For reasons unknown, Kalamazoo, Michigan (and more specifically, Western Michigan University) holds the world’s largest academic conference on things medieval each year. It’s a godforsaken part of the world, and nobody ever goes there apart from this one weekend, but for one week the place is crawling with people discussing various aspects of pre-modern society. I’ve known about K’zoo for years, because my undergrad medieval professor, Dr Rampolla, went every year. I had wanted to go for the years preceding this one, but first it was the same week as finals, and then I had other conflicts (New Market and Wine in the Woods, perhaps?), and last year I was bogged down in... everything. This year, though, there was no way in hell I was going to miss it.
On Wednesday I picked James and Adrienne up at Midway and we headed east. James had managed to come down with stomach flu two days previously (I swear a garden snail could beat up his immune system) so it was a rather rough journey, but at least he was past the puking stage by the time they arrived at my (rental) car. It’s not a bad drive, really: tedious in the way that southern Michigan just is, and northern Indiana is a pit on part with New Jersey, but it’s only about two and a half hours. We got checked into the dorms, which are exactly that, and rather spartan and miserable. I don’t know how undergrad don’t kill one another off, having to spend an entire year in tiny concrete cubicles, especially without hot water (at least in our building) and with beds that squawk if you so much as sneeze. (Last year, James rather famously commented upon the thought of how many brilliant and eminent medievalists throughout the past forty years had probably had drunken sex in those rooms. Kalamazoo is famous for having once-a-year couples, who meet up for the conference and then go home to their relative spouses, so the answer is probably, several. But they sure as hell weren’t doing anything clandestine in the bed I got- the entire county would’ve known.)
We did a lot of meeting and greeting over the course of the week. Adrienne always seems to know a million people via the marvellous medium of LiveJournal, and of course she knew people from last year’s conference. James had friends here from the armoury in Massachusetts where he used to work. The only person I knew here was Dr R, but we did manage to have lunch and catch up, which was really nice. I dearly love everyone in the history department at Trinity, and I owe them a lot: they, more than anyone else, really pushed me to come to grad school, and it was Dr R who took my passing interest in the Middle Ages and fanned it into a career path.
During the days we were in sessions of papers. This probably doesn’t sound tremendously exciting, especially if you’re not an academic, but it was amazing. I don’t have the words to explain how incredibly important this week was in my outlook. I’m going home excited about my life and my work, and I’m really looking forward to doing the next degree. Suddenly the thought of a PhD and career in medieval theatre isn’t like being shackled to a mistake; it seems like fun. Of course, conferences represent the thing about academics that I love best, which is the intellectual exchange and the dynamism of bouncing thoughts and ideas off of one another. I’m not a people person, but I am at my absolute best when I’m working with like-minded individuals, either in concert or in friendly and complimentary opposition. This week was a much-needed tonic for the horrible burnout of a year fraught with the MA and the nervous breakdown. I don’t even have the applications for the next degree finished, and I’m excited about getting to work.
Nobody did anything on the York Cycle in specific, which is of course the aspect of medieval drama with which I’m most intimately acquainted. I heard a couple of papers on the Chester Cycle, one of which was about the use of feasting and food within the play.. It covered everything from the possible interpretations (the author argued that real food was probably used, rather than props or mime) to the secular/sacred implications of both the presence of feasting in the text and the literal use of food on stage. This is the kind of thing I find fascinating: I’m not tremendously interested in the manuscripts as pieces of literature, but in medieval drama as drama. They’re plays, and their production and performance is, as far as I’m concerned, the most important issue. And it’s fun because it forces me to think about theatre in different ways from the relatively representational style in which I usually work. Perhaps the note that interested me the most was the discussion in both papers about the ways in which Chester found ways of continuing to stage the plays, even after the Reformation, when the political authorities tried to quash them (they eventually succeeded). By trying to recast religious plays in a secular light, they gave the plays a longer lifespan than the politics of the era would have liked. And the thing in that which is so intriguing is that it suggests that the plays were important to the populace beyond their meaning as religious works. Since religion isn’t really my baby, even in the Middle Ages, I find that exciting.
Another pair of papers discussed the writings of Hardin and Chambers, and the validity of Hardin’s dismissal of Chambers’ evolutionary interpretation of developments in medieval theatre. Just the idea of putting scientific theory to artistic/creative processes is kind of interesting (and, I would argue, a limited option). I spent most of last year reading these two books, so I’m intimately familiar with the issue. This made me want to go back and re-read them, though. (And for the record, the Darwinian argument of development, which I have always found the more rational, is the one generally out of favour, due in no small part to Hardin’s subsequent writings.) This lecture would have been indescribably tedious for anyone who doesn’t do medieval theatre, and that was another thing I enjoyed about the conference: everything is so tremendously specialised, that you get to feel damned clever when you do understand things. I’m not sure you ever get over that. (Dr R was saying that she’d found herself referenced in a random book she picked up, and in spite of years as a tenured university professor she still gets a bit giddy over that.) It’s both fun and inspiring to realise that there are other people out there who know what you’re talking about, and with whom you can share ideas.
Of course, it’s not all work and no play. The sales booths are a book lover’s dream come true, at least, if your thing is medieval history. I am fiscally poorer, but my shelves are academically richer, for a binge buy I did of books that I used during my MA, or ones that I wanted to find and couldn’t. You don’t even really feel guilty about it, because it’s a career investment. Surely overdue library fines add up, when you need to keep something past its deadline, and you might as well just buy the damn thing. I had planned to let myself have at least one ‘fun’ purchase, but I didn’t end up doing it. One of the books I had wanted, James bought, so it’s in the house; the other I can get at the uni library and photo-copy, and I never spend money on what I can get for free. And after the conference, buying books for work also seemed like fun, anyway.
Other activities include the annual mead-and-ale tasting, where Adrienne got a wee bit tipsy; it wasn’t as good as the meads I can get at home, although she says it was better last year. Pseudo Soc is another bit of academic amusement- people give proper academic papers on made-up, ridiculous topics. You have to get there insanely early- we were there two hours in advance, and everyone orders in pizza and beer and just sits there; it’s probably the best-attended session of the whole conference. (Apart, possibly, from the Terry Jones lecture on Richard II, which was extremely well done, and another fairly packed house.) And there is the infamous Dance on Saturday night, which is really something you go to watch. Academics are strange people, and medievalists, it seems, are not, on the whole, genius dancers.
It’s been an exhausting week, but an exhilarating one. I definitely want to make this my annual pilgrimage to the States, even if it is decidedly awkward as far as seeing my family goes. But it’s worth it for the kick in the rear, for the recharging of the mental and academic batteries, which I think one desperately needs periodically. I never thought I could be excited about medieval theatre again, after last year, and that, if nothing else, is beyond price.
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