First Full Week of Classes

Congratulations to me, first week of classes is done. Since classes are now in full swing, this is pretty much how I spend most of my time. Reading articles/books/etc in my spiffy new York sweatshirt on the bed because if I sit at my desk under the eaves I smack my head into the stupid cross beam every time I stand up.

I think the biggest difference between undergraduate and graduate classes (and I think my fellow grad students will agree) is the amount of reading. We have to read A LOT for every class. It is also different because there's not list of course books that you are expected to go out and buy. In the UK (apparently this is true for both undergrad and graduate courses), they don't expect you to purchase pretty much any books (with the exception of language grammars and dictionaries). Instead, the expectation is that you will get everything from the library. This would be great if I wasn't a 40 minute walk away from the big campus library. King's Manor does have its own library with some stuff in it, but they a) don't have everything that the main library does, and b) only have 1 copy if they have it, so unless you are super aggressive about checking out books before everyone else in your class, no such luck.

All of my classes are once a week seminars, which means that every week I get to track down new loads of books and articles from either the main library, the Minster library, KM library, or the internet. This has led me to question whether it really is more convenient to live in city centre near my classes since I have to trek up to campus for the library all the time or to visit history professors' office hours. I think it is a toss up- whether you live on campus or in city centre, you get to do a lot of walking back and forth. Unless you are made of money and take the bus a lot.

Speaking of money, I have some! I can pay my tuition! Huzzah! Course, according to the online currency converter, my $15,000 USD should have been just over 9000 BPDs, but it came out to 8800 which kind of puzzles me, but at least I have money and will not be kicked out of college.

Here's a brief rundown of what I'm learning about this term.
1) Medieval Latin. The Latin placement test put me into Beginners Plus, which kind of made me sad because I thought I knew more than someone just barely better than someone who knows zero Latin. But after the first class, I heartily agree with that placement. Beginners Plus is ACTUALLY basically Intermediate but with a quick review of all of the grammar structures. I think this works out well because the amount of Latin I remember from the last time I took it is, well, not super (it was better before I went to Italy last spring break. That got Italian all stuck in my head and now I'm thoroughly confused about what is Latin and what is Italian), and because I've only ever worked with classical Latin, so this gives me a chance to run through some of the ways the language changed in the medieval period and in some of the vocabulary that was invented, particularly to describe church related things that classical Latin just didn't have words for. Medieval Latin is a bit nicer because the sentence structures more closely resemble modern English structuring, but they get tricky and do things like write an "ae" ending as just "e." And lets not even go into the abbreviations they used in manuscripts. But I actually like the class, which is good. The teacher is this cute older English woman who's very no nonsense and figures that we can't help our ignorance because teachers today were often taught in the 40's and they didn't care about things like grammar back then. She's pretty funny.

2) Paleography. For you non-medievalists, this is the study of manuscripts, writing, and books basically. We learn how to read different scripts so that we can make sense out of primary resources and actually read all the medieval manuscripts still around. We also learn about standards in form and technique for various types of documents (i.e. a charter is usually written on parchment with specific dimensions, etc.) Right now we're basically just doing an introduction to the field, but later we break into groups to study in depth the documents and scripts used in a specific time period or document type (for example, books are often written in different scripts than documents, which were typically written for the king/court where speed of production was necessary.) The class is taught by an American/Canadian- someone told me she was American, but she went to school in Canada so I'm not sure- who has managed to develop a tinge of English accent. With the exception of one professor who still sounds very American, most of the North American professors have developed a strange hybrid accent. I'm going to come home and not know how to speak properly! I'll be calling things shops instead of stores, and weekENDs instead of WEEKends.

3) Old English. Taught by a PhD student who lives in my house (makes for a handy resource when stumped by homework!), so far all we've worked on is pronunciation. Because with the exception of a few words, it is not anything like modern English. Well, to be precise, we're learning West Saxon, but that was the dominant dialect of Old English in literature/documents after Alfred the Great.

Stolen from Ellen:
Alfred is Good
Alfred is Great
To read his Life
I just can't wait.

Sorry, medievalists humor. This is what happens when you put us in a house together... Anyhoo, it is definitely interesting. I actually think my Italian background is helpful here, which is strange since Italian is a romance language and OE is West Germanic, but I'm used to enunciating all vowels in a word. I don't know if I'll ever get the different "th" sounds, but its only the first week. And after this class I might be able to read through some of Beowulf in the original. Pretty snazzy.

4) Core Module. This is a class all Med. Studies MA students have to take. But, they break it down into various groups, so it isn't like a big lecture class full of all 20 of us or anything. The first few weeks, everyone is either taking Approaches to Archaeology, Intro to Art History, or Reading Published Medieval Texts. This is designed to introduce us to a discipline we don't have much background in. I'm taking Reading Published Medieval Texts, which is sort of a hybrid literature/history thing. I haven't done much with medieval literature, so I figured it'd be a good section to take. In a couple of weeks, everyone will be switching to one of three case studies which we will then look at through various interdisciplinary approaches. This is all designed to help us think and work with multiple disciplines, since that's kind of the point of doing an interdisciplinary masters program.

5) Saints and Sanctity. This class looks at early Medieval religious developments- specifically looking at the rise and development of saints cults. It is definitely interesting. But we kind of got tsk tsked by the professor after the first session. Apparently class was slow and he felt he led discussion too much. I didn't think it was particularly slow, and I don't know how we were supposed to do anything about him leading discussion, since the whole class was basically him posing questions, us discussing them, then him posing some other ones. I'm sure we would have been happy to pose our own questions if he hadn't been clearly leading discussion. But whatever. I'm sure it'll straighten itself out over the next couple weeks.

So yeah, that's what I do. Fun stuff.

Beginnings

I'm really sleepy, so I'm going to bed basically right now. But, I felt like I should at least write a short entry. The picture is part of the King's Manor complex. It isn't the oldest/original building on the site (that actually holds the library and porters lodge among other things). But the Centre for Medieval Studies is headquartered in this building. I had sort of my first class today. Real classes start next week, but I went and met the professor, got what passes for a syllabus here, and had a mild heart attack at the amount of reading. If I were feeling more industrious, I'd take a picture of just what I'm supposed to read for next Thursday to show you. Also, its like a 10 person class (which, to be fair, the professor was not expecting. There's only about 6 of us registered through CMS to take it, but Medieval Lit and Medieval History folks registered later and showed up today as well) and the university's various libraries generally have about 1 copy of the books between them. Now, the professor could have put things on reserve as part of their key texts program, which keeps one copy at the library and it can only be checked out for a 4 hour period, thus allowing multiple people to use an item without one person checking it out and keeping it for weeks. But no, we're to work together and communicate to share readings. Yeah that's going to end well. I think graduate training, more than anything else, is meant to teach us how to fight to the death for rare books at the library! I did manage to track down copies of 2 books (but there's a whole lot more. A whole lot. Like, it took an entire page to write down everything we're to read for next week.) but some of the other major works for next week are already checked out. So I'm hoping that whoever has them is going to be a nice person and like me plans to read what they've checked out quickly and return it promptly so other people have a chance to read it.

In other news, I put in a Tesco order with a couple other girls to be delivered tomorrow. Hooray for groceries to my front door with little effort on my part! But online grocery shopping is kind of hard when you don't know the brands and products. For example, it took us about 20 minutes to figure out how to search for laundry detergent. You don't search for laundry detergent. Or laundry soap. A search for just "laundry" mostly turned up laundry tablet things. I wanted liquid so that I could hand wash things since 1 load of laundry costs 2 pounds to wash and another 2 pounds to dry (that's like $7!). They also do this thing here where they call fabric softener "laundry conditioner" and it is totally not clear on the bottle what laundry conditioner does. We finally figured it out, but it was just rather comical that it was that complicated to find laundry detergent.

Tonight was also the audition/interest meeting for Lords of Misrule. This semester's play is Beowulf. Several of the other new MA's and I agreed that it sounded fun but we weren't sure about the time commitment. So we "auditioned" for a small or non-speaking part and said we could help out with some of the crew stuff like sets/costumes/props. We'll see how that goes.

We're also trying to organize a trip to see Eddie Izzard's new show Stripped. He's a really funny comedian and he's doing a UK tour basically right now. There's shows about an hour away by train next Thursday and Friday and tickets aren't too bad, so we're trying to get a group together to go. I hope it works out because that would just be so much fun.

And now, as previously mentioned, I'm sleepy and going to bed. Goodnight!