howbout medieval uni's?

[ellenkushner]

Thank you for the wise rug advice. And now for something completely different - Nicholas Laccetti sent me this query on FaceBook (which is, to my mind, I'm sorry, a completely useless appendage when it comes to joint interaction and we should all just switch to LJ unless we care passionately about acquiring pixellated beers):

Lately I have been looking around for books set in or about medieval universities (fiction or nonfiction). Since you co-wrote the wonderful Fall of the Kings, I figured you might have some recommendations.

Flattery will get you everywhere - including access to my Brain Trust.

Well, friends?

Me, in non-fiction I would recommend anything about Peter Abelard - it was "his" Paris university that we had in the back of our brains when we started working on Kings. We also read Will & Ariel Durant . . . I'll have to ask deliasherman what else, when she gets up from her post-novel-nap.

Comments

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Ursula LeGuin's "April in Paris"---I can't find it readily (it is Not in Orisinian Tales, but I believe that's the lovely one about the lonely scholar who invokes a demon, gets a student from the future, they hit it off...hijinks and a happy ending in April, in Paris, ensue.

ETA: It's in The Wind's Twelve Quarters.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Besides "April in Paris" - good call! - there's the wizard's school at Roke in Earthsea, which is highly medieval in flavor. (The students come young and mostly leave early, but that was typical of medieval universities.) See A Wizard of Earthsea, Tales from Earthsea (especially "Dragonfly"), and parts of The Farthest Shore and The Other Wind.

[meijhen.livejournal.com]

I don't have anything to add (although I am watching the comments eagerly for more reading material!), but I just want to say I completely agree about Facebook.

[phoebesmum.livejournal.com]

For all the books I have read, I am completely useless at this sort of question - but I, too, agree about Facebook, although I have whiled away a few empty hours playing the never-ending movie quiz.

[squirrel-monkey.livejournal.com]

Eco's Baudolino is partially set in a medieval university.

[aulus-poliutos.livejournal.com]

I was going to suggest that as well. :)

Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

[quizzicalsphinx.livejournal.com]

::is not, repeat, not taking notes for own novel::

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Excellent! You might want to see Sharan Newman's list of resources here:
http://www.sharannewman.com/history/

[quizzicalsphinx.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

And likewise, I thought of a potential source for you: there are some scenes toward the front of Shield of Three Lions by Pamela Kaufmann that are set at the Paris University, although, um, don't fall in love with this trilogy. It will break your heart later, and not in the good way.

Likewise, I've been reading Life in the Medieval University by Robert Rait, available from Project Gutenberg.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Gosh, I remember that Kaufmann book! I must have gotten it back when I was in publishing . . . I remember liking it but that's about all; didn't know there were sequels.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Hm. I can't think of any other medieval university novels offhand, but I'm sure they must exist.

I do second the recommendation to read about Abelard. Specifically, read the actual, preserved letters of Abelard and Heloise. Nothing says, "Aren't you sorry you educated me now?" better than a woman out-arguing the teacher who taught her rhetoric, when said teacher is also the woman's angst-ridden and now castrated former lover. Abelard just can't win.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Heh!

Do people know Sharan Newman's French medieval mysteries? I haven't read many, but they sound promising - especially HERESY, in which the heroine's best pal is A&H's son Astrolabe (I'm *not* making this *up*, you know!)....
http://www.sharannewman.com/levendeur/heresy.html
http://www.sharannewman.com/levendeur/index.html

[shannachie.livejournal.com]

Thank oyu for your evaluation of facebook. Entirely correct, I should say. I haven'T found out what it is useful for yet.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

I really recommend quirkybird's wonderful Family Man (http://www.webcomicsnation.com/dmeconis/familyman/series.php). It's a web-based graphic novel.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

MUCH LOVE for Family Man!!!!!!

Not medieval, though. 18c.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Yikes! Of course it is. I wasn't paying enough attention...

[wisemack.livejournal.com]

Well, if you want a novel about Heloise and Abelard, with glimpses of Paris and the university there, there's Stealing Heaven by Marion Meade, now sadly out of print, but I've found copies in used book stores. (And a friend informed me only last week that the novel was made into a V. SEXY movie and that she owns a very ancient video of same, and I hope it holds up long enough for me to watch it.)

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Much love for your icon!

Have you read Sharan Newman?

[wisemack.livejournal.com]

*chuckle* Thanks, I love that picture. It's from the bridge under which Duncan McLeod and Methos first fought. And if you've ever seen Highlander, that's where Duncan's barge was always parked.

And I haven't read Newman, but based on the comments on this post, I shall look for her books!

[aamcnamara.livejournal.com]

I keep meaning to quit facebook, and compromise by not spending much time there.

I can sympathize with the post-novel nap--got home (by circuitous, college-filled route) last night, and crashed this afternoon for an hour and a half. Now I get to go through the backlog of LJ, email...

Can't think of any medieval universities right now, though. The closest I can think of is A College of Magics, but that has trains.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Lordy! You've been On the Road almost as long as Jack Kerouac!

[abrakadabrah.livejournal.com]

Hunchback of Notre Dame has scenes around the Sorbonne.

[unovis-lj.livejournal.com]

You probably already have these, but if not -- Life in the Medieval University (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/20958), by Robert Rait (1910s) (Project Gutenberg link) & English University Life in the Middle Ages, by Cobban, 1999.

ETA: Also things here, from the Fordham Internet Medieval Sourcebook:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook1r.html
(scroll down to 13th-14th Century Scholasticism * Educational Institutions)

[yaoi-in-exile.livejournal.com]

I'm no expert at all, but if one can get their hands on a copy of Bulfinch's Age of Chivalry of King Arthur and His Knights--it's excellent nonfiction, and SUCH a good read.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

No useful comments. I just wanted to note that since uni's are what rowers wear to compete (it's short for unisuit and comprises one piece that's shaped like a tank top over spandex shorts, not as funny-looking as what wrestlers wear) the title of this post had me really imagining some odd images for a moment.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

...And aren't you glad I did that thing for you?

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I don't know. Now I'm trying to figure out how to do it!

The nice thing about unis is you get them custom-made, for not huge amounts of money. Wish I could do that with my day clothes.

[medievalist.livejournal.com]

For non-fiction, the person who sorta owns the field is Charles Homer Haskins; he wrote a nifty slim and very readable book called The Rise of Universities. It really is the standard in the field. Haskins is looking at the birth of the universities in the twelfth century; he is perhaps best known for his book about intellectual life in the twelfth century--The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century.

For a slightly more recent (1969) study, see Astrik L. Gabriel Garlandia: Studies in the History of Mediaeval Universities. She's mostly looking at the institution and cultures of universities in the later middle ages.

For the current take, see Life in the Medieval University
Robert S. Rait. It's very much written for the non-specialist.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Dag - where were you when we were starting Kings....?; Well, we muddled on through with the Durants - and it's not like we needed to be historically *accurate* (or, as Delia likes to say, she loved doing the research on this one because the world's greatest authority on the Riverside city was right down the hall).

[medievalist.livejournal.com]

I was awfully tempted to suggest Sayer's Gaudy Night; it captures the feel of life in a college in ways that I think would have been just as true (and you do it in Kings, too), in the middle ages since students were dining in the same refectories, living in the same rooms, and sleeping through lectures in the halls and reading in the same libraries in Sayers time.

[medievalist.livejournal.com]

By the way . . .

For folk interested in the middle ages, as specialists or not, there's a Ning community a bunch of us medievalists have set up for out reach and recruit . . . umm community creation, here (http://medievalists.ning.com/).

We welcome new members of all sorts.

[aulus-poliutos.livejournal.com]

I should not click that. I don't need another procrastination tool. The TOR site and all the other places I'm hanging out are bad enough already. ;)

Medival Universities

[shelly-rae.livejournal.com]

Don't forget that Christine de Pizan was once a lecturer at a medieval university. Evidently she taught from behind a curtain so that her students would not be distracted from her feminine whiles. Or something to that effect. She also wrote an early book are Arms and Chivalry. I can say more but it's time for bed for me.
Anon

[grondfic.livejournal.com]

Liz Greene's The Dreamer of the Vine (a heavily Holy-Blood-Holy-Grail influenced novel of Nostradamus) contains scenes at both Avignon and Montpelier Universities.

For the straight medieval stuff...

[howl-at-the-sun.livejournal.com]

Hugh of St. Victor and Peter Abelard had wonderful academic squabbles. When looking at Abelard, seeing Hugh's side is fun too.

Thomas Aquinas wrote on just about everything.

Roger Bacon was one of the first 'experimental scientists'. He snuck around the medieval reliance on authority as proof by not mentioning authorities, when possible.
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/bacon1.html http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/bacon2.html

Guy de Chaliac was a doctor who wished to perform dissections, if you can find anything by him.

Re: For the straight medieval stuff...

[howl-at-the-sun.livejournal.com]

And right, this: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook1r.html#13th-14th%20Century%20Scholasticism

That's a goodly list of internet scholastic sources, some of which are available.

[mantichore.livejournal.com]

I have dim and confusing memories about Orlando de Rudder's La Nuit des Barbares having bits in it about the Sorbonne in medieval times, but the book is out of print in France and I'm not sure any of his books were ever blessed with an English translation. So, yes, I know: a fat lot of good that's doing to you... He wrote the libretto for an opera about François Villon... Yeah, yeah, same thing.

Well, I tried.

[deliasherman.livejournal.com]

I wish I'd had this wonderful list when I was doing Kings. I made do with the relevant chapters of Durant's The Age of Faith and Abelard's The History of my Calamities and his letters to Heloise. Oh, and smoke and mirrors, which was appropriate, since (ahem) the City in which it finds itself never actually existed--not on any map I've ever seen, anyway. Ours is a European university, btw, not a British one--more Amsterdam than Paris, with a certain amount of Wittenberg around the organization.

[(Anonymous)]

Try Sharan Newman's Catherine LeVendeur mysteries which are thoroughly linked to Paris University and for that matter both Peter Abelard and his love, Heloise.

The "hero of the Margaret of Ashbury Trilogy by Judith Merkle Riley is a defrocked Paris Unibersity student.

Even more focused on Paris University is The Lords of Vaumartin by celia Holland . The protagonist is a student and then a professor.

You can find all of these and more at www.medieval-novels.com .

Nan Hawthorne hathorn@drizzle.com
medeival-novels.com

Author of "An Involuntary King: A Tale of Anglo Saxon England" www.shield-wall.com

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Great suggestions! Thank you, Nan.