Matt Gabriele

@profgabriele

Professor, historian, author THE BRIGHT AGES (2021), OATHBREAKERS (2024), and VIOLENCE: A CHRISTIAN HISTORY (coming soon). Host podcast "American Medieval" nostalgia/apocalypse. religion/violence. medieval/modern. Neutral Good. He/ him. profgabriele.com

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Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· 27d

worth pointing out that Mehdi posted this vaguely antisemitic thing on the Nazi app, but not here

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· 27d

it is weird (a) for a person who doesn't follow me to assume I'm talking about them (b) to think that I don't live in Appalachia, held elected office in Appalachia, am active both locally and state-wide in politics (c) to immediately be an asshole

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· 27d

This only ends with William imprisoning Harry in a castle in Wales

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· 28d

one of these events involved them gathering in A PUBLIC PARK WITH THEIR PARENTS JFC let kids be kids!

One incident in June involved hundreds of teens convening after dark at Romare Bearden Park, where police arrested 23 teenagers and one adult and issued citations to 13 parents.

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· 29d

New laptop sticker

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· 29d

Matty did my meme

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jul 10

I mean this seems like a bad faith reading of Macron, whose whole quote in the article is about the current democratic relationship between France and the UK

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jul 6

Amazing how responses to Kathleen’s (correct) post and others hold humanities education responsible for literally everyone who has ever studied in those fields, while STEM education “cannot” be held responsible for their graduates doing bad stuff

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jul 4

And again remember how Douglass ends his speech, with hope - a call to see the forces working to make America fulfill its heretofore broken promises God speed the year of Jubilee daily.jstor.org/what-to-the-...

Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably, work the downfall of slavery. " The arm of the Lord is not shortened," and the doom of slavery is certain.

I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from "the Declaration of Independence," the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age.
Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up, from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long
established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude

the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a
change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth.
Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday
excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated.—Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic, are distinctly heard on the other.

The far off and almost fabulous Pacific
rolls in grandeur at our feet. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The fiat of the Almighty, "Let there be Light," has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen, in contrast with nature. Afric must rise
and put on her yet unwoven garment.
"Ethiopia shall stretch out her hand unto God." In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it:
God speed the year of jubilee

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jul 4

Happy 4th of July

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jul 2

just found this and kind of love it www.etsy.com/listing/9860...

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jul 2

Bowdoin college has a lovely statue facing downtown

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain statue at Bowdoin college in maine

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jul 1

Me looking at England/ Harry Kane:

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jul 1

It’s actually wrapped up in medieval historiography and I talk about it in Chapter 1 global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jul 1

These are all right-wing grievances. In the 2nd screenshot that’s just plain antisemitism. What are you doing here?

A lone attacker builds a world view the way you build a plate at a buffet — a bit of racism here, some antisemitism there, a scoop of anti-government conspiracy; whatever fits his grievance. It doesn't hold together as a doctrine. It holds together as a feeling.

He attacks a "Judeo-bourgeois class" and names "influential Zionists" as targets — old-fashioned antisemitism wearing an anti-capitalist coat. Asking whether he was left-wing or right-wing is the wrong question.

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jul 1

Why do you say that?

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jun 23

He did the meme

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jun 20

Yikes

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jun 12

Please don’t get a gun. It’s much more likely someone you love will accidentally kill themself, and the vast swath of American history with racial pogroms shoes that the gun won’t do anything We need systemic disarmament not Wild West fantasies

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jun 11

late to this but it's really good. especially this part. the Vandy-Wash U report is a fascist-enabling document to purge faculty from universities. it should be widely reviled and condemned. full article --> www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

But perhaps the worst parts of this report are its repressive conclusions. A committee that fears left-wing censorship of scholarship (which is a real thing to be concerned about) could have easily proposed any number of excellent recommendations, such as urging stronger protections for academic freedom and tenure and calling upon all colleges and professional associations to adopt defenses for free expression.

Instead, the committee takes a much more disturbing direction toward endorsing academic authoritarianism—the use of administrative power to seize control of academic departments and impose ideological standards on them in order to purge leftist scholars.

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jun 9

Listen it’s only fair

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jun 7

dude

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jun 7

let me add too that we were ostensibly closed because our major was "unsustainable," but the state's - and university's - own metrics showed that our enrollment has been growing consistently since 2012 this wasn't about money and it wasn't about metrics. it was about something else.

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jun 7

people online will post anything. "Charlie Brown had hoes." No he didn't. That isn't true.

Post from Instagram about the film “death of Robin Hood” saying: “"You think of medieval battles as knights in shining armor, riding in on horses, but most of the time it was just peasants beating each other to death with shovels in the mud."
Director Michael Sarnoski in an exclusive new look at THE DEATH OF ROBINHOOD”

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jun 6

lol

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jun 6

it's like the backlash from the literary turn. there's a point where they attack Hayden White (!!!) for a 1978 essay! like, that's not what White's saying at all! these people are idiots!

There is, however, a long-standing and deeply rooted current in contemporary
humanistic scholarship that regards the idea of scholarly objectivity with profound
suspicion. One version of this skepticism is purely epistemological. A scholar of literature
or history may concede that there are genuine facts about the meanings of texts or about
the past which prevail independently of our representations of them, while at the same
time holding that scholarship is aimed, not at an accurate reconstruction of those facts,
but rather at an edifying narrative. Any such narrative is constrained to fit the data — the
indisputable facts about the text or the historical record. But insofar as it goes beyond

this, filling in the gaps, giving explanations, assigning meaning or significance, the aim is
not to recover the real past, or the real meanings, but rather to construct a story that
serves our purposes. As Hayden White puts the point (approvingly): What historians
write are really “verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found.”
(White 1978, 82) (This is somewhat analogous to a minority view in the philosophy of
science, according to which the aim of science is not to discover the real causes of the
phenomena, but rather to construct a model serviceable for the prediction and control of
nature (van Fraassen 1980).)
This conception of the scholarly enterprise can seem liberating; the scholar is licensed to
imagine how things might have been, to explore the manifold ways in which texts can be
read, without pretending to know what really happened or what was meant. It can also be
illuminating; one learns something about a text when one learns that it can fruitfully be
read in a certain way. But it is in the nature of this sort of “critical fabulation” (Hartman
2008) to blur the lines between fact and fiction in a way that is potentially distorting.

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jun 6

ok i'm not done because i'm really fucking angry now. the entire premise of this report is a lie and we need more people at more prestigious places than me (at Virginia Tech) to fucking fight back. this is a bad faith attack on you - yes, you - who sit across from these assholes every meeting

from the "report:" Taken as a whole, however, our review of the disciplines paints a mixed picture. Every field we have studied shows some signs of the pathologies sketched above: a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of long-standing ideals of rigor and objectivity."

my comment: go fuck yourselves

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jun 4

Brett Kavanaugh: It is what it is George Santos: It is what it is Matt Gaetz: It is what it is Dennis Hastert: It is what it is Donald Trump: It is what it is Cool politics, yo

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jun 4

modified it for the medieval crowd

Matt Gabriele@profgabriele· Jun 3

from me and @lollardfish.bsky.social THE BRIGHT AGES