Back in the saddle

It's been quite a while since my last post on this blog, which in large part is due to two main factors. The first factor is that I accomplished this blog's initial purpose: I passed my candidacy exams. It was rough and the oral portion definitely nerve wracking, but the important part is I passed. I must place a large part of the credit for my passing on this blog, which kept me honest in my progress and provided a good place for me to hash out ideas and connections. I've generally found that I'm the type of learner that best succeeds in an environment of discussion, which is part of why I miss not being in coursework any more. Posting my ideas here was a good way to simulate some of this process.

Unfortunately, the past year has found my productivity not meeting its previous levels, in large part due to the other main event that's happened in my life: on June 20 of last year, my wife gave birth to our daughter. The time since then has been crazy and wonderful, but I've also been the primary stay at home caregiver due to a more flexible schedule. That has been fantastic, but it also means that my previous work methodology of holing away in a room for hours on end doesn't quite work (and admittedly said method also involved more time staring at a screen/facebook/reddit trying to motivate myself than it should've). I've been slowly improving and finding ways to squeeze time and productivity out of areas I hadn't been exploiting, but I need to do more to stay on track.

In light of the above, I'm coming back to this blog as a way to keep my work output consistent, my thoughts down somewhere that I can consult from anywhere, and once again take on the completely fabricated idea that if I'm not posting enough I'm shaming myself in front of a faceless and judgmental readership. The last in particular almost sounds like academia in general, sans the facelessness.

In this light, I'm going back to handling this blog in a similar fashion to when I was doing exams, albeit with a more reasonable schedule. By the time I was actually able to start reading for my exams I was already at the point where I had to cover an average of more than one text per day. With some Middle English poems this was no big deal, but when we're talking academic monographs the challenge was pretty intense. My goal going to forward is to average around 5 entries per week, which seems enough to both be feasible and make me feel great when I can surpass it. This will include both posts reflecting on what I'm reading and general comments about where aspects of my research are going. In some ways this will be a bit easier with monographs as I'm less under pressure to read them cover to cover and can focus on what's relevant to my interests (unlike reading for my exams because OMG WHAT IF THEY ASK ME ABOUT THAT THING IN ONE FOOTNOTE). Before launching into this, I should briefly describe where my project  is going now for better context of what's coming.

My thesis focused predominantly on sexual commodification and Aristotelian economics in Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue and the Lady Mede section of The Vision of Piers the Plowman. Since then, my research interests have become more refined and (I think) less obvious. I'm still employing Aristotelian economics, following from Joel Kaye's Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century, and am very much interested in how economic language and metaphor applies to gender issues. But my project has focused more specifically on how economic metaphor plays out in discussions and depictions of marriage in Middle English poetry. My thesis project, while rather obvious in retrospect, was starting to touch on this trend, a tendency for Middle English poets to employ economic language and metaphor when touching on matters of marriage. Clearly this is at work with the Wife of Bath, who blatantly discusses taking her "Bele Chose" to market, and Lady Mede, who is the allegorical personification of money (or at least the exchange of reward, usually monetary, in exchange for goods or service), but this same trend is at play in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Capgrave's Life of St. Katherine, Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes, Sir Amadace, King Horn, and Gower's Confessio Amantis to name a few. 

The latter in particular was the focus of the paper I gave at the John Gower Society Congress last week, a great conference with fantastic scholars and wonderful collegiality. My paper was sadly scheduled against a very popular panel with very big names (or perhaps luckily due to my nervousness), but it seemed to be well received and I got some good comments and questions about the paper. In fact, it is this conference that has pushed me to restart this blog and get to work; interacting with many excellent scholars made me realize where my own work could be, and it's past time I saw that happen.