Now, the Middle Ages have held a fascination for me ever since childhood—a fascination expressed by my obsessions with fencing and riding, as well as my less-acceptable-in-polite-well-educated-and-sane-company hobbies of strapping on armor and beating my friends senseless with swords and jousting on horseback. I am, in short, what happens to that fat, geeky kid who sat alone in the cafeteria reading his Dungeons & Dragons books after he grows up, gets contact lenses, and gets in shape. Coupled with this, however, I've always had a profound sense of curiosity about the workings of the world, and if the way things are has been inevitable. In other words, what makes the world tick, and if we don't like it, can we take it apart and put it back together again? These tendencies are not very good ones if you're my parents and you'd prefer your kitchen appliances weren't destroyed, but they are helpful in scholarship.

Thus, my Fulbright project. I've always felt oppressed by time: Why do I have to get up for school so early? Why do I have to sit in this cubicle for eight to eleven hours a day? Why is the bar closing when it's only 4 AM? I'm not the only one to ask these questions: In fact, how work-time has come to be organized has been a major topic since people started questioning the Industrial Revolution. Overwhelmingly, the consensus has been that time-work discipline (which has vaguely been held to have something to do with Newton's idea of time as an independent variable) emerged as a result of increasing urbanization in the thirteenth century. In my investigations, I found that medieval people organized their work time according to the ringing of their local churches' bells. Thus, my task: To investigate how, exactly, Frère Jacques knew it was time to sound the matins. The question has more than academic interest: Philosophers from the University of Paris used medieval thinking on time to lay the groundwork for the Scientific Revolution's transformation of human society. . . a process that would ultimately result, seven hundred years later, in my alarm clock so rudely informing me it was time for another day of sitting alone in the cafeteria.

My research is proceeding apace. I'm not always sure exactly where it's going, but it's proceeding. The staff at the Bibliothéque Nationale have at least gotten to know me, as I found out when no less than five of them asked if I had found my laptop power cord after I had accidentally left it there overnight. My satisfactions are threefold: I've found reference to an officer known as a matricularus who was in charge of tending the monastery's clock in some early 13th century records; I accidentally stumbled upon a previously unknown copy of the oldest Italian work on fencing; and I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in the Occidental Manuscripts room at BN Richelieu blasting the Pixies' Doolittle on his iPod. (This last item has nothing to do with medieval history, but I do like the Pixies, and, honestly, sitting alone at a desk all day gets kind of lonely.)

Overall, I've become convinced of several things: The ringing of the church bells, while sometimes organized by mechanical clocks, was not by any means rationalized in anything we could call a "scientific" manner. Rather, we have to look at the ringing of church bells as more of a socially agreed-upon signal than anything like Taylor and the Gilbreths' time-management. On the other hand, medieval people both ascribed great moral value to time-management and taking precise measurements of the transit of the constellations and various heavenly bodies. It is this, in turn, that influenced the Scholastic philosophers. We therefore can't speak of any one unified medieval (or Western) idea of time, but rather a variety of conversations, each of which was dominant at various points in history.

Unfortunately, the division of work time also means that the BN isn't always open, which means I have to find other ways of occupying my evenings. So what have I been doing with myself? The first thing I've learned in France is that no matter where you go, you bring yourself with you. I've taken the opportunity to work on my skills: I've been bucked off French horses, skewered at the oldest continually-operated fencing salle in Paris, working on my French (I can now order lunch!), and, to complement my interest in historical swordsmanship, begun learning stick fighting. But being a nerd in France is somewhat difficult; for starters, the French don't have a concept for the nerd. Alienation is unknown here—all they have is ennui. Everyone has had the same friends and tight social network since they were children. People stop by one another's apartments unannounced with bottles of wine when they're not even trying to sleep with you. Online dating is unknown.

In fact, the French have respect for intellectuals: The supermodel-cum-pop-star who's currently dating the president had a kid with a philosopher for crying out loud. Ergo, while they may think that the Middle Ages were the "bad old days" (thanks to the legacy of the Revolution, medieval romanticism á la Sir Walter Scott never quite took root in France), people love to hear about my thése, and the more pretentious references to Marxist theory and dismissals of how mondalisation has dissolved the lines between work-time and private time I can work in, the better. Now, if I could figure out exactly how to transform these conversations into making these people stop by my apartment with bottles of wine, I might be having more fun...