A (Not So) Beautiful Mind

Have you ever seen the movie "A Beautiful Mind"? It is a moving tale of a very smart guy who unfortunately is profoundly mentally ill. The first sign of it was when he started meticulously searching through documents and then posting them on his wall to find evidence of conspiracies. Well, I had a moment like that today. Only, my mind is not exactly at his level. He was a genius, I needed "spell check" to spell genius. It started when I decided to think outside the box with my studying techniques.

Because the context of my research involves a great deal of English history I constantly find myself looking up dates of things that I read about. I then try to place that in reference to other things that were happening in other parts of the world during the Reformation. I got tired of flipping through pages and looking up the same dates over and over, so Idecided to print out a complete timeline of the Pre-Reformation events, Reformation events, and Post-Reformation events. When I finished printing them and putting them up on the bulletin board in our bedroom (yes there is a bulletin board in our bedroom; this apartment was obviously originally intended for undergraduates) a scene from "A Beautiful Mind" popped into my head. See below.

Top line: Pre-Reformation; Middle line: Reformation; Bottom line: Post-Reformation. The funny thing was I did not even think about how massive the printout would be on our wall, until I was done. I was both proud of it and embarrassed by it at the same time. When Krisy got home, she walked in the room and just said, "You've been busy." True. I had mentioned to her that I may put some stuff up in the room to make studying easier. Her reply? "If it helps you get this degree any quicker, you can dress up like John Calvin and wall -paper the place with study guides." Silly wife, we are not allowed to use wall paper.
It did not stop there. Right in front of my desk I posted a chronology of English monarchs (on the right) from Egbert, first king of the House of Wessex to the current Queen Elizabeth II of the House of Windsor. On the left is a more general and condensed outline of the history of the English Reformation from Henry VIII to the Restoration of Charles II. All I can say about that is, how cool would it be if there was another King named Egbert? Better be glad he was King, cause...Egbert??

As ridiculous as it sounds, having these dates and events at a glance is incredibly helpful and saves me the painstaking effort of doing classical research: Google.

Tim