Janice Liedl's Blog

My professional life has run flat-out the last five years but I’m finally taking a somewhat over-due sabbatical break after serving a three-year term as Director of Laurentian’s School of Liberal Arts which was a lesson, in and of itself, due to our institutional “challenges”. Suffice it to say, I’ve done a lot of administrative and pedagogical work since 2019, so I’m enjoying a chance to focus on some of my seventeenth century favourites. Between a six-month sabbatical and the application of many banked credits from overloads, I’m out of the classroom until September, 2026.

That means lots of time for early books, modern scholarly book purchases, and inter-library loans to supplement our own institutional holdings. I’ve been transcribing primary sources and note-taking at a break-neck pace, all the while completing one much-delayed book proposal while picking up an interrupted article draft. I hope to share more tidbits here. In the meanwhile, enjoy an image from one work that informs my recent scholarship and teaching: Hannah Wolley’s The Ladies Directory.

While the university logins are being restored, here are some resources for the week ahead.

HIST-3476 Crime & Punishment: 4 March, Gender & Crime slides (PDF); 7 March, Geographies of Crime slides (PDF)

HIST-4517 Later Medieval Chronicles: Jocelin of Brakelond excerpts (PDF) – used for both class meetings; 5 March, Chronicling People slides (PDF), Gerrard, “Jocelin of Brakelond and the power of Abbot Samson“; 7 March, Chronicling Place slides (PDF), Hudson, “Local Histories“

Keep checking https://laurentian.ca for status updates. In the meantime, here are materials for today’s class meetings:

11:30am in-person & on Zoom HIST-3476 Workshop #2 (slides PDF & Project #2 Guide) plus an Additional Bibliography of articles & book chapters for Old Bailey projects – request any PDF from me

2:30pm in-person & on Zoom HIST-4517 Authoritative Perspectives (slides PDF) and readings (Chinca and Young, “Uses of the Past“)

Discord invite code for week of February 26: V9BG5HNk

For Tuesday, 27 February – “The Chronicler as Historian” – PDF of slides; Read Prologues #64, #69, & #75; Pohl, “Abbas Qui Et Scriptor” Discussion: How might we describe a chronicle tradition or perspective on history? How important was the hands-on and immediate work of chronicle creation? Are chronicles more believable than other histories or not?

For Thursday, 29 February – “Authoritative Perspectives” – PDF of slides; Read Prologues #71 & #72; Chinca & Young, “Uses of the Past” Discussion: How and why was ancient Rome so important in medieval German histories? In what ways did Christianity shape stories of empires, past and present? Could history be both entertaining and serious?

I will run Zoom if I can get cell service in our classroom, otherwise I’ll post a recording. Until D2L access is restored, you’re welcome to post discussion here (you can confirm your pseudonym with me later) or on Discord where I am setting up a Discussions channel for our class. The invite code for the week of February 26 is V9BG5HNk.

Slides for Thursday, 29 February: Workshop #2 (Old Bailey Online Quantitative Analysis) as PDF.

Old Bailey Project #2 Assignment Guide (PDF).

Reading Evaluation: list of article options for #2 & #3.

Options for #2 (Due not March 7 but March 15 or later)

Callahan, Kathy. “On the Receiving End: Women and Stolen Goods in London 1783-1815.” The London Journal 37, no. 2 (2012): 106–21. https://doi.org/10.1179/174963212X13345262125678./li>Milka, Amy. “Feeling for Forgers: Character, Sympathy and Financial Crime in London during the Late Eighteenth Century.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 42, no. 1 (2019): 7–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/1754-0208.12566.Shoemaker, Robert B. “Sympathy for the Criminal: The Criminal Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century London.” Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies 24, no. 1 (October 30, 2020): 5–28. https://doi.org/10.4000/chs.2677.Warner, Jessica, Kathryn Graham, and Edward Adlaf. “Women Behaving Badly: Gender and Aggression in a Military Town, 1653–1781.” Sex Roles 52, no. 5 (March 1, 2005): 289–98. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-005-2673-6.

Options for #3 (Originally Due April 8)

Ainsley, Jill Newton. “‘Some Mysterious Agency’: Women, Violent Crime, and the Insanity Acquittal in the Victorian Courtroom.” Canadian Journal of History 35, no. 1 (April 2000): 37–56. https://doi.org/10.3138/cjh.35.1.37.Gray, Drew. “Gang Crime and the Media in Late Nineteenth-Century London: The Regent’s Park Murder of 1888.” Cultural and Social History 10, no. 4 (2013): 559–75. https://doi.org/10.2752/147800413X13727009732209.Handler, Phil. “Forging the Agenda: The 1819 Select Committee on the Criminal Laws Revisited.” The Journal of Legal History 25, no. 3 (2004): 249–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144036042000290717.Poole, Steve. “‘A Lasting and Salutary Warning’: Incendiarism, Rural Order and England’s Last Scene of Crime Execution.” Rural History 19, no. 2 (October 2008): 163–77. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956793308002471.

My History Courses Discord: invite code for the week of February 26 is V9BG5HNk

Students can find a PDF version of today’s slides here and can join via Zoom here at the usual link.

Students in HIST-3476 Crime & Punishment & HIST-4517 Later Medieval Chronicles can rest easier knowing that, due to the services outages, all due dates through 14 March (and grace dates to 21 March) will be extended by as many days as the outage persist for authentication-driven access to D2L, OMNI, email, and Drive.

For example, if services are restored on Monday, 26 February, you will have eight further days from the previous due date or grace date. Let’s say you were working on the Old Bailey Project #1 which was originally due Thursday, 29 February? The due date would become Friday, 8 March.

If needed, I’ll revise this policy further. If extenuating circumstances means that you need additional time or support, email your request with the course code in the subject line, remembering that I have no email access (and haven’t since Sunday).

Laurentian Services Status here (click on the FAQ link for more details).

Hello there! This is mostly for students and colleagues. Since our IT systems were taken offline the morning of Sunday, 18 February, due to a cyber incident, I don’t have university email, Drive, or LMS (D2L) access. Many of you don’t, either, and that may persist a while longer. Be patient, knowing that I’ll push back due dates (and the grace period) dating back to the outage’s beginning. If IT issues persist to Monday, 26 February, I’ll update this blog with information and materials supporting remote and on-campus students!

In the meantime, for reference, here are some (via my Dropbox’s Public Folder) important PDFs for my two winter-term courses.

HIST 3476EL-01/71 Crime & Punishment in England, 1500-1900: Syllabus, Reading Evaluations Assignment Guide, Old Bailey Online Project #1 (Qualitative Assessment) Assignment Guide

HIST 4517EL-01/71 Later Medieval Chronicles: Syllabus, Additional Readings, Proposal Guide

My father – himself a long-time academic administrator – had a cartoon he had posted on a bulletin board, featuring several business-suit wearing men, looking more than a bit terrified and bedraggled, struggling to keep themselves out of the maws of several alligators taking up the terrain below their dangling feet. The caption read “When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s difficult to remember that your first objective was to drain the swamp.” These days, “drain the swamp” has a different connotation – more about corruption than heretofore unknown hazards, but the unpleasant prospect still holds. In today’s more environmentally-informed era, maybe we should preserve the swamp and other habitats – leaving the alligators to flourish in their own world and stay within safer bounds?

Hazards abound in working life – many of them surfacing with no ill-intent. The other day I got an email politely asking about when a pending report could be expected. *CHOMP* It felt as if an alligator was suddenly underfoot, even if I knew well that responsibility was on my shoulders. It had been such a pleasant 36 hours with only one immediate crisis to manage. . . .

The learning curve for serving as Director is steep. That I spent my first month in the role covering for another major set of responsibilities in the Faculty stretched me thin for time. The final straw was squeezing in prep for a new course that I ran in the fall term: Games and History.

It all worked, somehow. The course was great – it really worked well to engage students thinking about history as much as “covering” topics. They connected practices well across time and considered thoughtfully how contemporary games about historical eras were, themselves, a form of historical interpretation that was worthy to examine.

This term there’s only one new preparation and it’s a shared course, so it’s work, but not nearly as daunting. I still have many daunting parts of my director’s duties to handle, though – recruiting faculty members for urgently-needed committees, drafting necessary reports, tweaking the timetable for next year, and, yes, sometimes meeting with folks.

Speaking of which, it’s time to get cracking on prep work for meetings and more (and keep working on my French because, dang, while my written French has improved greatly over the past eight months, my spoken French is still very much my Achilles heel). Au revoir, tout le monde. Qu’il n’y ait pas d’alligators chez vous!

So much has happened in the last two years. . . let me sum up. The good news? I still have a full-time faculty job. The bad news? Too many others don’t. Yes, my university has gone through the wringer. Truth be told, we’re still in the midst of matters and it’s a big ol’ mess. Here’s the CBC story covering the provincial auditor’s preliminary report on the matter.

Those of us who remain are becoming experts at doing more with less. I’ve said too many goodbyes, among them the cheerful kind that comes at convocation where students celebrate their triumphs and share their plans of what comes next. But too many of my goodbyes have been sad ones: of careers cut short or student dreams denied. I also bid my beloved Siberian cat, Sisu, goodbye, last December when cancer finally got the better of her.

We had already welcomed Gráinne into our lives at that point. Named after the pirate queen of Connacht, she is small but imperious: a worthy successor to Sisu. Along with Kaiser, the two cats keep us busy.

I’m working, as much as possible, from my home office this summer. After being dismissed as Chair of History when our department was amalgamated with all the others in the Faculty, I’m now a sort of “super-chair”: Director of the School of Liberal Arts. It’s a fancy term for someone who’s good at signing a lot of digital paperwork and supporting students in programs from English through Law & Justice. I’m also getting to teach some of my favourite courses along with one new one: a second-year class on Games and History. Lots of reading, lots of administrivia, and a little bit of summer fun, including some counted cross-stitch, a hobby that’s sustained me through this pandemic.