Let's hear it for the Library

I love the library. It's a long term relationship that started back when I just barely could read. Our local library had a kid's section, and in that section was a kid-sized wooden train. The engine had a seat you could sit on, and the wheels worked. So you could drive your little train between the short bookshelves, and load up your cars with every single book that even slightly appealed to you. Before we could leave, Dad would always make me sort through my considerable haul of books to pick out no more than five books that I actually wanted and would read. . . he was a smart guy.

Library buildings, by themselves, are typically great buildings to wander around. Tons of annexes and aisles and stacks to scuttle about. I love the Hiram library, not just because it is aesthetically pleasing, but also because there are all these little study rooms that you wouldn't even know were there, if you weren't looking for them. I've a couple hideaways on the 3rd floor, where I lock myself up and force the brain to do homework. The 4th floor has that lovely, lofty reading room near the Fiction section. Having only been to the Organic Chemistry section of the 2nd floor before, I was amazed to discover last week that there was a whole other set of rooms on there--even more pleasant places to study. So tonight I tried out a new spot: a study area on the 2nd floor which overlooks the front of the building (favorite orientation), had nice diffuse lighting, and a big portrait of a women in a gold dress watching bluebirds fly around in a green garden. Sooo nice, and there I completed my physics lab and physics problems for the week. Excellent.

The last, perhaps most wonderous thing about a library, is that you can just wander around and pick up books that catch your eye. You can flip through the pages and get a little snippet of info. It's kindof like beachcombing. . . only of course with less sand and oceany-nesss. Sometimes you find something really wonderful, without even trying. And here's what I found today, in "The Medieval Underworld" by Andrew McCrall. It's the observations of the writer Imad ad-Din about the women who followed the crusaders across the seas to offer themselves as prostitutes for support:

'They arrived,' Imad continues, 'after consecrating their persons as if to works of peity and offered and prostituted the most chaste and precious among them. They said that they had set out with the intention of consecrating their charms, that they did not intend to refuse themselves to bachelors, and they maintained that they could make themselves acceptable to God by no better sacrifice than this' Hoping to win approval from their Maker, ' they set themselves each with a tent erected for her use, together with other lovely young girls of their age, and opened the gates of pleasure. They dedicated as holy offering what they kept between their thighs; they were openly licenstious and devoted themselves to relaxation; they removed every obstacle of making themselves free offerings. They were permitted territory for forbidden acts, they offered themselves to the lances' blows and humiliated themselves to their lovers.'

I was just amazed to read about this. Ok, it's amazing that the men of the crusades had a bevvy of prostitutes with them (in the book Imad mentions seeing 300 European women arrive by boat. But what really got me was trying to imagine what it must have been like. I wonder who organized these ladies? Who had the idea first? But even this stuff isn't really the heart of the matter:

What is so amazing, to me, is to hear an account of European women treating prostitution as an act of support and devotion to a cause. Imad describes them as showing pride and piety while commiting forbidden acts. What I love about this passage is that these women turn the idea of chastity on its head, showing their devotion by making open offerings of themselves. Admittedly, this isn't something altogether new. Although I'm not well-versed in many world cultures, I am aware that there are places of worship where sex is/was sacred. But Europeans, typically, never seemed too keen on mixing the two publicly.

Well, it just leaves me a little breathless, and happy. I mean, I'm sure it wasn't all love and roses and crosses on buxom ladies. I am still baffled as to how they all got there, avoided derision and abuse, and all in a foreign land. . . .but it gives me a happy, peaceful feeling to read about women without shame. History strikes again :)