S. Worthen | Weblog

Alas! The pepper plant which was,
but now it is no more.
A faded stalk of floppy leaves
lies littered on the floor.

( Read more of the details of how the poor thing died... )

I've been irregularly following the growth of the weblog-based Medievalist not-really-a-community yet. The medievalists I've found have not, in turn, found very many themselves. One aspect of trying to figure out how to find them is that not all people who are working professionally on medieval subjects spend any time commenting on medieval content in their weblogs. There's a great deal else in the world to talk about, after all.

Many people began their weblogs with an entirely different agenda in mind (aliciam and sioneva, for example). Others like littleowl have a great deal else on their plate these days, even if at one point it was a major focus of their work. Still others, like myself and cliosfolly make relatively frequent reference to medieval content and sometimes even devote entire posts to the subject. The Cranky Professor tends to only post on subjects of personal experience from which can be extrapolated larger, more generally-applicable thoughts on academia. H.D. Miller focuses on all sorts of things, from politics to sports to academic commentary, but includes medievalist-oriented commentary and the sporadic personal-experience comment. Mind Numbing's weblog also has an broad scope. Further along the spectrum is Ideofact, who tends towards intensive, focused commentary on academic topics. The Digital Medievalist is purely an annotated list of medieval-related links and notes.

There are others I haven't read enough to really slot into my scale of greys, but I'll list them since they too are blogging medievalists, as least from what I hear: Cacciaguida, Caveat Lector, Glosses, Kross & Sweord, Old Oligarch, The Reader, and Wormtalk.

Part of what interests me in this subject is the various commentary I've irregularly encountered online evidencing a clear sense of superiority by some bloggers over diarists. More non-diarists use the