Raewyn Connell

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Web Name: Raewyn Connell

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Navigation menuHomeBioSouthern TheoryIntellectualsGender sexualityMasculinitiesClassNeoliberalismEducationPoetryWriting for researchMenuMasculinities

Published this year: Men, Masculinities, and Earth, edited by Paul M. Pulé and Martin Hultman (PalgraveMacmillan). It's a wide-ranging collection of studies and reflections on gender issues in the environmental crisis and the environmental movement, with a focus on men and masculinities.

I contributed a chapter called "After the Fires: Thoughts on Masculinities, the Sociocene, and Environmental Struggle", pages 105-115. Apologies for the dreadful term "sociocene": it's the best I could come up with, to emphasise the role of powerful institutions and social structures in producing planetary disaster.

masculinitiesShare:Unforgotten Books: Wandering Scholars

My COVID19 reading has just included, after more years thanI care to remember, a re-reading of Helen Waddell's The Wandering Scholars.My copy is a Pelican paperback from 1954, one of Penguin's postwar nonfiction serieswith blue borders around a no-nonsense white front cover, price 2/6, twoshillings and sixpence. On the fly-leaf is my name in blue ink, in my father'shandwriting; I guess he gave it to me when I was at school. The pages areyellowing now, and their edges sometimes flake off under my fingers; this pelicanwasn't built to last. The text is the sixth edition, from 1932. First editiononly five years earlier - the book was unexpectedly popular.

The Wandering Scholars is not about scholarship, it'sabout poetry. Specifically, it's a history of the Latin-language, secular lyricpoetry of the European middle ages. Latin was then the international languageof the church, law, scholarship and diplomacy - and of a mostly forgotten bunchof poets.

The book has all the charm of an enthusiast's despatch homeabout her discoveries in far-flung, dusty archives. Helen was fired up so muchthat she published a book of translations too, called Mediaeval Latin Lyrics.Not only that, she wrote a romantic novel about one of the poets, PeterAbelard, which became a best-seller in the 1930s. I've got those books too,I was so warmed by her fire.

The Wandering Scholars is not just salvage scholarship,it's a praise song, written in a shifting, allusive style that's sometimesbrisk, sometimes turgid, sometimes witty and sometimes lyrical itself. Helen scattered translations of the poems(and sometimes fragments of originals) through the text, a large part of thebook's appeal. She made confident rankings:who was a great man, who was a lesser, what was a great poem and what was not(top two: Dum Diane vitrea and Dies irae). She even staged in thetext a competition for the best drinking song in the world (won by Mihi estpropositum). She was a hands-on researcher, but her book was a literarycomposition more than a technical history. It presupposed a reader with alittle Latin, some Christianity, and quite a bit of European history - enoughto get scholarly jokes about the Trinity or passing allusions to Gregory theGreat. Evidently in 1920s England, there were enough readers like that.

Helen wasn't the first to trawl these archives. She was ableto rely on printed editions of important sources, especially the famous CarminaBurana (a manuscript from the monastery of Benediktbeuern in Bavaria, withan amazing collection of earthy and jovial poems in Latin and German,apparently transcribed by three monks).

What Helen did, basically, was to weave them into a mightystory, from the fall of the Roman empire to the thirteenth century, whenvernacular languages began to take over. Her tale has two great heroes: theoutrageous philosopher Abelard (whose lyrics have been lost, but whose storysurvives), and the witty, cynical and technically brilliant Archpoet (whosename has been lost, but whose lyrics survive). The tale has a collective herotoo, the subversive subculture of the vagantes, the wandering scholarsthemselves: the Beat Generation of the middle ages, enthusiasts for sex, booze,travel and laughter. Heavily disapproved by the church, to which they repliedwith cutting satire.

I wondered at some absences. There was some lusty stuffbeing written in Arabic at this time; did none of it waft across the water?Mediaeval Europe had a patriarchal gender order, certainly, so the priests,bishops and vagantes were all blokes; but were no women writing secularverse? Hildegard von Bingen (or the nuns writing under their Abbess's name) wrotereligious poetry and music, heavy-duty spirituality and medical texts; norecreational verse? Did the brilliant Héloise not have a try? Maybe they did,but so many of the surviving poems are anonymous...

I can't say I'm an enthusiast for Helen Waddell's translations.They are loaded with thee and thou, nay, unto and hither. Pseudo-archaic, likeother scholarly translators of her generation; yet written in the same decadesas Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Still, translation is hard in any style, Ishouldn't complain. Not when I've been warmed again by this fire.

Try Dum Diane vitrea and Dies irae, if youdon't know them: both are wonderful poems. And try Mihi est propositum.Who knows, it could be the best drinking song in the world.

Share:Teachers, and Sociologists

The Journal of Professional Learning, sponsored bythe NSW Teachers' Federation, has just published a condensed version of mypaper on the nature of teachers' work in schools. It's available (open access) here: https://cpl.asn.au/journal/semester-2-2021/vital-elusive-and-fantastically-complex-teacher-s-worth. Please be my guest!

Re the future of sociology: Alain Caillé (Nanterre University)and Frédéric Vandenberghe (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) have justpublished For a New Classic Sociology: A Proposition, followed by a Debate,Routledge, 2021. It has their"position paper" outlining an intriguing agenda for re-shapingsociology, plus responses by eleven colleagues. I'm a participant in the Debatesection, arguing for shaking free of global-North hegemony and building worldperspectives: "For sociology: more ambitious, more practical, anddefinitely polyphonic" (pp. 77-83).

postcolonial,schools,sociology,teachers,workforceShare:"Masculinities", Persian

I'm very pleased to let people know that a translation of my book "Masculinities" into Persian (Farsi) has just been published. Coming soon, to a bookshop near you!

There are also translations of this book into Italian, German, Swedish, Spanish, Chinese, Hebrew, Slovenian, Hungarian, Korean and French.

books,hegemony,masculinities,Recent publications,TranslationsShare:HomeFeatured postSurvive and thrive at an academic conference

Conferences are an important part of university life. They are where you get know-how, visibility and connections. In co...

Raewyn Connell
Photo by Peter HallWelcome This website is intended for people who share my interests in research, social action, or poetry.

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Introduction to Raewyn

Free papers
Online folder of Raewyn's papers (click image)Translations
Link to translations of Raewyn's work (click image)Popular PostsResearch publications (complete list)Feminism's challenge to biological essentialismRaewyn in TranslationTranssexual WomenDiscussions of Raewyn's workSex, Fear and Faction: Australia's Bizarre Marriage SurveyDecolonising the CurriculumYoung men, masculinity and violenceStrike at University of SydneyInterviewsContact meraewyn.connell@gmail.com

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