And back again…

Finally crawled through my front door at 4am Monday morning after a long and draining day of travel. Wonderful holiday, though. Crammed a lot in and, although I’d have liked to have taken in a bit more medieval stuff, it was all good crack. Will post some selected highlights at a later date. Below is a nice panorama of the rather spectacular view from my Sorerentine window (Vesuvius to the left on the horizon):

The View

Ciào!

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N/B I recently discovered that the above salutation is in fact derived from  a Venetian expression ’s-ciào vostro’ which translates literally as ‘I am your slave’ (s-ciào from schiavo which is, in turn, derived from the latin sclavus). Total submission always makes for such a charming goodbye…

A Lucky Coincidence…

Second post! Aren’t we doing well!

Tomorrow I fly to Naples to be met (hopefully) by an Italian man holding up a sign bearing my surname. Wonderful. It’s that time again, you see; the yearly pilgrimage to some gorgeous corner of the earth otherwise known as the ‘family holiday’. A glorious week in the sun where all the manacles of independence, adulthood and peaceful co-existence (i.e. university life) are shrugged off in favour of sibling rivalry, family squabbles and a grating refusal to ever, ever stop for a rest if there is anywhere listed in the Times travel supplement within five miles walk. This year the family unit is alighting upon Sorrento.

Charming!

Lucky, really, because my two semester special subject in the coming year (and most likely my dissertation) is Medieval (i.e. Norman) Southern Italy and Sicily, primarily through the extensive primary sources available at the Leeds Medieval History Texts in Translation website. Upon congratulating my parents on picking a rather useful destination I was helpfully informed that there was ‘a lot of history’. That meaning the Roman stuff helpfully buried by all that magma. I’ve managed to wrangle a day in Amalfi (where I will make sure to pay my respects to St Andrew – we might be there on one of the feast days all being well) and we’ll see what other medieval delights arise when we’re over there.

I’ve forged through G A Loud’s ‘The Age of Robert Guiscard‘ (the hero of which has provided me with an alias for the last few years) and made a start on the two main chronicles (William of Apulia and Geoffrey of Malaterra). Incidentally, I was struck by a wonderful little gobbet in Malaterra which I feel sorely tempted to include in the introduction to my dissertation (directed towards the marker):

“But I commence my task timidly, for my style lacks learning and my powers of expression are poor. It is as though I was in the middle of a very deep lake and knew not how to swim. I am also exceedingly afraid of you and your anger towards me, all the more so since it is you, who are steeped in the clearest fountain of the literary art, and not me – starved of the bread of such knowledge, who should be preparing for such a task.”

Suitably grovelling…

A Brief Introduction…

We’re often told by tutors not to worry about introductions until we’ve got our teeth into the body of the essay, but I’m not sure how regularly I will be updating this blog for the time-being so a brief contextual bookend might be the best you can hope for…

Perhaps the best place to start would be with my identity: I am a third year undergraduate at the University of Leeds studying for a degree in Modern History, my interests lying for the most part with all things Medieval. I have found over the last two years that this history thing is really quite intriguing, and that my plans for that horrible watershed of ‘after you graduate’ seem to be coalescing around a strong desire to step back inside that nice dusty academic bubble and continue my studies. The point of this blog, then, is to document my passage through academia.