A Self-Indulgent Post

This is an exciting day for me, because about midday today I reached 20,000 page views on this blog. As I like to remind myself sometimes, this is approximately 19,990 more 'people' than will ever read the thesis I've spent the past three years on! Never mind; I'm almost as proud of one as of the other. I've also only now realised that the 22nd February just gone was this blog's fourth birthday. 20,000 views in four years isn't that many, but when you consider how obscure most of my subject-matter is, I choose to find it heartening that so many people are interested in it! It's been a very beneficial experience for me; I've learned a lot. I'm thoroughly committed to the idea that academics should make their work as available and accessible to a wide audience as possible, and the appreciative and intelligent responses of my readers here have convinced me that there is an audience for this kind of thing. Heaven only knows if I'll ever get a job in anything related to my field of study, but if I don't, at least I won't feel like the time's been entirely wasted while I've shared some of my work with you.

To celebrate, I went back and looked at some of my previous posts. There's a list of the most popular posts there on the sidebar, but that doesn't really reflect the best of this blog, in my ever-so-humble opinion (well, except for the post on the stained glass of Canterbury, which I do like); so here to add to it are links to some of my own favourite posts, one from each year. You may have noticed I like linking to my own posts (it's not my fault! I have a limited range of topics, and they're all related!), but these are the ones I don't think I've ever found an excuse to link to:

2008: that would have to be my first post, almost the only time I've written about the real, Chaucerian Clerk of Oxford. Oops.

2009: Slants of Light, on medieval romance and 'sun shining through glass'.

2010: a little language rant. I don't often write film reviews, but when I do, they include the word 'monomachy'. (An honourable mention to this post on Lammas)

2011: A Month since Michaelmas (but also Wilton, the New Narnia, and the New Jerusalem)


Thank you for reading; I'm grateful for all my readers - and still mostly just pleasantly surprised that anyone cares about the stuff I care about!