New archives, new cities: the academic tourist

Domplatz, Speyer

I'm approaching the halfway point of my time here (eek!) and am busily reconnoitering regional archives in order to make my midterm report for the Fulbright commission sound as impressive as possible. This week, this mission took me to the city of Speyer. Speyer flourished under imperial patronage in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; remarkably, enough of the old town survives that streets, neighborhoods, and monastic precincts from that period are still marked with plaques. At least so far, the charm of being able to trace via street names the medieval layout of weavers and tailors, butchers and bakers, has not palled for me. Speyer's medieval Jewish neighborhood, unusually large and central, also retains its outlines; I'd hoped to visit some of the archaeological remains too, but the city map I picked up during the archive's lunch break turned out not to be quite up to date with its "winter hours" listings. Walking back to the archive, I found myself in the Salzgasse where the leper hospital owned property in the fifteenth century. The narrow street was only about two blocks long, so I could guess: did the lepers own their house where the wine bar stands? The Thai restaurant? The hideous concrete municipal buildings?

Work and play (or vice versa)

Frohes neues Jahr! In Germany, you can wish anyone a happy new year as long as you haven't seen them in the new year yet, a custom which I find charming. Coupled with the custom of wishing everyone "a good slide into the new year" in the last days of the old one, it pretty effectively makes the entire Christmas season a festive-feeling one. I saw in the new year by going dancing with a friend from church, and watching the fireworks over the Rhine (pictured left, taken by someone looking towards Mainz from the other riverbank.) Not a bad way to start! In an attempt to balance out this rank frivolity, I've so far submitted an abstract to a prestigious conference on medical history, and submitted a book review for publication. I spent this past weekend, however, wrapped up in Still More Frivolity, with a friend who stopped over on her way to do research of her own in Vienna. Many of our pleasant catch-up chats were held on trains, as we junketed around this corner of the Rhineland. This included me getting to Frankfurt's famous Museum Mile for the first time (oops!) where we saw Goethe's house, and admired the considerable collection of the Städel Museum. It had been a long time since I spent several hours in the company of visual art (the luxury of popping into museums is one of the things I miss about NYC) and I loved it. Auden was right about the old masters' insights into suffering. One of the pieces which grabbed me most strongly was a retable depicting Christ bearing the cross. The configuration of figures was familiar from the Stations; what struck me with the violence of originality was a man in the crowd sticking out his tongue, not even ridiculing Christ himself, but the Virgin Mary, who, following, already stunned with grief, leaning on St. John, might not even have been aware of the man's cheap, mean gesture.