The very helpful discussion on blog alternatives a few posts back, still bubbling on, seems for now to be pointing to trying to regrow an audience here. I think that means I need to start posting more than once every few months, don’t you? And things are sufficiently exciting just now that I am starting to stub bloig posts again, for the first time in ages. But I have left it late for today, so let me just bounce some medievalist photography off you once again, if I may?
This is the view you see, or at least that we saw in August 2021, on approaching the remains of White Ladies Priory in Shifnal, Shropshire. I know very little about White Ladies, no more than English Heritage’s website will tell me: it was built as St Leonards Brewood for a group of Augustinian canonesses, the eponymous white ladies; it is first recorded in 1186 and architecturally is probably not much older; it was never wealthy; it just about survived till the Dissolution and then became private property; the owners built a mostly-wooden mansion house into the ruins of the church; the house is gone, the ruins are still here. It’s open access and well worth the look. Admittedly, it doesn’t look like much as seen above. But as the subject header suggests, somehow it is bigger inside…
This view down the south from the west end has some humans for scale… And here are some other features, which you can click on to get full-sized and uncluttered.This is the end where the previous photograph was taken, facing west nowAnd here we have the east end, looking at the north nave wall over the altar setting
But for me the best bits are the smaller flourishes. The priory doesn’t seem ever to be have been highly ornamented or anything, but I think every time one passed through these one would have been comforted by both their solidity and their excellence of craftsmanship. And they make a lovely pair to photograph together.
This is the south door into the west end, looking at the north oneAnd here’s the north door looking at the south!
It’s interesting that the north door is a bit fancier. That may be because it was actually the entrance; a 1670s drawing suggests that the south door gave onto a cloister and was presumably for the canonesses and their staff only. Someone coming to the church from outside got the lobed archway. But that’s all!
With so little left, especially of the buildings where the canonesses actually lived and worked, rather than just the one where they worshipped, it’s hard to imagine what life here was like for a small number of medieval women except by analogy with other, preserved places. The documentation English Heritage chooses to mention on its website suggests that the prioresses, at least, sometimes favoured wine and hunting dogs as part of their lifestyle, which is all very Chaucerian. Presumably the normal canonesses didn’t enjoy quite such comfortable conditions, not least because by the end of things they apparently weren’t getting their salaries! But still: the community here lasted four centuries or so, longer than most modern institutions, and in that time a lot of women must have known this as home and the communal religious life as the one they lived. I have no bigger point than that, and I wish on visiting that I’d known some of their names or seen some of the documents, just to give some sense of connection. But worth looking at all the same!
The time has come (the blogger said) to talk of big things. I have flown flags enough, over the last few posts, sporadic as they have been, to give the impression that change was afoot in my life as well as maybe in the blog, and so here at last is the announcement. These are the headlines.
For reasons which the blog more or less makes clear, if you read back over the doldrums, hiatuses, shortage of news and posts about industrial action, despite having had a secure academic appointment in a top UK university I have been looking for other work, academic and non-academic, for a few years now.
Until recently, neither of those searches had been very successful; I got no academic interviews, a couple of museum ones and two real-world professional ones but no offers, and I made a few extra grand over a couple of years buying and selling stuff over eBay and evaluating grant applications, but no life-changing options opened up.
Then, in March this year, a prospect emerged at a private liberal arts university in India (and forgive my paranoia or superstition or whatever it is, but I’ll identify them once I’m actually there). This very quickly became the exit plan; they offered both me and my partner jobs in April and we accepted immediately. I start there in January 2026.
Therefore, in May I handed in my notice at the University of Leeds—and about that I shall say only that the response was to offer to allow me to go sooner—and on 31st August this year I ceased work for them and became a gentleman of leisure.
However, in the meantime, my brilliant partner, already on unpaid leave from our employers, had obtained a fellowship – in fact she obtained two, but had to choose between them – in İstanbul for nine months, and the relevant institution were and are happy to have me there as a trailing spouse, albeit unpaid, which is really extremely good of them.
However again, because it transpires that in my current situation Turkish residence is basically not possible for me to get, as I post this I am taking a couple of weeks solo in Catalonia, which I intend pretty much entirely to spend reading, writing and visiting monuments. (I will only be passing through Barcelona, sorry folks.)
Oh yeah, also in there, on completely unrelated schedules and plans, this year has involved getting my mother into care and then out of it into independent sheltered accommodation with two new knees (and moving and housing her cat and a load of her belongings from the wrong end of the country and back as a result), and also my oft-mentioned partner becoming my legally wedded wife. That latter has made emigration a lot simpler, but we’d been engaged with a date in mind since before the job offers came in, so that’s not why we did it! More traditional motives like wanting to be together forever came in first there.
But as a result of all this, I drafted this on a train through the Austrian Alps, which I followed with a night bus to Sofia and then a night train to the Second Rome, where I have taken up residence as an independent scholar for most of three months except for the current Pyrenean interlude. Then next year I light out to India, where after a term of initial teaching I return to İstanbul for a further two months’ respite. Then follows a brief return to the UK to see family and coordinate getting our cat shipped to India; and after that we’re both there with him for the foreseeable, except for probably-yearly trips back to Europe.
(A resignedly trusting cat on his unwitting way to a long stay in a cattery. Poor little fella. But no-one we knew could take him in.)
So I’m out of it, but I hope this is actually going to mean being more into it.1 My teaching load, once I have one again, is contractually fixed at 2:2 and confined to six months of the year, variously split, including marking. The gamble is that, with that in play, so much scholarship now being online, my new employers being willing to buy most books and a literal container currently containing our shared private academic library distributed about our offices and dwelling, I’ll actually be better placed to do research and contribute to things than I have been at the supposed heart of UK medieval studies. You will hopefully all be seeing more of me before long, in person or online, than has been possible these last few years. And even if not, I hope I’ll be happier.
However, none of this is simple. Until the end of August I was still responsible in my job, mainly for marking and e-mail although there were a few days in which there was literally nothing else I could do for my wage than historical research. Unfortunately I was also taking some part of the arrangements for the move—though my wife took much more—and then I was fairly frantically packing down, using up, and digitising stuff, and relocating our own cat to the other end of the country as well, until reaching the point now where my, our, belongings, are divided between three storage locations, one of which is being held for shipping to India, and then four suitcases and two rucksacks which we brought, slow-travel-wise, to İstanbul. Reducing a pretty comfortable material life, in which I had allowed myself to collect several sorts of things, to that level was a hard slog. And I really need to catch up on many months, probably years, of short sleep, which I have only really just started on. But I’m doing things, I’m reading again, I’ve sent off some delayed work (and had no acknowledgement, I guess because the relevant editor has also left UK academia and his colleagues are too swamped with term starting to check the relevant email address), and rest is possible again. And I think, before too long, things will be better.
Nonetheless, times of change. My domestic and natal homes have both gone this year, as have my wife’s; I’m unemployed for the first time in two decades, having given up what was supposed to be the job for life; I have left the only country in which I have ever lived with no immediate plans to return there except as visitor; and there are also some bigger changes going on in the world order which you’ve probably noticed yourselves but do nothing to add fixity to my sense of things. All I can say is that in a few months’ time everything will be pretty different, and that sadly in some ways, but excitingly in others, hopefully more, it needed to be. Here goes.
1. And after all, did not the great sage Harvey Bainbridge long ago point out that, “If you wanna get into it, you gotta get out of it”? (Hawkwind, “Utopia”, on Choose Your Masques (Charisma 1982).) He didn’t mean this, I’m pretty sure, but I also doubt he would disagree even now.
I know my recall isn't perfect, and I'm always anxious to correct mistakes and happy to acknowledge them. If you think a correction is necessary or appropriate, please leave a comment or contact me by e-mail.
A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe 