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Jamie Kreiner, "The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction" (Liveright, 2023)
00:44:11
An interview with Jamie Kreiner
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- [00:01]
Marshall Poe
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- [01:22]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very excited today to have with me Dr. Jamie Kreiner to tell us all about her book titled the Wandering what Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction. It's just come out in 2023 from Livwright Norton, and this book does a whole bunch of things. First of all, it tells us what Christian monks thought about in terms of distraction. What did they think was distracting? How did they try and get around it? To what extent was that successful? And also helps us understand how this investigation is not just a historical one. Very much has legacies and implications for how we think about these topics today. And it does all of this while also being quite funny and quite succinct. So an impressive book on a lot of levels. And Jamie, I'm very pleased to welcome you to the podcast to tell us all about it.
- [02:20]
Dr. Jamie Kreiner
Thanks so much for having me, Miranda. It's good to be here.
- [02:23]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Before we get into the various things the Christian monks did or did not do relative to distraction. We should probably have you introduce yourself a little bit and explain how you came to this project in the first place.
- [02:38]
Dr. Jamie Kreiner
I am a professor of history at the University of Georgia. I live in Athens, Georgia. I am from Denver, Colorado. Originally. I had started out there as a clarinetist at the University of Colorado. I had a great clarinet professor who first got me interested in thinking about thinking because I didn't have a ton of time for the practice rooms because I had to work nearly full time in college. And he helped me play around with ways of, you know, disciplining my own mind so that I could make the most out of the limited time I had to practice. But I also started taking medieval history classes while I was there and first got exposed then at the same time, to early medieval monks. And both of these interests, you know, were not totally dormant during grad school, but, you know, they took a back burner to other stuff that I was working on. And then, you know, I reacquainted myself with monastic literature from late antiquity, in the early Middle Ages, and was so delighted to see monks all around the Mediterranean, from the Middle east to the British Isles, thinking about thinking. So I really thought it was worth sharing this with more people.
- [04:02]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Absolutely. And that last comment, the idea of monks kind of all over the Mediterranean, I think, is a really important sort of foundational thing to talk about, to understand kind of who these monks are that we're talking about. So could you explain kind of where, when, and what sorts of monks this book focuses on and why? How did you come up with those boundaries?
- [04:27]
Dr. Jamie Kreiner
Yeah, it's a good question to start with, because in my experience teaching medieval history, a lot of students sort of assume the Middle Ages is basically about England and France and maybe Germany. But this book is about men and women who were involved in monasticism, from north and Western Europe to the Mediterranean to Eastern Europe to the Levant to Mesopotamia, all the way into to the Western Persian Empire. From the centuries roughly between 300 and 900, this is what the experts know as late antiquity in the early Middle Ages. And the monasticism in this period was very diverse. It wasn't a world of what we think of as the established monastic orders. Those came much later. It was a lot of different experimentations with different forms of disengagement or engagement with the world of different forms of discipline, of basically every. Every key ingredient of monasticism saw a lot of different ways of approaching it. So it's a. It's a kind of an argumentative but also collectively very excited period to be a monk.
- [05:53]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
It certainly seemed like that, reading the book, kind of all of these different aspects about what is distraction, how do we avoid it? All these different things. Each instance seemed to have so many different examples of, well, this community went off and did this. Meanwhile this other community saw what they were doing but did something completely different. So there's a whole lot going on, but it wasn't sort of this world because we also think of monks quite often as sort of off doing their own thing and having no idea what the other people are doing. And that doesn't quite seem to be the case. Right. There is a lot of communication.
- [06:28]
Dr. Jamie Kreiner
Yeah. I mean, certainly separation from the world was an ideal insofar as it was really about getting your priorities straight and disengaging with stuff that you didn't think mattered that much, but it didn't mean you were no longer in touch with anybody. Monks, for the most part, really knew what was going on. They, as a result, you know, some of the, some of the reasons historians know what they know about the period is because monks were often the best historians of it. They were, they had their ear to the ground for sure. And that wasn't just about, you know, political history. They kept abreast of what their fellow monks were doing in all different places. They, they were definitely plugged in in that way.
- [07:13]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So you also mentioned, of course, that these monks were men and women, which does also go against, I think, some preconceived notions about who a monk is. And when it comes to distraction particularly, obviously there are probably certain things, and I'm sure we'll get into them, that kind of make a monk more susceptible to distraction or more able to not be distracted or to what extent were there gender differences around kind of likelihood of being distracted or ability to rise above it?
- [07:50]
Dr. Jamie Kreiner
Monks mostly thought that there wasn't any difference between men and women when it came to their abilities or in the case of distraction, of their susceptibility to distraction. That was. It was a pretty level playing field as far as they saw it. They did recognize that there were a lot of differences in the experiences and challenges that monks would face depending on their gender. Like women, for example, often had a harder time just striking out on their own, in part because they usually made the choice to become monks when they were younger than men. You know, women tended to marry pretty young, so if they had decided not to marry, you know, they might, they might still be in their late teens when they decided to become a monk. And you know, they were partly more vulnerable to predation or sexual assault, stalking, that kind of thing, if they lived on their own. And also they might just be, you know, financially unable to support themselves. So they would be likelier to live in groups, for example. So, you know, that's just to highlight how, you know, monks were attentive to the ways that experiences could be gendered. But when it came to making recommendations for dealing with distraction, they saw the solutions as pretty unisex. So, you know, something that a monastery of women might develop was adapted for men without any changes, except basically like crossing off a gut set of guidelines that said for women and saying this is for men now. And it could go the other way around too.
- [09:30]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So in a lot of ways that's kind of not the kind of legacy that we expect to receive from Christian tradition today. We sort of might expect that the received legacies would be more, for example, fixed around differences in ability for gender. And this area doesn't. But it does seem this, this kind of, I don't quite want to say obsession with distraction, but they do seem really quite into thinking about it. They're thinking about distraction susceptibility, as you said, and kind of ways to work through it. You show in the book do have continuities or legacies that are still with some of our sort of modern conceptions of distraction as well. Can you tell us a bit about what those links might be?
- [10:19]
Dr. Jamie Kreiner
Yeah, I mean, monks were certainly not the first to get distracted. That's, you know, something that is just endemic to the condition of being human. But they seem to have been the first, at least in, you know, the Greco Roman world to say, not only do I get distracted and this is frustrating, but this seems to be a kind of symptom of something deeper and more serious that amounts to moral negligence. That, you know, distractedness is, is a, you know, it may be something that all humans struggle with, but that doesn't mean it's value neutral. It's actually bad and deserves to be combated. They, I think, came to this conclusion in part because they had, you know, done so much work already to create lives for themselves that enable themselves to concentrate on what mattered. Um, they wanted, they wanted to concentrate on God. And so they left their lives as they knew them to, you know, become more single minded in purpose. And yet having done that, they found that it, you know, they were still distractible, that they still struggled with their attention and, and thought that the stakes were really high, that, you know, the consequences for failing to concentrate could you know, endanger their entire enterprise, endanger their efficacy as communicators with God and, you know, the fates of those for whom they prayed and for themselves. So, you know, we obviously don't see, most of us don't see distracted of those terms anyway today. But the moralization of it, I think, is in some ways a product of the continuation of this Christian legacy past late antiquity in the early Middle Ages into later centuries, which is, you know, other historians and literary study scholars have shown, you know, the. The moralization of attention is. Has been Christian for, you know, many centuries before us. So, you know, it's not the only reason we're obsessed with it now or continue to find it something that deserves a solution. But the orientation of the problem may have started with early Christian monks.
- [12:48]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So the stakes, as you said, are really high. And they do put a lot of effort just in becoming monks, in trying to do something about these stakes. So I guess it sort of makes sense to go into more detail. What exactly were they distracted by?
- [13:06]
Dr. Jamie Kreiner
You know, a lot of it is very familiar and in some ways kind of endearing when you see them struggling with things, because it's also what we struggle with. Like, you know, they'd be reading something or singing something, and their mind would be like, going back to what it had been doing a few hours ago or thinking about what it's going to do after it's done with this activity. Or, you know, they would be trying to meditate and they'd start wondering, well, when is dinner? Or what time is it? They might get distracted by, you know, their fellow monks in the same way we get distracted by, you know, like our co workers sometimes. Like, maybe someone's being too obnoxious and in prayer and it's sort of distracting you as you're trying to do your thing, or, you know, maybe someone's chatting or laughing loudly or misbehaving a little bit in a way that you find it hard to, you know, it sort of derails your own train of thought. Yeah, you can see I'm even switching into the second person here because it's so relatable, the things that they complained about.
- [14:09]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
How familiar then were their attempts to unplug. What did they try to do to get away from this? And did any of it work?
- [14:18]
Dr. Jamie Kreiner
Some of their techniques are familiar, but I think that's what's one of the most striking things about this history, is that although the experience of distraction feels very continuous with our own, they were much more determined than we are to actually develop Strategies to deal with distraction. So they had pretty comprehensive approaches to the problem. So, you know, strategy number one is what they had all done to begin with, which is you cut out all the things in your life that you feel are pulling you away from concentration on God. And that could mean leaving your hometown, it could mean just deciding not to get married. It could mean, you know, it did mean giving up your work. The sort of normal social and familial ties that, you know, were supportive, but also really kept pulling you in all these directions. Then once you had decided to become a monk, it was a matter of determining how you set up, you know, your living situation in a way that, you know, other monks are either supportive of you or at least don't distract you. So you have to decide, do you live alone? Do you live with other people? Other strategies involved training their bodies as part of like a physical mental regimen. They thought a lot about their technologies, which is maybe the most relatable to us because we so tightly associate distraction with tech now. But for them, it was the technology of the book. Like, how do you make a book both an aid to concentration and also something that you interact with using good habits so that it doesn't become a distraction on its own. They also thought more about their memories and acculturation, like how you used the memories you had and developed new memories so that if your mind did wander, it would just go to stuff that was good. And then they had all of these metacognitive strategies to like sort of monitoring their own thinking as a sort of higher order of discipline. So it's a huge gamut of stuff. And yeah, it's definitely maybe one of the most surprising because we've lost a lot of those forms of craft.
- [16:40]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I'm certainly going to ask about more detail on some of those because they were absolutely fascinating. The first is kind of, again, this a little bit of myth busting, I suppose, because at least one of the ideas is sort of the meditating monk by themselves. No other people, no distractions, and that's kind of what they're seeking. But as you detail in the book, Community was in fact one of the tools to work against distraction. It wasn't just a source of one. So I was wondering if you could kind of unpack that for us. How could it be helpful and how could it maybe also not be.
- [17:20]
Marshall Poe
So?
- [17:21]
Dr. Jamie Kreiner
One of the most basic ways it could help is that if you live in a community that has a shared schedule and shared purpose, having a lot of people participate in the same Routine not only created a kind of emotional support in some cases, but it also, through the kind of momentum of collective action and a preset schedule, just ensured that your day would have both enough variation and enough structure to help keep you doing what you wanted to be doing and what you were supposed to be doing. There were also other ways that having people around could help. Like, some monasteries thought it was good that monks kind of monitored each other, so if, you know, they saw one doing something they shouldn't, they could call them out on it. Other monasteries thought that was a big problem, and it led to snitching and, you know, bad relationships and resentments and things. Another benefit of community is that you could have elders acting as kinds of mentors for you. So monks treated, you know, either their abbot or another monastic leader as a confidant. So it was, you know, an opportunity to, you know, give an account of where your mind had been going lately and even going into deeper analysis of certain distracted detours to see if they were problematic or not. And also just to have an exemplar, someone to look up to as a model of what a good monk looked like and also as someone who provided leadership to the community as a whole. So there could be a lot of benefits there.
- [19:11]
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- [20:12]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And the distractions, of course, being people talking too much, too loudly. There was a long list. Yeah, yeah.
- [20:19]
Dr. Jamie Kreiner
I mean, certainly, you know, the fact that monks misbehaved, you know, and threatened to, you know, in a large community, it could cascade and it could, you know, snowball into disorder was one of the fears. So there were some monks who said, you know, it's Best to live in isolation. You don't want to go with those risks. Then a counter argument was sometimes, well, if you were totally green, you would be unprepared for living in isolation either. You would, you know, at a minimum, think you were doing a really great job with no form of comparison or check. So, you know, who knows how well you're actually doing as a monk. And at worst, being alone and not having adequate training could mean that you were even more vulnerable to getting distracted, more likely to give up, more likely to become discouraged and, you know, and weaken over time.
- [21:17]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Definitely concerning some benefits there too. As you said, sort of enough structure to keep you on track, but not so repetitive that your mind drifts. Because minds drifting, of course, happened even with like the perfect set of rules. There were definitely, as an aside, a bunch of really interesting instances of monasteries having rules for how they all should operate. So I imagine that was probably a pretty fun set of historical documents to go look at. But aside from the kind of rules and external stuff, you have a whole section in the book about bodily challenges, the ways in which the body could be a problem. Now, of course, if we think about the body and we think about monks, the kind of obvious, again, the myth is, oh, it must have all been about sex. Not so true. What were the kind of list of things that monks were worried about in terms of their bodies and what was maybe top of the list?
- [22:12]
Dr. Jamie Kreiner
Well, most, basically, the body was frustrating because it wanted things that maybe competed with your attention. So, you know, it would get tired or you'd start to feel grimy or you, you know, you would want to look good or you. Yeah, there were, you know, the body would get turned on, it would have to deal with sexual impulses. But the worst and most frustrating one was hunger, because the body was always going to be periodically hungry. And greed and hunger together were seen as the sort of fiercest combatant with monks attention. But on the flip side, I mean, I think the other sort of surprising thing in researching this history to me is that, you know, we tend to think of monks as wanting to just discipline the body so much that it just sort of became erased, that, you know, it needed to be punished more than anything else in order to allow the mind to flourish. But what most monks saw, I mean, there were some in a minority who did, who did take a sort of more violent view of their own physical selves. But most monks thought that the body really could be harnessed to do good for the mind, that you trained the body and mind together. So that you would just become a higher functioning person, a whole person with physical and mental capacities working in tandem as a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship. So in the case of hunger, you, it wasn't about starving yourself. You wanted to, you wanted to be alive. You didn't want to become so hungry that you fell asleep in exhaustion or became distracted because you were thinking about food constantly. You just needed to create a kind of diet or fasting regimen that was moderate enough that it didn't become its own end in itself, but instead allowed your body to thrive enough while also giving space for your mind to think about the things that it wanted to think about.
- [24:31]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That is a more well rounded approach than I think we often assume we with monks and sort of how they thought about their bodies. So I was also really interested to read that. And speaking of reading, you've mentioned a little bit technology, obviously, books. We are the new books network, so we do quite love our books. But the monks, as you detail them, are in fact a lot more ambivalent about books. Why?
- [25:00]
Dr. Jamie Kreiner
Well, books could become so enjoyable that they were again, an end in themselves. And that was a problem. Like you didn't want to fall so deeply into your world of books that you sort of lost track of God and the divine order, the things you were really trying to concentrate on. And like any other activity, like working or relaxing, too much reading could be a problem. Reading too needed to be done in moderation. Monks were also a little bit worried about how certain kinds of reading material might be a little bit riskier. They didn't really ban certain kinds of reading entirely, not most of them. They just thought that it needed to be handled carefully. So, you know, like pre Christian texts or the texts written by, you know, Christians of another persuasion or a different sect, those kind of things, they weren't, they were, they were problematic, but they weren't something that most monks thought was worth banning entirely. There was always something to learn that just needed to be handled carefully. And then, you know, just on a most basic tech level, you know, a reader could just be sitting with a book and like fall asleep or start, you know, paging through it and just like looking at the, how many pages were left or how pretty the calligraphy was and not really, you know, objectifying the book more than really absorbing it. So those were some of the basic problems that they saw. On the other hand, the advantage of books was that they could be, I mean, most basically, if you read material that you had decided was really worth absorbing, if you read it deeply and slowly and often even on repeat, it could become just part of the way you thought, so that it would be harder to differentiate between sort of the ideas that came from you, separate from what you had read, and the ideas that were braided with that material. So if you're, you know, interested in redirecting your attention to things that matter to you, then books could be a really powerful tool in that way, and, you know, more basic, on a more technical level, you can design books in ways that make them engaging. So you can use the technology as a kind of enhancement to your concentration. Could be just little things about how you arrange material on the page. It could be the way that you design a text structurally, internally, rhetorically. Monks experimented a lot with book technology, and despite their ambivalence, they became some of the most enthusiastic copyists and collectors of books in the early Middle Ages.
- [28:12]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Can you tell us a bit more about kind of how they used the technology or played around with it? There were a bunch of examples in the book that were just absolutely fascinating.
- [28:23]
Dr. Jamie Kreiner
A really basic one is something we very much take for granted, which is punctuation, just providing spacing between words, and then marks indicating clauses or ends of ideas. You know, readers didn't always have those things. Monks weren't the ones to invent them, but they were enthusiastic adopters of these interventions, and it just made it easier for readers to follow the text, especially if Latin was not their native language. So, for example, readers in the British Isles were often a big. They were enthusiastic users of punctuation. You might do things, again, that we sort of take for granted now, but were early medieval additions to book technology, like rubrication, or using a different color to signal the start of sections or chapters or book titles? Sometimes it was a matter of making marginal notes in the pages, like, this is a really important idea, or this continues the theme of X. It could be much more ambitious design projects where an entire text would be laid out in a way that sort of embodied the argument visually on the page. So, like, particular historical arguments about, you know, different historical timelines could be represented in parallel columns that then bled together when, you know, there was, like, imperial conquests or mergers. There's. Yeah, they were very inventive. I mean, and then that doesn't even begin to, you know, cover all of the, you know, innovations and illustration and iconography where they communicated extremely complex ideas and pretty visually economical ways.
- [30:22]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I would definitely say for listeners of this who are intrigued, the book has so many cool examples of this, including some reproductions of the images of what this looked like. So would definitely point listeners to read the whole book to kind of see some of these examples. But we are going to move on from books as much as that is always my favorite part. The monks did a whole bunch of things without kind of any external things, not just thinking about their body, trying to, you know, what kind of balance with other people, what kind of balance with the rest of the world. How do we deal with books? They also, as you've briefly mentioned so far, did a lot with their memories. So how and why were they training their memories?
- [31:07]
Dr. Jamie Kreiner
Well, sometimes memories were the most distracting things a person experienced. Like the example of a monk just sort of, you know, maybe in the middle of chanting a psalm, thinking about what, you know, she had done a few hours earlier. That all is about, you know, what her memory is harboring. So one of the things monks wanted to do is just like a kind of renovation of the contents of their memories. It's hard to excise things, but it's pretty easy to fill the memory with new contents. And so they really emphasized taking a proactive approach to memories, which I think is very unusual from the way we think of ours today. We tend to think of our memories like kind of black box, like, oh, I don't know how I forgot that, or what's to be done about my bad memory.
- [32:00]
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- [32:01]
Dr. Jamie Kreiner
They were very different in this regard. So, I mean, that's one of the reasons that reading was so important. Reading becomes recitation becomes memory. So that's one way of filling your mind with better memories. Another way is to think of the memory not just as a storage unit, but as a kind of, like a kind of construction site or place to experiment or build out ideas as you, you know, are shifting through your memories and making new ones. You can create kind of entirely new vistas or storehouses by rebuilding things with your memories and creating new connections. So they had pretty sophisticated meditational practices where, you know, you might start with a word that you really wanted to think more about, like a key concept. And you'd say, well, what does this word remind me of? Or where are there? What are the other instances of this word or this concept have I encountered? And you sort of start thinking through those different instances or places and move from those examples to further connections, either going to a different topic word or expanding out to different associations that you've had with the same word or related locations. And, you know, it seems to us like meandering. Like, it doesn't seem particularly logically rigorous. But what monks were interested in doing is creating new sight lines of stuff that was really actually quite familiar to you. But in the work of collating all these different examples, you'd have a kind of panoramic view of something that you might not have considered so deeply before. And in the process of seeing how many different ways there were of understanding just a given set term or concept, you'd start to appreciate one, how immense the universe really was. And two, you're building for your memory a kind of set of examples that you can keep returning to and turning over that the vision you have of a particular idea isn't ever going to be finished or finite. It's a sort of model of how you're always going to be learning more about the world. So that was a sort of technique that allowed the mind to do a lot of moving around. To some, it might look like kind of aimless wandering, but to a good meditator, it was actually a way of kind of controlling the motions of the mind without unrealistically expecting them to stop entirely.
- [35:02]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Speaking of the mind moving around a lot, why was metacognition so important to these monks and how did they cultivate it?
- [35:14]
Dr. Jamie Kreiner
Metacognition. So like thinking about thinking and more specifically, thinking about yourself. Thinking was a way of, of getting deeper self knowledge by observing your mind in action. So at a, at a, at its simplest level, it was just checking in and saying, what am I thinking about right now? Where is my mind moving? Where did it go throughout the day? How does that compare to what it did yesterday? Getting a sense of its behaviors and in the process of checking in? Ideally, it would over time encourage the mind to think about the stuff you actually wanted it to think about. The idea being that if you didn't check in with it, it would go all over the place and it wouldn't really be accountable in any way. But there were more advanced ways of, I guess, boosting the mind's motivation to pay attention to what it was supposed to. It could be imagining yourself thinking in situations where you're very likely to be deep in concentration. So maybe it's a fascinating conversation with a friend, maybe it's you speaking to a ruler or a judge, you know, places where you would not, you know, let your mind drift. You really had a stake in how the conversation was going. So imagine yourself in those situations and transpose your mind then to that feeling in the work that it's doing to talk to God. To try to recapture some of that motivation, you could scale it up even more and Say, a real motivating factor would be to picture your death or imagine, what if you were to die tomorrow? How does that then change your motivation? Does it seem like the stakes are higher when you're aware that you only have a finite amount of time? These are all sort of ways of reflecting on the mind's actions. Probably the most typical metacognitive move is something that they called discernment, which involved watching distractions as they came to you and then trying to determine basically whether these surprise thoughts were worth following or needed to be jettisoned. And that could be tricky because no thought was on its own in isolation, inherently good or bad. Um, so, for example, if a monk is sitting around and suddenly gets the. This idea in her head to fast. Well, normally fasting is good, but sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's inappropriate, like maybe it's Easter, and the monk definitely should not be fasting on a holiday. It was up to the monk to decide, based on context, whether the idea was bad or not. And this kind of detective work could be really hard because sometimes they didn't know if an idea was worth keeping or not. And that's where the role of your advisor, especially came into play. And if you didn't have a mentor around, God was also, well, God was essential always to consult about these. These distracting thoughts, but God and triangulated with a mentor would be even better. And this detective work they were supposed to be doing all the time, just like watching thoughts cycle in and out. Because if you identified one that was bad, well, some monks thought that was enough. It just sort of withered right away just by being caught out. And others thought it required something a little more active, like a statement to the thought, like, I don't have any use for you right now, or, you know, something like that. So these are a few of the most popular techniques when it came to metacognition.
- [39:21]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So given all of these things, the techniques for metacognition, the thinking about books, the trying to work with one's body and thinking about community, all these sort of things that we've touched on so far, what do you think we can maybe learn from? Or are there any things we can learn from? Given that our experiences of distraction, as you said, are so similar to what these monks are talking about, and yet their techniques for challenging them are quite different. Do you think any of those techniques are relevant to us today?
- [39:56]
Dr. Jamie Kreiner
I mean, I think we can play around with any of the techniques, or at least most of them that I, you know, bring up in the book. But I think on a more general level, what we can learn is to deal with distraction more strategically. And like the Monks, start seeing the mind not just as something that we as individual agents can manipulate with like a single fix, like, you know, putting do not Disturb on our phone, but instead appreciating, like the Monks did, that the mind is constrained by a lot of different forces, but could also take advantage of its interactive relationship with those forces. So thinking about our environments, thinking about our social or community organizations, or thinking about our bodies and our memories, not just our tech and our executive functioning, like thinking about this stuff in concert and maybe developing a repertory of strategies that work together and that are designed on the understanding that, yeah, we're distracted by all these things, but also these same forces could maybe be taken advantage of too. I think that's sort of the more valuable lesson to take away from these Monks.
- [41:24]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's a very useful lesson, very thought provoking one as well, to take away from the book, from this conversation. Which leads me only to my final question. The book has just come out, but as we all know, one has to turn in the manuscript a while before it's available to actual readers. So is there anything you might be currently working on or looking to work on next, big or small, that you'd like to make listeners aware of?
- [41:53]
Dr. Jamie Kreiner
Right now I'm working on a little small project that's an extension of the book in some ways, which is what these monks thought about popular music. There's. I mean, it ties to the theme of distraction in certain ways. Monks thought that sound was probably the most distracting sensory input, whereas we probably would say that it's vision, especially because of our phones. But there's something interesting there about, you know, why popular music is especially catchy and it's hard to get out of the mind. But also sound meant so much to them in other ways, through their chanting and recitations and, you know, emphasis on not chatting with each other too much. So, yeah, I want to explore that a bit more, I think.
- [42:50]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Intriguing. I certainly would have thought they'd be very pro music because of, as you said, the chanting and the psalms and the hymns and all of that. But you do have quite a few examples in the book of sound being sort of policed on as being distracted. So that sounds like a very interesting project.
- [43:07]
Dr. Jamie Kreiner
Yeah, it's just a small one. But yes, after a big book, I think I need just, you know, an article sized thing.
- [43:15]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Very fair. Yes. And, well, speaking of that book, the title of the book we've been discussing is the wandering. What medieval monks tell us about distraction. If anyone wants to go read it. Jamie, thank you so much for this lovely conversation.
- [43:30]
Dr. Jamie Kreiner
Yes, thank you, Miranda.
- [43:44]
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- [43:58]
Dr. Jamie Kreiner
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Dr. Jamie Kreiner
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