Mostly Medieval:Images and Reflections

Medieval Studies blew up online this past weekend when a Rachel Fulton Brown, an Associate Professor in the History Department at the University of Chicago (my graduate institution, although I did not study with her), published a few pieces on her blog aimed at Dorothy Kim (an Assistant Professor at Vassar College, who I know from the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship) for her insistence that medieval studies as a field needs to grapple with the way its materials have been and are currently being used by white supremacists to support their ideology and that those of us who teach medieval materials need to signal our rejection of white supremacist beliefs to our students. While the first post begins (and the second continues) an attack on Kim, the bulk of it is given over to an argument about the Virgin Mary that is framed around a famous window from Chartres Cathedral, known as Notre Dame de la Belle Verriere (our lady of the beautiful window).  According to Fulton Brown, th

For the 2017 Babel Working Group Meeting in Reno , I'm organizing a project for The Material Collective.  The full proposal appears below.  Get in touch if you are interested in participating! Make + Risk = Craftivism: A Roundtable and Yarnbomb Project A dominant symbol of the January 2017 Women’s March on Washington was the pink pussyhat: a knit or crochet hat constructed in such a way that cat ears appear on the wearer’s head.   Large numbers of women participated in making pussyhats and wore them at marches in Washington and other cities.   Yet the hats were also a focus for critique, as the product of a white middle-class feminism that often fails to take into account the experiences of other women, and as excluding transwomen in particular through their reference to biological sex.   In many ways, this combination of responses to the pussyhats mirrors the responses to the March itself.   It also demonstrates both the productive potential and the po