Tuesday 9th February

Well peeps, here I am all excited and enthused because I have some essay planning underway, and it's such a cracking subject I'm thinking about changing my dissertation plans to move towards this idea. Some of you know that I've just done a presentation on Augustine Bishop of Hippo's book On The Care To Be Had For The Dead. This is an extremely interesting book written in the 4th Century by the above, basically following a letter that he had regarding a widow who wanted to bury her son near to the body of a saint. Augustine didn't think it would do the son any good to be buried in a place that might be regarded as especially sanctified, he didn't think it would do any harm, but having considered the subject there were a few other things he'd like to move on to... and so on he went. It's oddly stream of consciousness type of writing for a Church Father, who are usually more structured, but in and amongst all of this are a few references to 'the entranced', 'the mad', those who address people who are not present, as if they were present - in other words, it's a bit of a window into how the people of the antique viewed people with mental health issues. I'm going to write an essay on this, which is a great opportunity to firstly come up with a really great bibliography, and see whether this topic really has the legs for a dissertation. So I'm quite chuffed.
The presentation itself seemed to go ok, no great shakes I don't think, but not a total disaster either.

Anyhow it's gone extremely cold up here. In fact I shall have to go and put the heating on in a minute, I've been sitting here all morning searching the library catalogue to find sources for my essay. My but I've come up with some interesting looking stuff - what do you think of Demonical Possession among primitive races in antiquity? It dates from the 1930's, and a lot of these very old history books have lots of references in them to the primary sources that I can dig out and use - you wouldn't necessarily use a book that old as a source, but trace it back to it's original roots. Mind you I was writing my presentation on books written in 1909, and 1907 - one of which is Van Genneps Rites of Passage, which frankly I can't believe is that old. It's certainly lasting that's for sure.
Anyhow that's it for now, I'm desperate to go and put the heating on!