A Day In the Life of a Carpenter Fellow at HMML

The Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) is a treasure-trove of medieval materials – much of which is on microfilm, part of their long-term mission to preserve our written past. It is, for nerds like me, a fabulous place to do research. In a single day I can compare things from Italy, France, Germany, and Austria without getting on an airplane or having to worry about figuring out how to manage dinner after a full day’s work. I’m lucky to be here in Collegeville, Minnesota as a Carpenter Fellow, with housing, meals, and research support that let me concentrate on a project that draws on HMML’s collections.

HMML is not just European, of course – a couple of days ago I got a whiff of the “Smelly Book,” an Ethiopian Psalter from the 17th century which has had some haaaaard history, blackened as it is by fire– and HMML is consciously working in various places where the written record is under threat. Syriac, Armenian, Lao: there is an abundance – literally hundreds of thousands – of things in languages I don’t speak or read.

But, as I indicated, I’m here because HMML lets me put manuscripts from different places into conversation as I work on my book about Franciscan sisters. I’m currently looking at the rules that shaped their daily lives – and getting happily sidetracked by the words women spoke when they made their vows, their “profession formulae.” After all, these women were Franciscan Tertiaries, whose religious life could take several forms. There’s a tension between “we’re not nuns” reality of their Tertiary status and “we live in community following rules” that’s an interesting space for my book project to live.

For example, here’s one difference that caught my attention (and ate my mid-week): a profession formula from Solothurn, published by Brigitte Degler, explicitly makes room for a woman who might later feel called to a more rigorous monastic life. The Freiburg versions I’m working on instead have her promise “for all the days of my life.” That sounds like a minor difference, but it opens up a big question: how did these women understand the commitment they were making, and what possibilities did they imagine beyond it?

This is the kind of question that gets me to my (standing) desk in the morning. And HMML makes a Latin Editing Before Lunch kind of lifestyle possible, letting a scholar dive deep into a project while leaving the dishes and laundry back home.

So here’s a bit of what a day here at HMML looks like for a scholar in residence, the pictorial version:

walking with a book in the Emmaus residence basement, with coffee and tea, and more coffee

 

small but comfortable housing; 3 meals a day in the refectory

beautiful campus – with a glimpse of the lake on the way to work

The most visually arresting campus image: the abbey church

“My cell”: microfilm reader, computer, notebook, coffee -- all the fun stuff!

Working on bibliography in the Alcuin library

 

walking campus trails: lake-side, arboretum; last week’s step-count was 106,529 steps, or 50.4 miles!

(Okay, okay, regarding step-count: I did go backpacking over the weekend – here’s a couple of pictures of bears, all three, including mama bear playing peekaboo. Those were from off campus, though – up at the Paul Bunyan State Forest on the North Country trail...)

For the adventurous: Walking to St Joe’s via the Lake Wobegon trail. (One could bike, if one biked. It’s 6 miles, each way, so plan enough time. Weekends can be well-spent!) I recommend Flour & Flower for the baked goods.

Progress!

So, what does progress mean to me? Well, at this point, it's:

• 23 tabs open across three browsers. 
• 19 footnotes on a working edition that will be the basis for discussion of “lived life” in Chapter Zero, the book’s introduction.
• 88 files of notes, bibliography, and outlines for the middle section of Chapter One.
• 28 pages of handwritten notes.
• An outline of the book’s opening gesture – often the hardest part to figure out. Yay, I have a hook! (It’s still a secret, but I’m having such fun with it! And I figured it out while walking at lunchtime looking at the leaves change color.) 

The way I treat HMML is as an almost frenetic immersion in my material. The goal here isn’t to produce prose, it’s to produce the knowledge that will inform my prose when it comes time to write. There’s a great deal to be said for having the time to follow a question past the “here’s a footnote” stage until it actually becomes interesting – and then keep following it. Here, I can do that, take a walk by the lake, and arrive at dinner without having had to plan it. For this Carpenter Fellow, that’s a very good day.

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Seeds, Sculptures, and the Art of Paying Attention

Attention is something people teach one another.

I’ve been thinking about that as I’ve hung about in Northern climes; I may be hard at it in my library research (as a HMML Carpenter Fellow; more on that in other posts), but my weekends are filled with new-to-me experiences.

To take an example (or two): I worked a prairie refurbishment day up by Poplar Grove IL at Kinnikinnick Creek Forest Preserve and Conservation area, Caledonia IL last weekend, and, oh, was it lovely! 

Often the tasks there are to cut back invasives, but here at the end of the season it was time to collect seed for next year’s new patches of rewilding lands. So a group of half-a-dozen volunteers went out on a Saturday for a supervised “pick” on the soon-to-be-closed-for-winter patch of prairie at the conservation area. When I say supervised, I speak as the novice; everyone else had definitely been out there before, and most of them were professional or quasi-professional preservationists of one type or another.

For our morning’s labor, we were collecting two major types of seeds -- pagoda plant (in three species: downy wood mint, hairy wood mint, and horse-mint bee-balm) and silky wild rye. Pagoda plant really does look a set of piled pagodas on a stalk. We started off just wandering the field up on the hillside, but once someone had actually found a plant, we grouped up for a mini-lesson in plant identification, and then each person took off on their own wander to play “I spy.”

Once we started finding the plants, an abundance mentality set in. They grow in patches, so if you find one set of seeds, you usually find between 20 and 50 sets of seeds. Of course, as good conservationists we took the top half so the rest could re-seed for next year. Caring for the local prairie patch is priority number one, leaving enough seed for new plants, but also for the animals that need to overwinter.

I actually did not-half-bad on the hunt-and-find for pagoda plant; I was mostly responsible for downy wood mint, but turned up a great deal of horse-mint bee-balm as a result. (Those seeds went in the other bucket so I didn’t get to count them as MY totals!) Still, every once in a while I would find a patch of the downy wood mint, enough so that I noticed that I had used my bending over muscles a good bit while out on the hillside!

The silky wild rye grew in a giant and quite obvious patch, as you may have noticed in the picture above. So harvesting there was a matter of pick a large handful, drop it in a bucket, pick another large handful, drop it in a bucket. Rinse and repeat. We had such abundance that we wound up having to combine buckets to make way for the seed bag, designed to hold about 40 lbs of animal feed. We got that bag more than half-way full, so it definitely felt like success!

By the end of that second picking, I understood the idea that one could put in an order for “75 lbs of such-and-so seed” and the main office wouldn’t actually blanch at the request. I also learned that every year, they obtain a selection of seeds, and those go into targeted refurbishments elsewhere. Every little bit helps.

Listening, I though I'd notice wind and birdsong, and it was certainly there, but I found myself instead drawn to the people telling stories -- the community they'd built, their friendships, their stories of leadership and not wanting leadership on firelines, and restorative burns and the ways in which the newbies (me?!!!) interact, particularly in "those" moments, and motivations and the ways that people respond to nature. About the building where during winter months our seeds would be cleaned and further sorted and prepared for next use.

I wasn't listening to nature, I was listening to nature being managed. And that, for me, was pretty cool. The prairie’s abundance had people behind it, people with knowledge and friendships and stories worth hearing.

Of course, I mainly took pictures of flowers instead of the dead stalks of mint plants, so my flower pictures from that trip are better. Oh well.

Common Blue Wood Aster, Aromatic Aster, and Coreopsis

What the flower pictures indicate – what our labors show – what a morning of close inspection taught me – is that the nature of the prairie is in its abundance. That abundance is not to be measured just plants-per-foot, but in kinds of plants-per-foot. Of course there were grasses, and sedges, and little vines which seemed to want to trip you. But as Jessie, our leader, gave us our instructions, she taught us to use the shapes of things – to look for a pile of pagodas, or for the waving stalks of rye – to see one shape among many, so that its shape could go on to re-seed new plots of land with similar diversity when the time comes.

Isn’t that a sweet meta-lesson on how the earth should be?

And speaking of earth, the other thing we did was to attend E(ART)H, a “Land Art” show at Nature at the Confluence, South Beloit, IL. Nature at the Confluence used to be a dump, for decades, with just piles and piles of debris on top of once had been an important tribal meeting ground. (Says something about respect and its lack, eh?) The land has been reclaimed, and a community park made through extensive efforts. There are winding trails and an interpretive center with picnic areas.

The idea behind the show was for the artists to use found materials placed within the context of this reclaimed land to make statements about the connection we all have to the earth around us. It was really well attended; in the three hours we were there I counted more than 130 people, and it had been running all day (including while we were out doing our prairie refurbishment). The opening included live music and performance – including a movement choir – as well as remarks by the artists.

Each of the artists had chosen a different array of materials and a different array of techniques. They were linked by eco-awareness; positioning their work in the landscape was a choice, and the guided tour took us variously along stream-bank, into the shaded woods, and around the circle of mown land as it edged up against prairie grasses. Place is part of art’s perception, and each artist spoke to why this spot – the fallen log which landed in the crook of the tree; a favored spot where the murmur of water joined up with the mosaic flower image to create a fibonacian meditation; the shaded nook where creation seems to both spring up from the earth and come down from the trees above.

The other reality is that art can become a way of asking us to think about place in new ways. “Mother Bison” by Jenny Mathews, for instance, creates the image of a bison but is made out of things like willow branches and grapevine, with prairie grasses and gourds for eyes. It is held together by string. Jenny placed it so that it is emerging from the taller grasses, which seemed particularly symbolic given both the history of the landscape around it and the history of the bison and its reintroduction.

Fun aside: the bison is in part a meat animal, and bison ranching for food is integrally tied up with its successful management, yet ranchers and indigenous peoples have very different views of how the animal should be treated. “Bison”-branded meat in the store is good for the animal because ranching has maintained biodiversity among the herds; we are still at the point where more animals is better for the species.

And yet, “bison” then becomes a ladened term, associated more with what can be read as exploitative culture. “Buffalo,” though colloquially familiar to us in the USA, is technically not the right word for these animals, because, as wikipedia taught me, bison are yak relatives, genus Bos, and buffalo are in two genera, the African Syncerusand the Asiatic Bubalus. All kinds of species in this world, eh?

Anyhoo, we have tended to use the misnomer “buffalo” for these majestic animals (“Where the buffalo roam, and the deer and the antelope play…”), and so the label “bison” is doing some heavy lifting in the world these days. Enough so that when Jenny approached members of a local tribe, they at first shrugged her off, because she was using the technically correct term “bison” and they thought that stood in for a way of thinking about the animal. She now leads with the term “buffalo,” and has been much more successful at connecting with them out of shared philosophy of what these majestic creatures mean for us and our mutual – if not always amicable – history.

Jessie Crow Mermel, “Ecology of a Breath” uses the echo of dendritic patterns with their branching structures – in the hand, in the lungs, in the nerves, and in the river systems. She used images on cloth, but also incorporated moss lungs, since moss actually put out more O₂ than trees do! “Patterns,” she says “can serve as a mirror and remind us how deeply we are interwoven with the rest of the Earth.” Plus, I have a particular affection for Jessie’s work since she’d been the Person In Charge of the morning’s Prairie work. It brought a real sense of the nature (pun intended) of community.

The artistic statement used to advertise the exhibit seemed in keeping with the spirit of the weekend: “Our collective goal is to spark wonder, acknowledge eco-anxiety, and inspire new connections.” “Spark wonder” is a phrase I might ordinarily pass over in an exhibit announcement. This time, though, I’d spent the morning discovering how much there really was to find in a patch of prairie, and the afternoon discovering how many ways artists could ask us to look at reclaimed ground. Wonder had acquired both very particular and very memorable shapes.

It had also come with something to do. Learn a plant, gather seed, leave enough behind for an envisioned future. Listen to an artist explain why a piece belongs beside this stream or among these grasses. I can’t claim that a Saturday settled my eco-anxiety, but it did give me a few useful places to put my attention—and, for part of the day, my hands. My bending-over muscles have registered their opinion too.

NOTES

The E(ART)H Land Art exhibit is installed through 17 Oct. 2026 in South Beloit, Illinois; more details are available at https://natureattheconfluence.com/event/earth-a-land-art-exhibit/

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Silences That Hurt: The Nashville Symphony’s 2026–27 Season (un-)Suspension: UPDATED

 

[update of 10/5/26: the Nashville Symphony's Season is "back on" with a significant gift -- $10M -- from Oracle. The good news post by new Nashville Symphony CEO Mark Tillinger is here: https://www.nashvillesymphony.org/22883. And yes, we're playing rotating CEO; Mark Cantrell stepped down the day after announcing the planned furlough and was replaced by Tillinger; details here. Topsy-turvy time in Symphony-land!]

Some days are painful. The Nashville Symphony has announced that it will suspend the remainder of its 2026–27 season after October 18. Its board describes the decision as the first step in a financial restructuring, so that’s something. And there’s a transition plan: Music Director Leonard Slatkin will still conduct the October 16–17 concerts. But after that, the orchestra’s musicians and many of the staff will be furloughed.

Mr. Micawber from Dickens’ David Copperfield says in the book, “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” His observation fits here: in 2025, the Nashville Symphony brought in $28.1 million; it spent $30.4 million. The difference was $2.3 million—that’s rather more than sixpence. And the overall deficit is a good bit larger: the stated operating gap is $10 million. These are stark figures. But the first loss I and many of my peers imagine is a good bit simpler: it’s that evening when an audience would have gathered, the musicians would have taken their places, and instead the hall stays quiet. That’s a silence that hurts.

Of course, there are some things that do continue. Fundraising concerts; a couple of big events; and hall rentals. But the symphony players are back to the experience of the pandemic: no set schedule, no financial promises. It’s a scary time.

I should acknowledge my own place in this story. I was not a season subscriber this year. (I am on sabbatical, and it is hard to attend concerts in Nashville from Minnesota or Italy.) Still, an orchestra is part of the life of a city even when any one of us is away, or misses a season. Among the comments I’ve saved, one person compared the orchestra to a library: you may not go every week, but you want it to be there. That’s exactly right: a great city deserves a great orchestra. It matters.

I’ve done some work on the symphony as an institution, of course. There are precedents that offer hope, though none of them promises an easy return. The Denver Symphony went bankrupt, and the Colorado Symphony emerged in its place; after another period of severe financial trouble and canceled concerts, the newer orchestra reported a budget surplus in 2016. Likewise, Syracuse’s former symphony closed, but musicians helped form the cooperative now called the Syracuse Orchestra. These are stories of people rebuilding musical institutions through changed structures and sustained work. But, of course, there are also reminders that the original organization does not always survive: the Honolulu Symphony was liquidated, although musicians and supporters subsequently brought orchestral music back through the Hawai'i Symphony Orchestra.

That distinction matters in Nashville. A hall can still host events while an orchestra is silent, as ours is doing. The musicians, however? They need work. Plus, an ensemble’s shared sound takes years to make. Slatkin, newly appointed to a three-year term -- and already connected to the orchestra through the opening years of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center -- has said he intends to remain its music director and work toward its return. I do hope Nashville gives him and my many musician-friends something solid to return to.

I named this blog Silences and Sounds to honor the observation that silences can be meaningful. But this silence hurts. I would rather hear the orchestra.

Sources and further reading

• Nashville Symphony, “An Update from Nashville Symphony CEO Mark Cantrell,” September 28, 2026, https://www.nashvillesymphony.org/22879.
• Nashville Symphony, “Leonard Slatkin Announced as the Nashville Symphony’s Music Director,” February 11, 2026. https://www.nashvillesymphony.org/media/press-room/press-releases/news-releases/2026-press-releases/leonard-slatkin-announced-as-the-nashville-symphony-s-music-director/
• Nashville Symphony, “Nashville Symphony Appoints J. Mark Cantrell as President & Chief Executive Officer,” July 16, 2026.
• Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, chapter 12.
• Stephen Trageser, “Nashville Symphony to Suspend Season Amid ‘Financial Crisis’”, Nashville Scene, Sept 29. 2026, https://www.nashvillescene.com/music/nashvillecream/nashville-symphonysuspend-2026-2027-season-financial-crisis/article_5f35ae09-bbad-4686-a940-601fc5c4f46f.html
• ProPublica, “Nashville Symphony Association,” Nonprofit Explorer (financial filings). https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/620550979
• Colorado Symphony, Nick Dobreff, “A Centennial Celebration” (September 5, 2023), https://coloradosymphony.org/a-centennial-celebration/ and “Colorado Symphony Announces Budget Surplus for the First Time in 26 Years” (September 12, 2016), https://coloradosymphony.org/colorado-symphony-announces-budget-surplus-for-the-first-time-in-26-years-appoints-brett-mitchell-as-new-music-director-in-2017-18/
• The Syracuse Orchestra, “Meet The Syracuse Orchestra,” https://experiencesymphoria.org/meet-the-syracuse-orchestra/
• Steve Flanter, “The Music Returns to Honolulu,” International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians, https://www.icsom.org/senzasordino/2012/02/music-returns-honolulu/
• New Mexico Philharmonic, “About Us” (another example of musicians and supporters establishing a successor after an orchestra’s closure), https://nmphil.org/about-us/.
• Image: Schermerhorn Symphony Center, photo by Ryan Kaldari, Wikimedia Commons

“I Sang with the Others”: Voice, Healing, and Margaret of Hungary

This is the first of several posts inspired by my summertime visit to Budapest’s Margaret Island, where the ruins of the medieval Dominican convent still preserve traces of the community in which Margaret of Hungary lived, prayed, and eventually became the focus of a thriving cult. I’m grateful to the Fyfe Faculty Excellence Fund, which supported the travel and research behind this work.

For a Dominican Sister, losing your voice meant losing more than speech. It meant losing your place in the sung services – a central part of the rhythms of religious life. In the thirteenth-century miracle accounts gathered to support Margaret of Hungary’s reputation for holiness, two stories (across three witnesses) tell of her restoring the ability to sing. Each begins with a multi-day sore and painful throat.

Margaret of Hungary (1242–1270), daughter of King Béla IV, lived as a Dominican nun in the convent on the island that now bears her name. The miracle stories recorded after her death offer rare glimpses not only of her cult, but also of the devotional and liturgical life of the women around her.

Dwell with that for a moment; consider strep throat, or tonsillitis, or the raging rawness of the Cold That Would Not Go Away. Pain, inability to eat, the lift of the shoulders as one tries to swallow. This is a human lived reality, in which the small irritation can be magnified, as the only, ONLY thing on your mind. No distractions, just the “ugh” of illness, mixed with the frustrations of being unable to do the work expected of you.

So there you are, a Dominican sister, unable to sing. You’re miserable. You’re mute. You’re unable to audibly join in, while all your Sisters are diligently doing their duty, singing the Liturgical Hours.

And in both these stories, the turning point comes right at the end of the liturgical day, when dusk descends and the sisters join together for Compline. The sick sister can be present, can hear, can pray – but she cannot add her voice to the sounds around her.

That’s where miracles happen.

The two women approach Margaret rather differently. Elizabeth, daughter of King Stephen V, makes her petition physically. Catherine, the convent’s cantrix, on the other hand, calls upon Margaret verbally, invoking Christ’s Passion and Margaret’s own tearful response to it.

Elizabeth actually goes to Margaret’s tomb. She puts her throat against it. As she does so, she petitions Margaret. The liturgical details matter: this is Compline on the Assumption while the Salve Regina is sung. And then, by Matins, her cure can be tested: “I was cured,” she reports, “and I sang with the others.”

The same pattern shapes Catherine’s account. After Compline she asks Margaret to heal her “so that I could sing and perform my office.” When she rises for Matins, she discovers that she’s cured. The pain is gone, her voice has returned, and she performs her office successfully. Both women also insist that their vocal affliction never returned.

Why Compline? We cannot know whether the end-of-day exhaustion mattered to either woman, but the timing is striking. In both stories the petition comes as one cycle of communal prayer closes, and the cure becomes apparent when the next begins.

These are also Sisters who think in terms of sacred networks. For Lady Elizabeth, the Marian connection is explicit, for she specifically mentions the Salve Regina as context for her petition. In fact, her moment of intercession is doubly Marian: it is the feast of the Assumption, and the sisters are singing the Salve Regina. Catherine, on the other hand, makes a different connection. She asks Margaret for help through the Passion of Christ, remembering how Margaret herself had listened to accounts of the Passion with tears. The two petitions thus call upon different memories of Margaret’s devotional life.

And then there’s the who. Both stories are about choir nuns, rather than lay sisters. Both are expected to contribute audibly to services, so the gap left by a missing voice mattered. Healing, in these accounts, means not simply feeling better but returning audibly to the community.

But one of the two stories – the one with two witnesses – is even more significant. For the sister who lost her power of audible prayer is none other than the cantrix Catherine, and the week is Holy Week, a time when sung services are central to the whole of the convent’s experiences. Her recovery, attested by herself and by her fellow nun, a Lady Candida in whom she confided, occurred between Compline of Maundy Thursday and Matins of Good Friday. The Cantrix, in other words, miraculously recovers her voice just in time to perform her Office in the middle of the Triduum, when the community’s liturgical demands are unusually intense.

Candida supplies something Catherine cannot: another pair of ears. She remembers Catherine unable to speak or sing, and then suddenly being able to do so. When Candida asks what happened, Catherine tells her—quietly, in the choir—that she had been healed after invoking Margaret. The cure has become audible.

To my eye (and ear!), Catherine’s story makes the stakes especially clear. She was not simply a nun who liked to sing; she was the convent’s cantrix, charged with leading others. A damaged throat therefore interrupted both her body and her office. And this is why her testimony and that of her witness matter: her cure was proven in the most practical and audible way possible: Catherine got up for Matins and was able to do her job.

In a community built around voices raised together, perhaps that is exactly what a miracle of healing should sound like.

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TESTIMONY

The three depositions behind this post are reproduced below, using the translation from Legenda vetus, Acta processus canonizationis, cited below.

Lady Elizabeth, daughter of King Stephen of Hungary of illustrious memory, a sister and nun of the said monastery on the Island in the Danube, (193ff, here p. 195-197)

“A year ago I had a terrible pain in my throat, so that I could hardly eat, and I couldn’t sing, and then I went to the tomb of the said Margaret and placed my throat upon her tomb, and I asked the blessed Margaret to cure and deliver me, and I was made healthy through the merits of saint Margaret herself.” When asked the month, she replied, “I don’t remember.” When asked the day, she replied, “The day of the Assumption of the Blessed Mary.” When asked the hour, she replied, “The hour of compline, while the Salve Regina was being sung.” When asked how many days she had that sore throat, she replied, “For two or three days.” When asked how long her soreness lasted after she placed her throat on the aforesaid sepulcher, as she said, she replied, “When I got up for matins, I was cured, and I sang with the others.” She also said that she [Margaret] used to visit the sisters and nuns when they were sick, and she was very attentive about doing for them whatever she could.”

Lady Catherine the cantrix, daughter of Lord Andrew of Várad, sister and nun of the same monastery, (379ff, here p. 387)

“One day at the Lord’s Supper, I was supposed to lead the choir, because I was the chief singer, and I had such a sore throat that it hurt terribly and I couldn’t sing, and then I asked this saint Margaret to heal me through her merits and the passion of Christ, which she tearfully used to hear expounded, so that I could sing and perform my office, and I said this after compline, and when I got up for matins, I was so healed and delivered, that I performed my office well.” When asked if there were others present at the time when she asked this of the blessed Margaret, as she said, she answered, “No.” When asked how many days she had that pain in her throat, as she said, she replied, “For four days.” When asked how many days she went without having that throat pain or something similar after she was delivered in this way, she replied, “I did not have that pain afterwards, nor have I had anything like it to this very day.” When asked if other sisters at the time knew she had the said pain, she replied, “Yes, Sister Candida.” When asked how many years it had been since she was cured, as she said, she replied, “Three.” When asked the month, she replied, “The month of Easter.”

Lady Candida, daughter of the late Lord Taurus of Gaura, a sister and nun of the same monastery, took the oath, (393ff) [Here, p. 401-3]

When asked about miracles, she said, “One of the sisters had such a sore throat that she couldn’t speak well or sing, and this condition lasted from Palm Sunday until the very early Friday morning, and then she began to sing, and when I asked her, ‘How can you sing? Are you cured?’ she replied, ‘I can sing well and I’ve been well and truly cured by calling on the name of the blessed Margaret.’” When asked the name of that sister who was ill in this way, she replied, “The cantrix Catherine, daughter of Andrew.” When asked if any other sisters knew about the said illness, she replied, “I don’t know.” When asked if any other sisters heard, when she asked how she had been cured, and what the said Catherine said to her, she replied, “No, because she was speaking softly into my ear.” When asked where they were at the time, she replied, “In the choir.” When asked how many years ago this was, she replied, “I don’t know for sure, but I think it is three years ago now.” When asked the month, she replied, “In the month of Easter.” When asked how long she had seen her thus delivered, as she said, she replied, “Until now.”

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RESOURCES

I have truly been enjoying having fun with the bilingual edition of Margaret’s miracles; I recommend it highly, and promise a return to its evidence in the weeks to come.

Legenda vetus, Acta processus canonizationis; et, Miracula Sanctae Margaritae de Hungaria = The oldest legend; Acts of the canonization process; and, Miracles of Saint Margaret of Hungary, edited by Ildikó Csepregi, Gábor Klaniczay and Bence Péterfi, translated by Ildikó Csepregi, Clifford Flanigan and Louis Perraud (Budapest, Hungary; New York, NY: Central European University Press, 2018).

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Reading with a Job to Do

So, I’m writing an article. This one is a big hairy deal; I’ve already agreed to submit it by a particular date, and it is the ONE thing standing between me and my book. Well, aside for cleaning the garage. And finishing the task of putting in the fall garden. And, dates with Tom. But I digress.

So, again, I’m writing an article. And in order to commit article prose, it is necessary to Engage the Discourse. Which I do, regularly. In fact, I teach a class on this topic, and *always* teach with new literature, each and every time I offer it.

And yet there are so many juicy bits one never gets to. Article writing is time to gather the flock of “Unreads” and convert them into “reads.” Which I’ve duly been doing. At three articles a day, I should definitely be done sometime this year, though perhaps several months after my deadline comes and goes.

And the reality is, one does not need to read in article mode the way one reads in understanding mode. I know, I know, that sounds weird, but hear me on this.

When you’re reading for understanding, all the little bits are the compelling part. Those are where the next big insight may come from – the fragments of understanding that piece together to make the mosaic of the story come to life. It’s the nuance, the compelling document, the momentary “aha.” It’s the chaplain who didn’t collect from that family for three years that opens the door into “oh, something interesting there!” Read the footnotes, I tell my students, that’s where all the cool stuff lives! You’re never going to learn about the priest absolved from having 5 children with that woman until you read the footnote that also explains that he had to come back and ask forgiveness for having three more. (Now, darn, where did I put that citation? I know, just know it’s on my computer somewhere…)

Those kinds of details are the framing out of a localized picture that is going to change what you actually think about your own data. You’re reading deeply, and it’s so very, very cool.

That’s not the kind of reading you need to do for an article. If all goes well, you already know the broad strokes of what you’re trying to say. They say that writing is often a kind of discovery – and it is, but at a more local level, I think, because you already had the big picture in mind going into that writing spate. No, reading for an article is “I want to know the discourse on X,” or “this was contentious, and I’d decided I believe Y, now what were the details of the arguments about?”

Because reading for an article is grappling with human fallibility. The reasons *I* remember a particular article don’t always jibe with what the author was doing with the article, and it’s important to separate out those threads if you’re going to be citing the thing, and I believe in honoring the work of the author where I can.

So, when you’re reading for an article, you’re working on your fairness positioning: what did the other side of that debate argue, and why does it matter?

When you’re reading for an article, you’re looking for the delimiters. Do I need to say “after 1640,” or change “all” to “most,” or (savvy writing here) put “So-and-so argues that…”? Sometimes checking the boundary of a claim takes every bit as long as writing up the claim in the first place – and that’s going to be the part that matters most to at least one of your readers. So go that extra reading mile.

When you’re reading for an article, you’re looking for any latent misattribution habits. I remember Jones said this. Wait, was that Jones? Or even worse, “everyone says Jones says X.” Yeah, but DID they? If you haven’t checked it yourself, you aren’t allowed to write it down, people. That’s because scholarship is harder than fiction, as my daughter once reminded me. I have to check all my facts, while she just gets to make them up. Be slow; be thorough. When in doubt, (re-)read. Check.

When you’re reading for an article, you’re also looking for the formulation of information that is going to be most helpful to your reader – not necessarily the yummy archival documentary study that found “the thing” but the one that put that new detail into a broader context.

And, when you’re reading for an article and you get to the wild-ass claim that means you’d never willingly converse with this ____ (insert category of closemindedness here), you can STOP READING. Because if you wouldn’t have this person in your life, what would they be doing in your footnotes? Step away and find something written by a better human being. (I’m not saying you don’t need to know the literature. I am saying that you don't owe every published argument your attention merely because it exists. If someone else has already thoroughly deconstructed the claim, maybe that's the article you need to cite. Why contribute to the citation count of flaming trolls?)

Reading for an article is reading to a purpose. Be ruthless (and not Ruth-less, because Ruth has actually written some pretty compelling arguments there!). Stop reading on a topic if you’ve already got more information than is going to fit in its paragraph. More is not better, it’s just avoidance.

Instead, when you’re reading for an article, one of the most important questions to ask yourself is: am I ready to commit prose? And that’s your reading exit strategy. Don’t keep reading “just because.” Don’t keep reading for the beautiful writing, or the compelling narrative. Read for the purpose. This bolsters paragraph 3. That might be in the footnote for paragraph 7. This will make the assessment of the controversy more compelling. That shows the strange hoops that scholars have jumped through to ignore such-and-so. So sure, read on all these things. But stop as SOON as you can.

Reading is tempting. Washing dishes is tempting. Heavens to Betsy: even LAUNDRY is tempting when it’s time to commit prose.

So go forth, and read no more.

At least until it’s time to work on the next section of your article!

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YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:

How To Jump-Start a Scholarly Article: The Plan: Before the prose comes the plan. This post works through choosing a journal, figuring out an article’s likely shape, building a broad outline, and assembling the bibliography that will support the writing.

Using Research Questions — Defeat Data-Hoarding and Discard the Chaff!: Research questions are useful for more than framing an argument: they are also excellent winnowing devices, helping distinguish what the article actually needs from all the fascinating material that can safely wait for another day.

Managing Bibliography By Spreadsheet: A pile of PDFs is not yet a literature review. Here’s the spreadsheet system I use to prioritize reading, track what matters, and turn an unruly bibliography into something that actually helps the writing move forward.

From Conference Paper to Article: Turning Talk into Prose: Turning a conference paper into an article isn’t really a matter of expansion—it’s translation. This post walks through my spreadsheet-based method for breaking a talk apart, adding the scholarship and evidence it needs, and rebuilding it as article prose.

AR for Your Ears

This post offers an idiosyncratic assessment of:

Michael Frishkopf and Scott Smallwood, “Auditory Augmented Reality for Well-Being,” in Augmented Reality: Situated Spatial Synergy, edited by Michael Cohen (London: IntechOpen, 2026), DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.1011786

Listening to things does us good. AR could, therefore, usefully migrate away from its visual obsession and consider the “technologically simpler and lower cost” option of sound-based “auditory augmented reality.”

This is the claim of Michael Frishkopf and Scott Smallwood in their recent chapter, “Auditory Augmented Reality for Well-Being.” It caught my attention in three ways.

• First, they mention EARLIDS, and earlids are a quirky rabbit-hole of mine.

• Second, they are talking in specific and measurable ways about how to develop useful, healthful sounds – that is, soundscapes that enhance well-being. I like that, it fits into my worldview!

• Third, they’re talking about AR, Augmented Reality, instead of AI, Artificial Intelligence (a misnomer), and I am very much there with that! Plus, the added bonus that they’re essentially saying: the AR community is getting it wrong, investing heavily in a tool which distracts, visually, rather than one that soothes, “mixing harmoniously” with the background. Yes, yes, YES.

They are interested as well in exploring lower-tech interventions – they mention headphones, loudspeakers, and personal listening devices, not just mega-gajillion dollar systems that block out the world around you. Now, add in some tech gear so the system can adapt to the subject’s location, actions, and motions and the costs go up. But not as much as their visual counterparts!

What do they claim? Well, one of the important observations is that

the auditory channel is widely regarded as far more potent … generating an affective response by indexing environment features, carrying paralinguistic emotion, evoking affective memory, or setting a mood via musical properties like timbre, melody, and harmony.

In other words, sounds move moods. Plus, and here is where the earlids come in, sound suffuses the environment; as they put it, “There is no auditory counterpart to “looking away” (“hearing away”?).” No earlids, no blocking the input.

If soundscapes change our moods, then, we can use them as a force for good. They are interested in deploying soundscapes to support wellness. To do so, they argue for a mixed-modality sound mixture, one that is a “steady-state, nonperiodic admixture of natural, musical, and synthetic” sounds. I’ve talked about the intermingling of nature noises and created ones before – and to this they add the notion of soundwalking – moving through a landscape with a directed acoustical accompaniment. They draw on the composed installations, particularly in their techno-mediated forms.

In all, they propose three kinds of interventions.

place-based augmentation: take a place, add sound to it so that listeners experience the place differently. In Sounding the Garden, for instance, GPS-triggered poetry and music overlays a physical garden. Sound installations and soundwalks fit this category.

individual adaptive soundscapes: intervene more directly with the individual listener using biosignals and machine learning to select and mix calming sounds for thee different than those for me. This makes ALL kinds of sense; musak gives me hives, but some of the chants I find calming my partner thinks are a bore. Let technology help figure it out.

shared adaptation: musical (well, sound-based) experiences as a social practice. Bringing the power of joint experience to bear on music’s infiltrative powers to allow a group of people to experience and inform the sonic environment. From this, you can get calm, concentration, and social connection.

See, doing good!

If you want a single take-away, it’s that sound should be treated as environmental design: something that can be deliberately composed to support well-being, individually or collectively, rather than simply as entertainment. Think about countering the all of the crisis-noise in a hospital (one of the examples that landed the hardest with me): sound intervention can be a solution to the sound problems that surround us.

Because, at the end of the day, sound can be something that changes the meaning and experience of a place rather than merely adding a soundtrack.

Pretty good observation!

YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:

Manipulations of Reality’s Sounds — on the intermingling of natural and constructed soundscapes

Mapping Soundscapes — another way of thinking spatially about what we hear

Soundscape Compositions, Chicago Style — sound treated as something composed into and through place

And, of course, there are always the various explorations of earlids: https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/p/earlids.html

Guarding the Mouth: Speech and Silence in Thalbach’s 1479 Statutes

I started reading a set of Thalbach’s convent statutes and discovered that their late-fifteenth-century Provincial, Heinrich Karrer, was remarkably worried about women talking.

That’s perhaps an unfair way to put it—but not entirely unfair.

In 1479 Karrer, Provincial of the Upper German Franciscan province and Visitator General of the brothers and sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis, issued a new set of statutes for the women living at Thalbach in Bregenz. An earlier set of regulations had apparently not worked entirely as intended, so Karrer replaced it with something he considered more useful.

What caught my attention was what these new statutes regulate—and what they (mostly) do not.

There is very little here about reading. Nothing about study. Almost nothing about household labor. Prayer itself receives surprisingly little detailed attention. 

Instead, again and again, the statutes return to speech: when the sisters should be silent, what kinds of conversation they should avoid, what they may say to outsiders, how they may speak to one another, and what happens when words damage the peace or reputation of the house.

First,silence

The statutes begin predictably enough with worship. The sisters are to attend divine service diligently, especially Mass and preaching, unless illness or necessary work prevents them. Then Karrer moves almost immediately to silence:

Let all the sisters observe silence diligently in the morning, in the evening, and at the table. (Und das alle swesteren ir schwigen mörgens und öbendes und ob tische flißenklich haltent; und welche das an nottorft bricht, die sol vor tische sitzen.)

Break that silence without necessity and there’s a consequence: the offender must sit apart at table.

But this is not really a rule demanding silence all the time. The next provision makes that clearer. The sisters are to be prudent in “speech and conduct,” both inside and outside the house, and to avoid idle talk. Anyone who fails must confess not simply that she talked, but how often, in what way, and about what. The Mother then decides on a suitable penance.

And the regulation is communal. A sister who hears another breaking the rule and fails to report it receives the same punishment.

That last bit recurs often enough to matter. This is by prescript a self-regulating community. You’d better tattle if you see things going wrong.

Good sound, dangerous sound

To my eye (or ear), the contrast is not between sound and silence so much as between kinds of sound.

The very first sounds mentioned in the statutes are good ones: Mass and the preaching of God’s Word. The sisters should be there to hear them. Dangerous sounds come afterward: idle talk, private conversations, insults, accusations, gossip, contradiction.

That distinction makes sense within the broader Franciscan tradition.

The Third Order rule confirmed by Nicholas IV in Supra montem in 1289 imagined a religious life structured in part through hearing and speaking.

Let each strive, while the office of Mass is being celebrated and the word of preaching is being offered, to observe silence and to be intent upon prayer and the office.… (Studeat quilibet, dum Missae celebratur officium, et praedicationis verbum proponitur, servare silentium; orationi et officio sit intentus...

Brothers and sisters were to say the canonical Hours—or substitute Pater nosters if they could not—and attend Mass when possible. They were to hear preaching and exhortation. But during Mass and the homily they were also to observe silence and attend to prayer. The rule even warns about careless oaths made in ordinary speech, noting rather ruefully that slips happen when one talks a lot.

Silence, in other words, was not simply the absence of religious sound. It helped distinguish useful speech from useless speech, attentive hearing from distraction. Francesca Sbardella makes a related point in her study of silence in Catholic cloistered life: silence is not an empty space left when speech stops. It is a practiced condition through which speech, behavior, relationships, and religious identity are organized. And the rule thinks so too: unfortunate things tend to happen in much speaking (prout contingere in multiloqui consuevit).

That seems especially useful for Thalbach.

What words can do

Karrer seems intensely aware that words have consequences.

No sister is to have unauthorized “familiarity, conversation, or private interaction” with anyone, priest or layperson.

Furthermore, no sister shall have any familiarity, conversation, or private dealings with anyone, whether priest or layperson.… (Item und will auch daz keyne schwester kaynerlay fruntschaft noch gesprech noch haymlich mit nyemands hab, er sy priester oder lay..)

(Again, a sister who knows about such behavior and does not report it shares in the punishment. Self-regulating!)

Inside the house, the stakes rise further.

If one sister were to attack another’s honor—accusing her of theft or sexual misconduct, insulting her, calling her a liar, or cursing her—she must confess publicly before the Mother and the community, ask the injured sister’s forgiveness, and eat her next meal on the floor. (Shaming and visual set-asides reinforce speech rules, but no corporeal punishment is ever mentioned, except for food deprivation, which is mentioned for unauthorized jaunts outside of the convent and as part of the increasingly severe penalties for sowing discord within the convent community.)

Words directed upward are dangerous too. Insolent speech against the Mother receives a doubled penance. And speech does not need to stay inside the convent to cause harm. A sister who speaks maliciously to outsiders in a way that damages another sister or the reputation of the house is to be called to account and punished according to the harm—or even the potential harm—her words have caused. Once again, anyone who hears and conceals such speech may receive the same penalty.

The underlying concern is not difficult to see. Words can disrupt peace within the house. They can injure another sister’s honor. They can create suspicion around a woman’s relationships with men. And they can move beyond the convent walls, damaging the reputation of the community itself.

Speech travels.

Guard your mouth AND your ears

There is a wonderful late-medieval image that gives visual form to some of these anxieties.

[IMAGE: “The Crucified Monk,” Wellcome Collection, WMS 49, photo L0029361. CC BY.]

Almuth Seebohm discussed this image in her study “The Crucified Monk.” Around the figure are texts concerned with disciplining the senses and the body. One set of verses instructs the religious to guard speech, restrain anger, and metaphorically place a lock upon the mouth and a balance upon words.

Custodi visum vehementer comprime risum
Sis custos oris et habenam stringe furoris
>Ori pone seram verbis impone stateram
Ne quid confundas ne quid sine crimine fundas

Curb the urge to laugh; be the guardian of your speech and rein in your fury. Place a lock upon your mouth; set a balance upon your words, so that you cause no confusion nor utter anything blameworthy.

The image also draws on the biblical tradition of guarding both tongue and ears: “Keep your tongue from evil” (Psalm 33:14); “I have placed a guard over my mouth” (Psalm 38:2); and even the wonderfully prickly advice from Sirach 28:28 to “Hedge in thy ears with thorns, hear not a wicked tongue, and make doors and bars to thy mouth.”

What I like about the image in relation to Thalbach is that the discipline runs in both directions. You must govern what comes out of the mouth. But you must also govern what comes into the ear.

That is very nearly what Karrer’s statutes ask the sisters to do. A woman is responsible not simply for what she herself says, but sometimes for what she hears another woman say. Listening itself creates obligation.

Governing women’s speech

And here the statutes become particularly interesting to me.

There is nothing unusual about medieval religious rules valuing silence or warning against idle talk. Benedict had done both centuries earlier. Nor is a Franciscan concern with disciplined speech surprising. But at Thalbach, the issue becomes unusually concrete.

These statutes regulate women speaking to one another, women speaking to outsiders, women speaking privately to men, women insulting one another, women talking back to authority, women spreading damaging information, and women listening to one another’s prohibited speech.

It would be easy to turn that into a simple story about male authorities silencing women. Karrer was, after all, a male provincial laying down rules for a female community. Yet the statutes are more complicated than that – more nuanced, and more reflective of women’s own exercise of authority.

The Mother is repeatedly given discretion to judge offenses and assign punishment. Sisters are expected to admonish one another. They are responsible for noticing breaches and maintaining communal discipline. The system certainly governs women’s voices, but women themselves are also part of that governance.

Nor is the object silence for silence’s sake.

The convent was not imagined as acoustically empty. It contained Mass, preaching, prayer, confession, admonition, correction, and ordinary communication. Some speech was necessary. Some was holy. Some sustained communal life. The question was which words belonged.

Reading the statutes this way makes silence look less like the opposite of sound than one means of organizing a religious soundscape. What mattered was not simply whether a Thalbach sister spoke, but what she said, to whom, where, when, who heard it, and what her words might do.

That is a surprisingly large burden for a few spoken words to carry.

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Sources

Gerold Fussenegger, “Das Frauenkloster Thalbach bei Bregenz,” Alemania Franciscana Antiqua 9 (1963): 93–140; pp. 108-112 includes a transcription of the Thalbach statutes of 1479 that have been the basis for my assessment.

Nicholas IV, Supra montem (1289), Rule of the Brothers and Sisters of Penance. (This is a blog post; I used online copies today: a Latin text https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Supra_montem and the English translation from https://ofsgb.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Supra-Montem-1289-exNAFRA.pdf.)

Francesca Sbardella, “Embodying Silence: The Resilient Action of the Unspoken in Catholic Cloistered Life,” Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni 88/2 (2022): 494ff.

Almuth Seebohm, “The Crucified Monk,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 59 (1996), 61ff.

Translation note: Translations of the Thalbach statutes quoted above are mine, based on Fussenegger’s published transcription and checked against the original German wording.

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YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:

Supple Rules for Prayer: Daston’s Ideas Meet the 16thc Prayerbook: Another look at how written rules shaped women’s devotional practice at Thalbach—this time through prayerbook rubrics rather than house statutes.

Building for the Ear (from Chaco Canyon to Medieval Vorarlberg): A broader meditation on how religious communities organized sound and listening—useful context for thinking about silence, speech, and the convent soundscape.

Diligent Devotion: Maria Euphrosina Vöglin’s Leadership at Thalbach: A later example of women exercising authority within the Thalbach community, complementing the 1479 statutes’ emphasis on discipline, oversight, and communal order.