Some works loom large in a historic field without necessarily providing new bodies of data for that field. In fact, to a large extent, one might view the writing of historians to divide (somewhat messily) into "the presentation of facts" and "the interpretation of the presentation of facts." With an additional category of "the interpretation of the interpretation of the presentation of facts."
It was the references to Dinshaw's Getting Medieval in that third category that led me to include it in my current focus on "foundational works", but Dinshaw's book itself belongs solidly to the second category. This means that its discussion of queer-relevant themes in history largely involves moving objects around on an idea-board for which familiarity is assumed rather than created. This is, of course, much of what the work of history is: the questions of how we interpret "facts" and how different interpretations of "facts" are themselves a subject that must be studied and understood as part of "doing history."
In tackling the books in my "theoretical works" series, I've dithered a bit in how to schedule the blog. Many of my write-ups are a bit long to do as a single post, but don't necessarily contain enough interesting material to justify spreading them out over multiple weeks. So for some books, like this one, I'll be doing a cluster of sub-blogs in a single week. This means that the amount of work I spend on reading and writing them up will be a lot more concentrated than usual. For this reason, I've revised how I'm scheduling things for the next several months to break up the dense books with groups of semi-related articles. (Originally, I'd planned to do all the books in a row and get them out of the way!) I suspect this will also be more interesting for readers. I don't want to scare you away (all six of you) with a few months of nothing but theory and philosophy!
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