Purgatory Disease Possession Witches Etc.

More on DH coming soon... Let this image to the left serve as a teaser. Yes, the file labels are:

Purgatory

Names

Education

Disease

Possession

Uncles

Witches

On falling in love with a dead white guy

So, I've found another soul mate to add to my small collection. I confess to having a thing for older men, but I've reached new heights... or depths would be more appropriate. His name is David Herlihy, and he's deceased. Actually, I'd probably fall in love with his wife, Patricia, as well, if only I knew as much about her as I do him. Where to start? It began in October 2006. The crisp autumn air always gets me. It's like there's a pheremone in decaying leaves or something... Anyway, I began a project processing the professional papers of a medieval history professor that died fifteen years ago of pancreatic cancer. BO-RINGG, right? Wrong. So, very, wrong.

The guy was a devout Catholic. Born in San Francisco in 1937 (if I remember correctly), he attended a Jesuit school, a Jesuit college, went on to graduate studies in history at Catholic University. He started out in college researching the life of a San Francisco priest that stood up to anti-Catholic bigotry in late 19th century San Francisco, then into medieval studies researching the papacy and Pisan coinage etc. He went on to Yale, where his mentor encouraged him to delve into the treasury of largely untouched Italian medieval town records. This is the early 1950s. Coincidentally, the UNIVAC computer comes out and is sold to the US Census Bureau to process census data. David Herlihy somehow gets access to similar behemoth computers to apply the same methods to medieval data. This is after he has laboriously transcribed by hand segments of the property tax records ("Catasti"), translated them, and prepared the information for data entry. He also has to learn FORTRAN to write his own data analysis programs. From this laborious process he is able to extrapolate and visualize socioeconomic trends of the 14th and 15th centuries. He's able to construct a demographic picture of a region of Italy from over 500 years ago.

It's getting late, and I'm getting tired, but I will post more on my man DH in the near future. I will explain further why I'm in love with a dead white guy, even though I'm happily married to an older, not dead, guy. Remind me to tell you about DH's feminism, anti-racism, anti-homophobia, pro-family-ism, self-respect, and advocacy for his wife's career in an old-boy's field, and how his work ultimately connects with the spirit of TIME + PLACE....