Dr. Marc Saurette

As a professor, you tend to accrue more and more online identities as time goes by. If you want (?), you can check out my Departmental Profile or my Hcommons profile to know more about the academic me. I also have an inelegant profile page in Carleton's edossier system (cuPortfolio), which we will be using in class this year.

These kinds of academic/ professional sites obscure something key about your professors. Usually, we got into this whole world because we intensely loved something about the past. For me, my love of the Middle Ages started with die-cast knights and Lego castles in a Winnipeg basement. It deepened after spending several years of my childhood in Germany - surrounded by medieval villages, ruined castles and awe-inspiring cathedrals. Then I really fell in love with the period by reading novels about the Middle Ages - especially Arthuriana like T.H. White's Once and Future King or Thomas Berger's Arthur Rex. So I studied history because I fell in love with the subject and then, during university, became passionate about how exciting the world of the past showed people to be.

As an undergraduate, I found myself in the Department of History at the University of Manitoba, soaking up mediævalia from ex-missionaries, Byzantinists and the new historicists in the English department. But choice encounters with a charismatic Victorianist and a committed researcher of Latin American history drew me into the worlds of nineteenth-century égouts, "disaster" as a historical force, class identity and cultural power dynamics. They made me rethink what I thought history was by teaching me new methodologies and THIS made me change how I wanted to think and write about the Middle Ages.

I did my graduate work at the University of Toronto, Canada's (and arguably North America's) most important centre for Medieval Studies. I ended up entranced by the monks of an obscure French monastery (Cluny) and their powerful, charismatic (if also somewhat problematic) abbot Peter. He liked to write, I liked to read. It was a marriage made in heaven. So I sat down to read. A few years later I stopped reading and started to write. And I haven’t stopped finding things about him to think about.