This article is the second in a roundtable focused on what it means to be a parent as a historian.
At this very moment, I have a tiny racecar and a baby velociraptor in my work bag. I think I put them there initially because my work bag is also my parenting bag and some very small hands gave them to me while we were at the park so they would not get lost. But then I left them there on a recent conference trip so I could take a piece of my children with me for a few days.
A tiny racecar and a baby velociraptor. Photo provided by the author.
One memento for each child, my twin boys who have just started kindergarten. I first learned I was pregnant immediately after passing my Ph.D. qualifying exams. A few weeks later I discovered I was carrying twins. There are so many twins in my family that I joked I would probably end up with a set, but it was still a shock to see two embryos on the sonogram monitor, and I was in disbelief about it for months, convinced that one would likely be lost. The next year and a half had me navigating a truly strange and trying set of circumstances, amping up the stress of a high-risk pregnancy and then the many unwelcomed opinions that came from every direction with the added pressure of doctoral research and its associated travel.
My research plan assumed a full year of travel to archives in California, England, and Italy. This was the epitome of humanistic study, in which I, the scholar, would sink myself into the dusty tomes of thousand-year-old manuscripts, nestled amidst the living yet historical city. But this ideal was made for independently wealthy white men living before WWI, and in that fantasy, I would have been the trailing spouse. Traveling for research with one baby seemed insane but doable. Traveling for research with two babies became a looming impossibility. But, if I waited to travel until my kids were older, I would open us all up to a horrific trauma of separation – they would remember me as object permanence set in, and they would know when I was gone. The solution was to spend the first few months of my research year commuting weekly to my domestic archives, only coming home on weekends, and then to split six months of research abroad into three two-month trips, with my husband taking solo parenting responsibilities, and I would come back to new babies every time.
I survived the year, although it did involve the very delayed management of postpartum depression and cutting out an entire archive trip to Messina, Sicily. When I arrived home to stay in the fall of 2019, I was emotionally exhausted and pained by having to reacclimate my very young children to my presence. Soothing them back to sleep in the middle of the night became another round of bonding, reminding them what it felt like to be held by me. I was ready to resume my life, to take my kids to play groups and jump back into campus life myself. And then of course 2020 had other plans, and my year of forced isolation extended on. I listened to Bo Burnham’s Inside (2021) on repeat as I wrote my dissertation, changing the words in my mind to “Robin’s been a little depressed, but look I wrote you a chapter!”
That was four years ago. The anxiety of ruining my kids with my own aspirations has been replaced with the more typical anxiety of ruining them with my laziness. Parenting is a constant labor driven by the immediate urge to keep children physically safe and the more abstract goal to develop them emotionally and intellectually. My energy is not limitless, especially as parenting continued on through a very difficult dissertation defense and the intense uncertainty of an almost nonexistent academic job market. But here, on the other side of my dissertation, history is finally on my side. My research into the exchange of medieval scientific knowledge has shown me how arbitrary our standards for development and intelligence are.1
In the time period (eleventh and twelfth centuries) I study, adults were just developing the language to talk about things like the nature of matter. They were developing numerals conducive to a place-value decimal system for computation and more advanced math. To cap it all off, the only people using these forms of scientific and mathematical writing were monks and the very wealthy individuals who were educated by monks, because literacy was such a specialized skill. All of this means that nearly a millennium ago, five-year-old children were not having their intellectual and physical development tracked via their ability to properly hold a pencil or recognize numbers or sound out letters, because even adults (famously including Charlemagne) were not expected to know or do these things.
This knowledge has freed me. I can instead look to the many other cues that my children give me of their interior lives, like one’s ability to recognize and name every single brand of car, sometimes based only on the taillights, or the other’s penchant for repeating The Lorax from memory. These traits of symbol recognition and oral pattern repetition are the developmental milestones upon which education has been based for considerably longer periods of human history. Though the process of research may have strained me, the history itself has put things in perspective, just as I hoped it would.
- My dissertation, Materials of Science in Norman Sicily: Translation, transmission, and trade in the central Mediterranean corridor, looks at a moment of intellectual and social transition in medieval Sicily. During the twelfth century, Sicily was the site of an apparent movement that translated Arabic and Greek scientific texts into Latin, which scholars often understand as the starting point for what would become the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution. I looked into the extent to which these translations offered new knowledge versus solidifying Mediterranean science into the Latin language. Most of my research involved investigating the many ways knowledge can travel outside of texts, from scientific illustrations to the trade of medically-significant goods to the production of copper objects informed by alchemical tradition. I found that the change of the twelfth century in Sicily itself was more a change in how scientific knowledge was expressed than what was known or who knew it, even though this would indeed result in a significant change in European modes of science.
