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January 20, 2005

What I'm Reading . . .

I get to teach European Studies 101 in the Fall, which is one of the shattered remnants of the Western Civ curriculum taught here at these Colleges from the 1940s through the 1970s. I like "great books" courses, though I tend to find them unworkably ambitious about how much reading 21st century students can do. I mean that -- not just will but can; the longer I teach the less use I find in assigning big chunks we don't cover and the more happy I am assigning small chunks and covering them thoroughly. That way some people who hadn't learned or hadn't figured it out for themselves learn how to read closely.

So . . . I'm rereading Thucydides, remembering how awful I thought he was the first time, and trying to decide what excerpts to read. I'm also picking bits of Plato and Aristotle. Fun, fun, fun!

While procrastinating-by-wandering-through-the-stacks (an activity I discovered sometime in elemenary school) I came across a book of articles translated from Annales, which promised to be the inaugural issue of a series of annual volumes.* I found two articles on marriage, birth control, and contraception in the early middle ages (one Byzantine, one western), that were very useful for trying to figure out things about virgins and virginity in early medieval Rome. I'd read something else by the author of the Byzantine piece, but I'd never heard of Jean-Louis Flandrin, the author of the western piece -- and he had some useful things mentioned in the notes. He seems to have moved from Annales-style interest in nutrition and demography to writing about food per se. His last book seems to have been Food: a Culinary History. It looks really useful!
*Isn't it a sad implication that already by 1975 historians at Johns Hopkins understood that no one could be trusted to go read things in French? Academic French is really pretty clear, too. These selected articles are things one could possibly xerox and give to an advanced undergraduate class (and one hasn't been able to expect them to read in foreign languages for a long time), but I find it hard to believe, given the selection, that they're not aiming the book at graduate students.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at January 20, 2005 7:50 AM