I had the singular pleasure of visiting with a bunch of my high school friends the other week, and one of them put me on to a podcast I had not heard about before Normal Gossip. She said it was something she thought I would like because, well, a thing about me is that I am interested in gossip – and I mean this in several ways.
Firstly, I mean I am interested in gossip as an academic concept. I like thinking about the way gossip is discussed in medieval sources. Secondly, I also like to think about how gossip is conceptualised by anthropologists, which is to say, I enjoy thinking about what it is that gossip does socially. Because it does a lot. Thirdly, I mean, look, I am a social historian. My job is to gossip about dead people. I sit around and read what they have written, or what was written about them. I rifle through records of their house contents to try to picture how they were living their lives. And I think about who is talking about them in order to try to put together an idea of what they were like – and then I tell people all about it. And like, let’s just be honest – My interest in this means that I am a professional gossip who writes on gossip as a concept and that’s cuz … I want to hear the gossip. You have some? Great, I want it. Is it about some people I have never even met and probably won’t ever meet? Even better. To me, every bit of anonymous gossip is my own private soap opera, and I simply love to hear it.
Continue reading “On gossip”
Going Medieval 