n/m I'm not done.
been thinking about global medieval studies and sources and wondering how fast we can get better nuance in our debates.
and I'm about to dig myself a proper hole here, so y'all want to pull up a chair to watch this over your cereal.

No 2 areas have the same source landscape. Some will have more archeaology that's been done. Some more documents remain. Some have one kind of art, others have another. Etc. Apples and oranges, always, and all fed through the MANY ways that colonial history influences such things

(Colonial histories infl how our very fields developed, the kinds of sources we train to use, what historical materials were viewed as valuable to keep, etc. So. Many. Influences.)

and I admit I'm looking at one corner of this debate here especially, pulling in contexts and examples from others:
Medieval England doesn't equal "Medieval"
Nope. It sure as hell does not.

(Insert the necessary quick aside that in NA rn "a medievalist" is, by the numbers, an English -literature- specialist. So that's always hanging in the background of these things.)
BUT I continue

English documentary history IS unique. Unique in a range of ways. It continues to directly undergird documentary cultures in many parts of the world today (cough cough colonialism cough). ALSO

bc of that imperialist chauvinism, you get antiquarians very early editing and PUBLISHING medieval doc runs. 1700s onward. AND ALSO

English gov't docs functioned, in the MA themselves, v differently than notarial systems.

Since the MA, English docs tend to isolate, and have been preserved, in use-categories, many of which remain used today (probate, etc).
In contrast,

A notarial register can be wildly rich in info, but it requires substantial editing before a researcher can dip in and out quickly to get what they need as they can (more) in English docs.
And that editing hasn't been done (different colonial histories).

Now there are certainly parts of the medieval Islamicate world (especially) that DO generate roughly comparable use-separated archives, but (cough cough colonialism) those archives "don't survive." Well, they do in some cases, but they haven't been catalogued, etc.

Librarians discuss "discoverability"-- how easily a researcher can find the bit of info they're looking for.
A WHOLE LOT of medieval documentary culture is simply not very discoverable, Partly bc of how it was originally archived and Partly bc of colonial infocultures.

So I'm wondering how we can nuance our insistence that England not stand in for "medieval" (bc it sure as shit shouldn't) while at the same time recognizing, and Using, the fact that it's got a discoverable archive nowhere else has.

(1st for me would be to pump resources into cataloguing and editing those Islamicate archives. and how.)
BUT WE CAN IMAGINE EVEN MORE

ESPECIALLY given that the field may be Just Us (can link that old thread at the end if you want)

Obv England-focused scholars need to get better yesterday about our rhetoric. Absofuckinglutely.
But what else? How can all of us teach the rest of Just Us about how the metastructures providing, and limiting, our sources shape our research?

ALL archival work (like archeaological work I think) is painstaking, slow "is this it? no. Is this it? no." sort of research, but sitting down to look at probate all day and working through a single notarial register to filter out the handful of wills in it? VERY different praxis