25
Sep
2012
15:47
Holy Oats Update
It looks like the holy oats article is going to make it into the 2013 open issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies: fingers crossed, it's going through post-revision reviews at the moment. If it makes it in, I'll be extremely happy. The project has been a long haul from finding some indications that Aquinas thought grace had intentional being as a quality, through the work at the Pontifical Institute in Toronto, and the submission of the LMS paper version, to the complete redrafting and rewriting of the research as a paper for McGill Medievalists in the winter of 2010. Finding the oats recipe was a godsend as it let me deal with the complex issues, I think, in a slightly humorous way, or at the very least with an example that most readers could easily relate to. Still, the topic is dense as one colleague has noted. And in some respects that's the point, it isn't easily accessible material, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't think about it.
The history of qualities is slowly creeping up in the background of my work, but until I've managed to get the other book project out of the way, it will have to wait. Still, I think I'll be returning to it quite consistently. A pipe-dream article is on sin and qualities, something I discussed briefly in a paper at Sixteenth Century Studies here in Montreal a few years ago. This topic seems, or is rather, the inverse of the oats article.
Interestingly the game returns to a question of privation I think in attesting to the nature of the sacred in believers or objects: is holiness a pristine state where nothing is added, but everything repaired, or actually a quality in its own right? In the former holiness wouldn't be something supernatural but the condition of restoration, or the privation of disorder. It's a complex topic, and in fifteenth and sixteenth centuries wars were fought for much less. The history of qualities though remains intimately related to the history of the senses, and I'm curious to see where the topics can be taken in light of the well established histories of the reformation.
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