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 "In the year 1503, on the Feast of the Epiphany, an anonymous woman completed a Book of Sisters, an account of the lives of sixty-six nuns of the cloister of St. Agnes at Emmerich on the Rhine....Her book reached few readers and was all but forgotten for the next five hundred years....This kind of literary-historical obscurity is more the rule than the exception for works by monastic women of the late Middle Ages. It has led to the mistaken assumption that they left no substantial written records about themselves. But, in fact, they did....The female monastics who produced these works represented a significant presence in medieval society....The task now is to rewrite [the past] with...firsthand accounts from the women whose own histories and works...have long been gathering dust in the archives." --Anne Winston-Allen, Dept. of Foreign Languages and Literatures, in Convent Chronicles: Women Writing About Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2004)  "For generations people in this town have been talking and writing about the past. Genealogist, antiquarian, craftsperson, preservationist, historian, storyteller--all have been working to keep connection with the past....This book attempts to recover and attend to all these voices no matter how faintly some may be heard....The pastkeepers of Deerfield have something to teach, principally because they have been working in a small place....Deerfield is a good place to begin to understand how we seek to ground ourselves in time." (Ed.--Deerfield was the site of a famous French-and-Indian raid in 1704 that killed 45 citizens and took more than 100 others captive.) --Michael Batinski, Dept. of History, in Pastkeepers in a Small Place: Five Centuries in Deerfield, Massachusetts (Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2004)  "The political organization of the Classic period (A.D. 179-948) lowland Maya civilization of northern Guatemala, Belize, and the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico has defied explication....[But historical sources and Classic inscriptions suggest] that Maya political organization was structured by the short-term and long-term...cycles recorded in their calendars, particularly recurring intervals of approximately twenty years (the k'atun) and 256 years (the may). Maya calendrical science, in other words, was not only a system of precise and predictive astronomical calculations and record keeping but also the foundation or 'deep structure' of their political science. The key is deceptively simple: the Maya are 'the people of the cycle, the people of the may.'" --Prudence M. Rice, Dept. of Anthropology, in Maya Political Science: Time, Astronomy, and the Cosmos (Univ. of Texas Press, 2004) [home] [spring 05] [topics] [back issues] [contact us] [locate researchers] [SIUC home] Comments: Perspectives Webmaster
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