Approaching the finish line?

My students turn in papers tonight, so grading starts tomorrow. And I'm not going to Kalamazoo, unlike seemingly most of the other medievalist bloggers out there. In the meantime, I can continue plugging away on these revisions.

Today I finally had a bit of a breakthrough: I've substantially reorganized the introduction. I want to make extra-clear that I am not really making a general argument about liturgy, or even about Cistercian liturgy, in this essay, but rather just making an argument about how the liturgy works at this particular community.

I have a few other passages to fix--some additional references to work in. At that point I might be ready to send it back. I'll need to read over the whole thing again (sigh) to be sure.

Further research

To follow up from yesterday's search of liturgical texts in CANTUS, I took a look at Late Medieval Liturgical Offices. LMLO is potentially a great resource compliling complete offices for a wide variety of saints, all from the later part of the Middle Ages. It has some drawbacks, however. One is that it uses a somewhat complex system of ascii codes for the information. The text accompanying the data files argues that this is not hard to learn, but it does constitute something of a barrier to using the materials. Even more problematic, just now, is that it was published in 1994, and its data files come on...3.5" floppy disks. My computer is an aged beast, and still has a floppy drive, but I know most newer computers don't. I'll see if I can actually read the files this afternoon.

At any rate, I was interested to discover from LMLO that the office for Saint C I'm looking at also appears (or at least a very similar one appears) in a single 15th-century manuscript from Barcelona, not so far from the monastery I'm studying. So I would guess I'm looking at some regional office for the saint. My ms. evidence is earlier, though, so I still wonder whether the office originated at this monastery or elsewhere...

Curious

So I am revising this article on liturgy that I seem to have been working on forever. I am looking at the feasts of several saints to see how they are presented in the liturgy of a particular nunnery. At the suggestion of a reader, I plugged the texts for these saints into the CANTUS database. To camouflage the project a little, I'm going to call these saints A, B, and C.

Saint A was wildly popular in the Middle Ages, and the results show it. Exactly the same texts appear in over a dozen different manuscripts, from totally different parts of Europe. So the monastery I'm studying probably got their office for Saint A from some commonly available materials.

Saint B was also quite popular. The texts I entered only appear in a few manuscripts, though. Both of those manuscripts are from monasteries of the same order, so perhaps this office was one composed at, and circulated among, monasteries of this order.

Saint C was another popular saint. But the texts used at the monastery I am studying don't appear in the database at all. Not a one of them. I checked them all. Admittedly the database is not comprehensive, but it does include a large number of manuscripts, and I did get hits for the other feasts. I am especially intrigued by this, because the celebration of Saint C is unusually prominent at this monastery. Other monasteries of the order did not observe her in the same way. So the fact that the texts are more obscure is extra interesting.

Getting unblocked

I have so many things to do this month it has been a little paralyzing. I came back from the AHA (via train) last Monday and spent the afternoon totally zoned out. I took a nap, which I almost never do. Then I spent a couple of days catching up on correspondence and finishing my grades and such.

As I puttered away at one thing and another, I realized I was reluctant to get back to my research. I need to finish revisions on an article and resubmit it, and then I need to dig back into the book manuscript. And I felt blocked. I wasn't totally sure how to address the comments of one reader, who seemed most interested in some points I felt were tangential to my major argument. I hadn't worked on it since probably early December, what with all the mess of finals. Prep for the spring semester seemed more pressing. And so on.

But today I may have gotten unblocked. I allotted two hours to work on the article. I sat down and read through it, made notes on things to do, fixed up some footnotes, added some brief explanatory material, explored the sources suggested by the reader. I think things are coming together. It may not even take that much more work. I'd be delighted to send this off by the end of the month.

I also allotted two hours to work on course prep. That was good, too; I made some progress, and the two-hour time period kept the prep from sprawling over into the rest of the day. I hope I can keep this up for the rest of the week.

Today's progress: much material skimmed, three books or articles ordered from ILL, several more requested from neighboring libraries, three references written on my "look for in the library" list, and, best of all, some actual writing.

Today I'm working on revisions to the liturgy article. I'm now drafted a whole new section that does a much better job of situating the community I'm talking about in the history of its order and region. So far so good. A reviewer also suggested that I need to situate the community's liturgy better in the history of its order's liturgy. That's a trickier assignment as the dating of the order's liturgy relies on arguments about the music more than the texts, and I am explicitly not dealing with the music in this article. I also am, of necessity, working from notes rather than the actual manuscripts. I'll need to take some thought about how to handle this issue.

Revision, again

I made a slew of revisions to the liturgy article today, based on comments from a helpful reader. (Thanks!) I hope this will clarify the argument considerably and also explain the specialized vocabulary better. Unfortunately it has probably also gotten longer. 

Helpful Reader also returned comments on the patronage piece, which I haven't gotten to yet, and remarked that it seemed more mature. I found this curious, since the patronage piece was dashed off in a shortish period of time--no more than six weeks, I'd guess, and probably less--before a conference, whereas I've been laboring over the liturgy article for much longer.  On and off for two years, in fact.

It's occurred to me that perhaps that on-and-off process has not helped that particular paper. In revising it I've had to cut repetition regularly, probably due to writing sections at different times. I've had to make the argument come through more clearly, perhaps because I've grown too close to it and have more trouble expressing it clearly.  Perhaps I need to try harder to finish a piece of writing in a short period of time, rather than writing one section, coming back a few months later and writing another, etc.

Readers, feel free to chime in: how to you do your most effective writing? Do you try to finish a draft as quickly as possible, or come back and add to it at intervals, or something else?

When the writing is not good

Well, having gushed about how smoothly things were going a few weeks ago, I feel morally obligated to confess now that things are somewhat...stickier.  I now have a full draft of the article, which I let sit for a couple of days and then read all the way through today.  I've revised the introduction, trimmed some of the pedantic early material, and am proceeding to do some more minor editing and revising all the way through.  As with so many projects, the fine-tuning once the thing is 95% complete is the hardest, and I'm doing a lot of fiddling with word choice for clarity and so forth. I have perfectionist tendencies, so it would be very easy for me to keep tweaking and tweaking and tweaking and never actually send the thing out.  So I'm going to limit myself to one pass through for tweaking and try to send it off by the end of the week.

End of the week

Well. I have a draft for the liturgy paper done. Time now to let it sit for a bit, and come back to it next week for a fresh reading.

I've been writing it in bits and pieces for the last few weeks, you see, so there's a substantial risk that I am repeating myself too much.  Or not clarifying something enough, because I thought I had explained it earlier.  I also need to think a bit about which journal I should send it to, and possibly revise it with that audience in mind.

Meanwhile, the Kalamazoo CFP is up, and I find myself uninspired. It would be nice to go to K'zoo next year, but I'm having trouble finding a session that seems well-suited to the things I'm working on.  There seems to be a lot of lit stuff, which is not what I'm doing; there are some sessions on religious reform, which I might be able to do something with, but not much else that seems to link religion and gender. Or even to allow for the linkage of religion and gender; I can't very well submit a paper on nuns to a session that says it's about clergy, or mendicant preachers, or the like.  I hate the feeling that I am trying to shoehorn my work into a slot that it really doesn't fit.  I'll have to read through the CFP again, since I may be missing something, but on a first reading, my work seems like a difficult fit for any of the proposed sessions.

Jesus and his celestial harem?

Aspects of medieval culture are often sufficiently different from modern culture to seem decidedly weird.  Today's example: the "bride of Christ" motif.  

It was common, in the Middle Ages, to describe nuns as brides of Christ.  Consecrated virgins took Christ as their husband in lieu of an earthly husband.  Much is made of this in any number of sources: one can find treatises discussing Jesus' superiority as a husband to any mere man and admonitions about how nuns must behave themselves lest they shame their "husband."  

What becomes odd about this, to a modern reader, is how very literal much of the discussion of the motif is.  Nuns are not merely metaphorical brides, but actual brides.  The liturgy for consecrating a nun, for example, may contain direct references to the theme.  The signature item of apparel for a nun was not so much her habit as her veil, an attribute of brides.  When you look at the lives of individual holy women, you can find even more direct references: the ancient St. Katherine of Alexandria, according to her vita, received a ring; St. Catherine of Siena is among several holy women actually living in the Middle Ages who had similar visions of a ring and wedding ceremony.  Special relationships with Christ, often accompanied by suggestive ecstasies, abound among female mystics.  I have also found a text referring to Katherine of Alexandria's entrance into the celestial bedchamber.  Medieval people were not just speaking poetically with this "bride of Christ" stuff; for many of them it appears to have been spiritual reality.

And where this gets even weirder...maybe even slightly disturbing...is when you reflect on the fact that Jesus was supposed to be married to all these nuns and saints at the same time.  My current research has brought that home to me, as the texts shift back and forth between talking about a nun's individual relationship to Christ, as his bride, and talking about the nuns' spiritual endeavor as a collective.  Such shifts seem a bit awkward, juxtaposing the spiritual reality of being a bride of Christ with the mundane reality of being a nun in a monastery together with many other nuns.  How special could a nun feel about being Christ's bride when Sister Snoresalot, or Sister Condescending, in the next cell was also Christ's bride?  The theme was widely used, for all sorts of purposes, and yet no one in the Middle Ages seems to have considered these implications.

Uh-oh

Less writing time today, but still going OK; I drafted one of the two remaining sections of this essay.  So just one section left to draft, and then I'll have a complete draft.  

There's just one problem.

In order to write the next section, I have to excavate my desk.  

I know that somewhere on my desk is a manila folder with printouts of the relevant documents I need to check before I can write this section. Somewhere, that is, under:
--book catalogs
--sample syllabi from my new employer
--notes I scribbled during sessions of the last two conferences I attended, one of which was in January
--random magazines
--mail I meant to deal with weeks ago
--photocopies of articles
--etc.

When my desk is organized, there are a lot of piles on it, but I know what type of thing is in each pile.  When my desk is not organized, as now, everything smears into one big pile.  So...time to go digging in the pile.  

How is your desk organized (or not)?

When the writing is good

I'm just coming off a good, solid writing session.  I was so into the work that I lost track of time, until I realized I was hungry, looked at the clock on the screen and saw it was almost 2 pm.

This project (the liturgy one) all along has nearly seemed to write itself.  Despite that, it's been in progress for 2 years, interrupted by conference papers, a book manuscript, and job applications.  From the beginning, when I was poring through the liturgical manuscripts, the basic idea came together very quickly.  I wrote a sketchy introduction and a rough outline.  How to organize a piece most effectively is often challenging for me, and this one fell into place very obviously: first I need to do this, then this, then that, then wrap up with this.  I haven't had to seriously revise the structure of the essay at any point.  

Writing is not always like this.  In fact, this particular project is almost unique in my experience, in that it's been so easy to work with.  Usually I do a lot more straining and revising and despairing over the utter crap I wrote the other day.  But for now, the writing is good, and it feels wonderful.  Hallelujah!  I need to finish writing two short sections, do a pass through the footnotes and conclusion, and then it will be done!  I almost hate to have to finish and send it off.  The next project probably won't be nearly as easy.

Liturgy: not so scary

One of the projects I am working on this summer is an article based on study of medieval liturgy.  Note, I am trained as a historian (who works on religious topics), rather than as a scholar of religion.  When I tell other historians that I am working on liturgical sources, I tend to get some interesting responses.  Often a look of suppressed terror creeps into their eyes.  "Oh," they say, edging away as if I might have something catching, "how interesting. I could never do that..."

Why are they so nervous?  Well, liturgiology (cool word, huh?) seems to be reputed as an especially esoteric part of the medieval studies field.  There are, I suppose, some good reasons for this.  Liturgical manuscripts are a distinct genre of manuscripts, with several different formal types.  The manuscripts use a lot of jargon and abbreviations which have to be unravelled.  Scholarship on liturgy also uses a lot of specialized vocabulary: can you tell Vespers from Matins? how about Lauds? what's the difference between an antiphon and a responsory? and so forth.  Further, many liturgiologists (even cooler word!) work on very early liturgies, which involve even more specialized manuscripts, plus languages like Syriac, etc.

I'm not venturing into those waters.  Instead, I'm working with late medieval liturgical manuscripts, which are safely in Latin.  Once I've gotten a grip on the conventions of liturgical manuscripts generally--which is possible through a couple of excellent introductions--the manuscripts themselves are not that hard to work through.  

Why put in the work?  Because this is what nuns (and monks) did most of the day.  Middle of the night, morning, scheduled intervals throughout the day, evening, the lives of people in monasteries were regulated by the liturgical routine.  This is what they read, sang, heard, and experienced throughout their days.  Liturgy had to have been crucial to how they understood themselves and the monastic life, and that's what I'm trying to uncover.