomb detail.   Detail of wrought-iron work on a tomb in Pere Lachaise.   Yarn-bomb d...

I'm back in Paris working on a number of projects: an article on transi tombs (see my previous posts on the transis of Jeanne de Bourbon-Vendome and Henry Chichele ), a presentation/provocation for the upcoming Kalamazoo congress on Medieval Studies, and the next chapter of my book.  A few days ago, though, I took a day off from all of that and went on a day trip out to Chartres.  My main reason for going was to see the restoration work that has been done to the interior surfaces of the cathedral.  This work has been somewhat controversial: in the US at least, it began with a piece by Martin Filler in the New York Review of Books , continued with responses by Madeline Caviness and by Caviness and Jeffrey Hamburger, and then with Filler's response to their responses.   In going to Chartres, I was following Caviness and Hamburger's suggestion that we should go, see, and judge for ourselves. Having done so, what do I now think?  Well, it sure is different! ...

As a wanna-be Parisian and a professor of Islamic art, I've been following the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris with interest.  I've been spending a month at a time in Paris every few years since 2006 (I will be there for the month of April this year) and have been teaching courses on Islamic art regularly since 2002.  The latter was my response to 9/11: although a medievalist by training, I've become a self-taught Islamicist in order to teach that material because I believe that Americans need to know more about Islam and because teaching Islam through art history has the advantage of presenting it as part of a sophisticated high culture. In following reactions to recent events, I've been most interested in two topics: reactions against the "Je suis Charlie" slogan and discussions of Islamic attitudes towards - or against - images and specifically images of Muhammad.  The most recent Charlie Hedbo cover, which I've...