Despite the fact that people say that the concerns of academics these days are race, class, and gender, I say instead that they are race, gender, sexual orientation, and the environment. Class doesn’t count for much these days, except maybe with some older academics.
One piece of confirming evidence for this comes from the medieval conference at Kalamazoo, which I’ve been going to for years in order to accompany my wife, who is a medievalist. After attending for a few years, I noticed that there was something missing from the many (600+) sessions at the conference, namely any sessions devoted to the poor. Where were the discussions of the serfs, the peasants, and so on? They were absent. Instead, most sessions fell into one of two groups: traditional subjects, like King Arthur, heraldry, Thomas Aquinas, and Chartres Cathedral, and postmodernist topics, like women in the medieval world, Muslims in the medieval world, gays in the medieval world, etc. A few oddball sessions were on other topics, like Tolkien or metals in the medieval world. But on the peasants, there was generally nothing.
Occasionally, I have brought this up, and people agree, but don’t seem too bothered by it. Now a “big name” is bringing it up. (See here.) The president of the Medieval Academy, Maryanne Kowaleski, writes as follows:
Peasants – a catch-all term for rural dwellers who made their living by farming land or raising livestock – represented about 80 to 90 percent of the population during the Middle Ages, but they rarely receive the scholarly attention they deserve. Twice in the last six years, I have had the opportunity (as part of searches for a new medievalist colleague at Fordham) to read dozens of syllabi for medieval survey courses. Both times I have been struck by how few of these syllabi even contained the word “peasant” or “agriculture.” Royalty, aristocrats, clergy, heretics, mystics, barbarians, Muslims, Jews, Crusaders, merchants, and even marginal people such as lepers and criminals make the cut, but not the social group responsible for the vast majority of the pre-industrial economy. Medieval peasants cannot rise up and shout “We are the 90 percent!” so I want to use my final presidential column to shout out on their behalf, even though they do not quite reach the 99 percent of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
She goes on to say that when she has questioned professors on why they don’t talk about peasants in their classes, various answers are given, all of which she finds reasonable. Here is one: with a limited amount of time in a semester, they have decided to spend their time on “the medieval roots of contemporary issues such as women and work or medieval multiculturalism.” I thought the point of learning about the medieval world was to learn about the medieval world and not to use it to learn about our own world, but hey, what do I know? I’m not a professor, and when I was a professor, I taught philosophy and not history.
The mere fact that someone else has noticed this peculiar phenomenon shows that maybe things are starting to change.
One piece of confirming evidence for this comes from the medieval conference at Kalamazoo, which I’ve been going to for years in order to accompany my wife, who is a medievalist. After attending for a few years, I noticed that there was something missing from the many (600+) sessions at the conference, namely any sessions devoted to the poor. Where were the discussions of the serfs, the peasants, and so on? They were absent. Instead, most sessions fell into one of two groups: traditional subjects, like King Arthur, heraldry, Thomas Aquinas, and Chartres Cathedral, and postmodernist topics, like women in the medieval world, Muslims in the medieval world, gays in the medieval world, etc. A few oddball sessions were on other topics, like Tolkien or metals in the medieval world. But on the peasants, there was generally nothing.
Occasionally, I have brought this up, and people agree, but don’t seem too bothered by it. Now a “big name” is bringing it up. (See here.) The president of the Medieval Academy, Maryanne Kowaleski, writes as follows:
Peasants – a catch-all term for rural dwellers who made their living by farming land or raising livestock – represented about 80 to 90 percent of the population during the Middle Ages, but they rarely receive the scholarly attention they deserve. Twice in the last six years, I have had the opportunity (as part of searches for a new medievalist colleague at Fordham) to read dozens of syllabi for medieval survey courses. Both times I have been struck by how few of these syllabi even contained the word “peasant” or “agriculture.” Royalty, aristocrats, clergy, heretics, mystics, barbarians, Muslims, Jews, Crusaders, merchants, and even marginal people such as lepers and criminals make the cut, but not the social group responsible for the vast majority of the pre-industrial economy. Medieval peasants cannot rise up and shout “We are the 90 percent!” so I want to use my final presidential column to shout out on their behalf, even though they do not quite reach the 99 percent of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
She goes on to say that when she has questioned professors on why they don’t talk about peasants in their classes, various answers are given, all of which she finds reasonable. Here is one: with a limited amount of time in a semester, they have decided to spend their time on “the medieval roots of contemporary issues such as women and work or medieval multiculturalism.” I thought the point of learning about the medieval world was to learn about the medieval world and not to use it to learn about our own world, but hey, what do I know? I’m not a professor, and when I was a professor, I taught philosophy and not history.
The mere fact that someone else has noticed this peculiar phenomenon shows that maybe things are starting to change.
The medievalist you quote thinks that the plural of _syllabus_ is _syllabi_. It is not. The Latin word _syllabus_ is a fourth-declension noun, and its plural is not _syllabi_ (as it would be if _syllabus_ were a second-declension noun), but _syllabus_, with an elongated _u_.
Quiz question: What is the plural of _octopus_? Hint: This word comes from Greek, not Latin.
Posted by: Mark Spahn | 03/15/2013 at 02:53 PM
Actually, no, that's what I like to think of as a "learned-folk etymology," and it wouldn't surprise me if syllabus is the most successful typo in world history. In fact, the word _syllabus_ didn't exist in Latin at all until it was accidentally created between the 1380s and the 1470s as a misprint of the Greek word _sittybas_ "parchment labels" in Cicero's letters to Atticus. (There's often added the claim Augustine used the word too, but what he used was a form of _syllaba_ "syllable.") There's certainly no warrant in the historical record for saying it's a fourth-declension noun, for the forms in Cicero are the expected Greek forms for first declension and the form in Augustine (syllabis) would be first or second declension. The claim it's fourth declension is rather an assumption by later scholars based on several subsequent layers of surmise without looking closely at the actual historical record.
For an entertaining view of this, see these two posts by a classicist:
http://epectasis.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/curious-and-quibbling-history-of.html
http://epectasis.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/curious-and-quibbling-history-of_23.html
As for octopus, the plural is, of course, octopuses, as it is a fine long-since-nativized word in English. If you refer to technical use in biology, the plural is octopodes. Octopi is, of course, an excrescence of posturing pseudo-intellectuals who think Latin has only two declensions, rather akin to the supposedly educated Latin American studies drudges who abuse Catalan and Portuguese names into Castilian pronunciations.
Posted by: Mike | 03/17/2013 at 07:06 PM