bunnyjadwiga

Miles, Margaret R. 2008. "God's love, mother's milk." Christian Century 125, no. 2: 22-25
EBSCO abstract: "The article presents an exploration into the use of nursing as a theological metaphor in Western medieval and Renaissance Christian art. An overview of several uses of the nursing Virgin Mary within church history is given, along with its gradual changes in artistic connotations throughout the Renaissance. The value of the religious image of nursing in spiritual life is emphasized."

"By 1750 the public meaning of naked breasts was largely medical or erotic. I have not been able to find a single religious image of the breast painted after 1750. By that time, it was impossible to symbolize God's love by depicting a nursing Virgin. Meanwhile, crucifixion scenes increased in number and in their graphic depiction of violence and suffering . . .
Did the increased attention to violent crucifixion scenes arise from social changes in Western Europe? . . . There are problems with the crucifixion scene as a representation of God's love for humanity. It presents a violent act as salvific. Are crucifixion scenes the unconscious origin, deeply embedded in Western Christian societies, of the sacrificial rhetoric that surrounds war? (On the eve of the Iraq war, George W. Bush said, "Americans understand the costs of conflict because we have paid them in the past. War has no certainty but the certainty of sacrifice.") Does the proliferation of crucifixion scenes habituate us to violence? The equation of love with heroic violence and suffering is typically a male-centered perspective. Depictions of the lactating Virgin, of course, also involve expectations about gender. Is God's love for humanity more adequately represented as the provision of life, daily care and nourishment, or as redemptive suffering?"

Though I did skim it-- it's for a College Seminar on "We Have Always Been Medieval".

David W. Marshall, ed. Mass Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture (McFarland, 2007).

Table of Contents:
- Chaucer for a New Millenium: The BBC Canterbury Tales
- "If I Lay My Hands on the Grail": Arthurianism and Progressive Rock *
- The Sound of Silents: Aurality and Medievalism in Benjamin Christensens' Haxan
- Antichrist Superstars: The Vikings in Hard Rock and Heavy Metal *
- The Future Is What it Used to Be: Medieval Prophecy and Popular Culture
- Idealized Images of Wales in the Fiction of Edith Pargeter/Ellis Peters *
- Places Don't Have to Be True to Be True: The Appropriation of King Arthur and The Cultural Value of Tourist Sites
- "Accident My Codlings": Sitcom, Cinema, and the Re-writing of History in The Blackadder *
- Medieval History and Cultural Forgetting: Oppositional Ethnography in The Templar
- Teaching the Middle Ages *
- Virtual Medieval: The Age of Kings interprets the Middle Ages
- A World unto Itself: Autopoietic Systems and Secondary Worlds in Dungeons & Dragons
- Anything Different is Good: Incremental Repetition, Courtly Love, and Purgatory in Groundhog Day

(* ones are ones I thought were particularly good, though the "Teaching the Middle Ages" essay is, well, rather whimperish.)

After investigating heavily, my boss-- who is an excellent resource librarian-- has decided that the library instruction material will say, on the subject of "Primary vs. Secondary Source" :
"Talk to your professor."

Because the definitions of primary vs. secondary source, while similar in intent, vary from discipline to discipline. It's hard to convince scholars in specific disciplines that this is so, but, it is. Scientists believe the first scholarly publication by the original investigators describing the experiment is the primary source. Historians believe something that was written or drawn at the time by an eyewitness is a primary source; Archaeologists/Anthropologists have far more stringent rules that I don't even pretend to understand, which seem to center around the original artifact in situ (so a photo of the artifact, much less a contemporary depiction of the artifact, are secondary sources to them...)

We learned about this in library school, when hypertext was "Hypercard for the Mac" etc. and we all wanted one, though computerized. Nowadays, we can sorta have this, though we can't annotate it (I find myself printing out all kinds of journal articles because I can't annotate the links!). Something like the Memex, for non-fiction research books, is what I want for electronic/online books!
"As We May Think," Vannevar Bush, The Atlantic 1945.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush

Supposedly about the research process of 'digital natives' but frankly this sounds like the research process as a whole:

For example, digital natives gather information — as a building block in any learning process — through a multistep process that involves grazing, a deep dive, and a feedback loop.

Digital natives are good at grazing through the vast ocean of information online.

While browsing the Web, digital natives might decide to go beyond the headlines of a story and to take a deep dive, for example by following a hypertext link, listen to a commentary, or download a video clip on the topic of interest. In this way, they are searching for what’s behind the bit of information that got their attention in the first place.

The feedback loop, finally, includes some sort of enhanced interactivity with the content they’re interested in. The digital native, for instance, may decide to share the information with friends and family. Or to post a comment to her blog to critique the story he just learned about. Or to share thoughts on a mailing list. The form of a digital native’s feedback loop varies, but his level of engagement with information and the world he lives in tends to be higher than the one of the previous generation.

We’re optimistic that these features are generally good for learning.
-- Urs Gasser, Interview, "Understanding Students who were 'born digital'"-- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/10/02/digital

Zillow.com not only gives you estimated housing prices, it will often give you house/neighborhood frontage pictures even when Google Maps doesn't have them.

GreatSchools.net provides both parent ratings and their own ratings. Greatschools.net ratings are based entirely on standardized test scores.

http://education.state.nj.us/rc/ gives you 'New Jersey School Report Cards' which include avg pupil:teacher ratios and other statistical data, also text contributed by the school and district to the report, as well as the NCLB reports.

So, my co-worker Bruce took a look at my CA (I really should have thanked him specifically in the acknowledgements, he's the one who suggested Scatologic Rites of All Nations) and said, oh, have you tried Art and Architecture Technical Abstracts? I said "what?" and he wandered off and came back with the print volumes, which are cool.

A while later, he stopped me at the reference desk to show me this:
AATA Online*: Abstracts of International Conservation Literature
(Formerly Art and Architecture Technical Abstracts)
http://aata.getty.edu/nps/

"’And that reminds me. Miss Lydgate’s History of Prosody was marked PRESS with her own hand this morning. I fled with it and seized on a student to take it down to the printers. I’m almost positive I heard a faint voice crying from the window about a footnote on page 97—but I pretended not to hear’" (Sayers, 1995 Harper paperback Gaudy Night, Ch 22, p. 492).

My Compleat Anachronist on Hygiene has had to be split into 2 volumes; Tonwen informs me that Vol. 1 goes to the printer TODAY!

So, I'm re-reading Gaudy Night, by Sayers, and running into questions of 'the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth...'.

In Gaudy Night, there is a long discussion among the members of Shrewsbury scholars about the morality of suppressing a fact, and of the person who sees the fact suppressed and lets it go.

"Well, that's true, of course. Nothing could possibly excuse deliberate falsification."
"There's no sense in deliberate falsification, anyhow," said the Bursar. "What could anybody gain by it?"
"It has been done," said Miss Hillyard, "frequently. To get the better of an argument. Or out of ambition."
"Ambition to be what?" cried Miss Lydgate. "What satisfaction could one possibly get out of a reputation one knew one didn't deserve? It would be horrible."

Of course, there are many things where depending on how one states the facts, and which facts one states, one can make totally opposing arguments. Some of them have been touched on lightly by certain discussions-- even among the sane people who do believe in the Holocaust, for instance, there are wildly varying constructions of what it was about and even the way things happened, and why, and what we need to do to keep it from ever happening again.

Right now, though, I'm looking at something less fraught. One of the blogs I read, a post-peak-oil one (and the peak oil movement puzzles me specifically because of the issues and indicators they choose to focus on), just posted something about the end of the economy, etc. as we know it. The writer cites two other sites for some facts to bolster her argument. But... following her references, I find that they don't say exactly what she has made them say. Using your 'economic incentive" to 'pay utility bills' is not the same as 'paying past-due utility bills'. It may indeed be true that 50% of 'recent' homebuyers now have no or negative equity in their homes-- if you define 'recent' as 'in the last 3 years'. Did the writer do this on purpose? Or is this just the way she reads the news? Should I say something? Should I stop reading her blog? I don't know.

The same is true of other questions. Even in my own writing. I've recently written about medieval hygiene. Trying to explode the 'dirty' stereotype, I may well have overstated my case, and possibly even my evidence. But if I don't lay out the evidence as I know it, I'm complicit in the surpression of facts. If I don't argue the thesis of John Riddle in Eve's Herbs by saying "there's plenty of evidence that lots of this stuff isn't very effective, and that people really were obsessed with regular menstruation" I feel like I'm complicit in the misrepresentation of history. But am I actually supporting the suppression of truth? I don't know.