Author: Jane Shaw Stroup

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I Learn about Historical Writing

Historical writing evolves. So there are some things that a budding historian should not say, do, or be. I’ll start with words that have gone out of fashion.

“Dark Ages” was a pejorative term historians used (until recently) to describe Europe beginning around 500. Influenced by the Enlightenment, these nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians thought that after Rome “fell” (another term going out of style), Europe had plunged into a benighted age of deteriorating trade, economic stagnation, and ignorance. Europe didn’t get fully back on track until the rediscovery of the ancient civilizations—the Renaissance. The first 500 hundred years were the worst, thus the Dark Ages.

That prejudice is gone. The Middle Ages as a whole are seen as a period of commercial and agricultural vitality. The “fall of Rome” has given way to “late antiquity,” and the “Dark Ages” are now the Early Middle Ages (followed, at least among Anglophone writers) by the High and Late Middle Ages. (By the way, notice that I said “Anglophone,” not “English-speaking.” Trying to sound like an academic.)

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A Deep Plunge into the High Middle Ages

I hadn’t planned on studying the Middle Ages, but one semester the only European course that looked good to me was History of the High Middle Ages, the period from 1000 to about 1300. (For climate aficionados that was the time of the Medieval Optimum, when it was warm enough to grow grapes in England and Greenland was temporarily settled.)

One thing I learned was that our romantic “Sir Walter Scott” fantasies about knights, castles, chivalry, and jousts are—largely true! There really was a courtly world. Lords built scores (perhaps hundreds) of castles across western Europe; the move to primogeniture (inheritance by the first-born male) meant that a lot of younger sons (“cadets”) were looking for rich heiresses; and jousts were a way of keeping young knights busy and in good shape without actually engaging in wars (of course, they had plenty of those, too). The aristocrats may have represented only 2 percent or so of the population, but they had chroniclers and poets to commemorate them.

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I’m Going Back to College

For the past few years I have been taking courses at North Carolina State University—first, a few undergraduate courses in French and history, then graduate-level classes in history alone. In April, I was accepted as a genuine, formal graduate student seeking a master’s degree. My primary concentration will be European history.

I’m retired. I’ve been retired since 2015. My husband, Rick, is an economist who says that education is an investment and, given my age, I won’t have much time to earn a return on it. So why do I want to do this? My reply is that this education is a consumption good, not an investment. Some people have “bucket lists” of things they want to do before they die—usually places they want to see. My bucket has two things in it: studying history and speaking French.

I’m writing this blog because I wish to deepen my educational experience and see if my observations resonate with others.’ I want to comment about it all—mostly history and historiography, but also other academic disciplines and maybe even pedagogy and college administration (not personalities, though, except possibly my own). I hope my questions and comments will elicit further observations, including corrections, from colleagues and friends, practiced historians, and fellow  students.

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