After having spent four full days with my favorite medievalists, I am once again reminded that this is a wonderful group of human beings. The International Medieval Congress at Western Michigan University has just ended, and I am getting ready to go back home. We were just around three thousand strong this past conference, and I think they, (we) are rather misunderstood because lay people think we put on armor and chain mail and spend out time jousting in the practice baseball field at Western Michigan University. They would be wrong because we are not larpers, but I have found that making explanations and/or justifications is both useless and lame. What we do is study the past. We study a period bounded by late antiquity–perhaps the end of the Roman Empire–and the early modern period which may or may not include such figures as Cervantes, Shakespeare and Galileo, depending on who is writing the paper or planning the particular session. We are not much interested in anything that happens after about 1600, but that’s not really true either because both Hobbits and Hogwarts are often the focus of our discussions. We are passionate about our studies, whatever they are. I spend the majority of my time with the other Spanish medievalists, so we spend a lot of our time speaking Spanish, which is to be expected, I think. I am often shocked at how well-read my cohort is, easily conversing about Latin or Spanish texts on a myriad of subjects too numerous to begin listing here. The sessions, however, are only half the fun because people watching and actually meeting the people you watch is the other half of the fun. There are innumerable receptions and business meetings where one meets still more wonderful and unusual people from all over the world. Medievalists are, if anything, individuals who think conforming is for the birds. Perhaps that is precisely why they are medievalists, a profession which is totally lacking in any sort of practicality whatsoever. I don’t think we are burden to society, but we have refined the term “geek” and embrace it. This not an apology for being a medievalist. One has one’s calling and vocation, and it is useless to flee from that which you love. So I study texts that were written eight hundred years ago, I write papers that three other people in the world might read, and I have no illusions about my relevance in contemporary society. I study language, literature, history, theory, and artifacts, and then I write about it all. My conclusion? That human beings are human beings, and that they have always been driven by the same concerns: food, shelter, sex, power, love, greed, pride, envy, generousity, kindness and hate. In fact, the more people change, the more they stay the same. The next event at Kalamazoo will start in 360 days.
