Off to Eigg tomorrow, where there is no electricity and where Festial might well seem a long way away, were it not for the fact that I'll be taking research material with me. 'Popular Medieval Religion 1000-1500' might not seem like light holiday reading to ordinary sane people!
I'm also taking 'Medicine & Society in Later Medieval England' by Carole Rawcliffe which has been sitting here reproachfully for some weeks now while I try in vain to find time to read it. The cover picture is a medieval illustration of a man with Zodiac characters covering his body in the areas where they are (still) said to exert influence. So, for example, he has a crab at his throat, a ram on his head and a bull across his shoulders. I think I'm going to find a lot of useful stuff in there! And the author is a professor at the University of East Anglia just a few miles away. She's agreed to a meeting to answer any questions I have at the end of June, and sounds interested in the project. So I'm looking forward to that.
Back to other blogs. I'm enjoying Cathryn Jiggens' blog very much, and looking into her previous work I can see threads that link our two practices. Cathryn is interested in a 'collective forgetfulness' – and collective memory, forgetfulness and instinct are themes I explore in my own work, including (I expect) Festial.
www.world-tree.co.uk/festial.html
festial[at]world-tree[dot]co[dot]uk
