PaperBackSwap Status

All the books I sent before going back to school have gotten to their intended destinations, and I have sent a book to Hawaii. That makes 16 books so far, and 5 received, and 2 more sent for. I've also tabulated the books I got at the end of the summer when I put my vacation hold on, and the books I bought at the book sale the other day ($2.75 for eleven books FTW) and I have at least nine that are going to leave in December when I come home from school. HOW AWESOME IS THIS?

I also found a book for my mom (not telling, but it's a doozy; she's going to love it) and I think I'm going to buy a book for my dad at the SJU booksale. They have a lot of theology books there, and I'm going to be on that campus again till 8 or so tonight to get information about going to the Holy Land.

Yes, I am taking my research on the Third Crusade for "Song of a Peacebringer" to a new level. I am actually considering GOING TO THE HOLY LAND and walking where all my favorite historical characters (Jesus not excluded) walked. I'm not sure how this will work out, but I'm very, very excited.

Last night I went to a lecture by Miquel Larranaga from IE University in Segovia, Spain on Image, Word and Power in the 11th through 13th centuries. He was at St. John's going through our Hill Monastic Library for images that would help him write his paper in support of the idea that church art and architecture, alongside the sermon being preached that day, helped to support and justify the idea of feudalism.

Feudalism, for those of you who don't know, is kind of like a triangle divided up into three parts, like so:

At the top are the clergy, those who have a direct relationship with God. After them are the nobles, the knights who fight to protect the other two classes, and at the bottom are the lowly peasants, the ones who make sure the other two classes don't starve.

In the text of medieval sermons, the priest or presider tries to make it look like all the classes are equal, and that all are equally important to the survival of feudalism. Thus, the model should look like this :

But it doesn't. As George Orwell will remind you, some people are more equal than others, and feudalism, as Dr. Larranaga reminded us, is about social domination. There has to be some power input in order for feudalism to work.

At the end of the lecture, Brother Colomba, who runs the HMML, observed that in the feudal scheme Benedictines are both the top and the bottom, those who work and those who pray. This, I expect, was a brilliant idea of Benedict's to not only keep his monasteries self sufficient and busy but also to keep them humble. they weren't just praying for salvation -- they were going to get their hands dirty, too.

But that got me thinking -- what about the Knights of the Hospital? Shouldn't they fit into all three? Hospitalliers were supposed to be knights, but they were also expected to lead a monastic life and contribute their time to working in the Hospitals of their Order in Jerusalem and elsewhere. Doesn't that mean they meet requirements for all three? They work, fight, and pray. I thought this was a pretty genius observation, and also thought that this was the reason that the Hospitalliers never really quite moved out of the Holy Land. As Godfrey says in "Kingdom of Heaven,"

"A man who in France had not a house is now the master of a city. He who was the master of the city begs in the street...You are not what you were born but rather what you have it in yourself to be."

Going to the Holy Land, either to join a monastic order like the Hospitalliers or just as a pilgrimage, was a clear usurpation of the accepted medieval social order.


On the flip side, Paperbackswap won't ship to school. Sad.