I went over on my bike this morning. Been a while since I did that. Last time, I cranked too hard on a sharp turn at the top of what was, for me, a steep hill. You rarely choose these moments, but it was a good place for going over. It was a smooth patch of dirt with no rocks or sharp stumps. I was lucky. It just knocked the wind out of me. This time, I was coming up an unremarkable hill on my normal route at 5:30 am, and during the night a large branch the size of a medium-s

Loving literature and old books can draw someone toward scholarship, but it does not by itself produce the habits which scholarship demands. You must learn linguistic discipline, methodological patience, command of secondary literature, archival competence, a willingness to spend months on a very narrow problem, and the ability to turn your enthusiasm into an argument that survives expert scrutiny. I saw this during a seminar I took in Fordham University’s Medieval Studies De