"DuChamp, L Timmel - De Secretis Mulierum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duchamp L Timmel)

I made an admiring observation to this effect to Teddy Warner the night of the
afternoon we discovered the "ugly but fascinating truth" (as I once heard Judith
Lauer, the prominent medievalist, characterize it). The man just didn't see it,
though, and snapped at me that if I couldn't appreciate the fact that the whole
project had been thrown into jeopardy, that this second "impossibly devastating
revelation" was "simply catastrophic," I should at the very least keep my silly
facetiousness to myself.

What he meant, of course, was that I should keep my mouth shut and give him
"some empathy for chrissake" (which is the second or third most important thing
graduate-student lovers are for). (Lovers? Rather, I should say, sporadic sexual
partners. Did he think of me as his lover? Probably not. Probably he used [in
the privacy of his own thoughts] something jazzed up, like "mistress," or tacky,
like "girlfriend." To which I even [or especially] all these years later say:
YUCK.)

I've often entertained the disloyal suspicion that if the PSD Lab hadn't been
packed with an international spread of luminaries, Teddy would have tried to
hush up this second revelation of "mistaken gender identity" (a term that had
already been coined by some fool in an article in Past and Present and not only
stuck, but along with the more economical "gender-disguise," made it into the
popular vernacular by way of the New York Review of Books' series of pop essays
on Past-scan Device issues). Though his spouse Marissa was present at this grand
soiree, I happened to be at Teddy's side (along with the three PSD groupies he'd
picked up from Princeton, Yale, and Harvard since that first PSD venture--
peeking in on Leonardo-- came down). Like everyone else, I had my eyes glued to
the stage [which the physicists called "the holo-tank"). Cameras were poised and
ready to shoot from all sides. And as all of us historians waited, Marissa and
her colleagues, seated at their keyboards, mice, and monitors, played (it
seemed) at being SF-movie scientists. Then, suddenly, there he was, Thomas
Aquinas, at mass, on December 6, 1273 (or so we all hoped, since the ostensible
reason for peeping on him was to find out just what the hell had happened to him
during that mystery mass). A great, collective sigh went up at his so
veritatious, life-sized presence on the stage before us. Who could mistake the
man for anyone but the sainted theologian? He was gargantuan, of course. (Prior
to the scan, everyone's favorite anecdote about him concerned the hellish time
the Cistercians had getting his corpse down their stairs after his death.) The
awe-inspiring sight overpowered me. I remember thinking it was lucky light waves
don't carry odors: but then the raunchy stench of pre-modern times is one of the
details with which we pepper our students to erode their godawful romanticism
about certain overly Hollywoodized areas of the past, and so it might not have
been strictly his dingy, greasy appearance that provoked such an irreverent
thought.

We watched with bated breaths, some of us literally on the edge of our seats.
(Three persons, at most, were allowed at any given time to move around the
perimeter of the stage, since any more than that would have blocked the view for
the rest of the observers.) Every now and then I would tear my eyes from this
vivid image of medieval reality to snatch glances at the renowned and eminent
historians sharing the moment with me. Several had declared themselves skeptics