Thesis to Conference Paper and Fun With Latin

I have apparently finally recovered from my thesis trauma (if you've joined our program in progress and don't know what I'm talking about, this older post should serve as sufficient explanation) sufficiently to consider where I can go with that research and what else I should do with it. I'd already been thinking about parlaying it into some type of journal article, since I really did uncover a real, if very modest, new contribution to knowledge that other scholars ought to have access to. Earlier this week, however, during my continuing quest to de-crapify before moving, I was reviewing the call for papers for next year's Congress in Kalamazoo and I had the amazing revelation that I could do a conference paper! Yeah, OK, so that should have been obvious a long time ago, but for some reason it didn't dawn on me. Doing a conference paper might also be a really good way of developing what I would want to do with a journal article on the topic. Since I don't really yet have much of a working relationship with my new Ph.D. program, I decided to drop a line to the indefatigable and ever-helpful Dr. T about it. She gave me some helpful advice and seemed encouraging about the idea, so now I need to clarify a couple more things with her and move ahead since submission deadlines are September 15.

I've finally dived into Michel Foucault's History of Madness, the new hardcover English edition that came out a year or two ago and is so substantial you could inflict some serious blunt-force trauma with it. Foucault is never exactly light reading, but in History of Madness, he references a great many early modern and humanist Latin texts I have no or only nodding acquaintance with. The most significant of these texts is Das Narrenschiff by Sebastian Brant, which I've never read, but he touches on dozens of unfamiliar texts in just the first chapter. So many references to so many texts makes it especially difficult to follow the thread of his argument, so I've set him aside for the time being until I have time and opportunity to read the works he's referencing. One at least I am passingly familiar with and have read a bit of in the original Latin, Erasmus of Rotterdam's Stultitiae laus, or In Praise of Folly. Since I've read a bit in Latin, it occurred to me that perhaps I should just hunt up a Latin edition and simultaneously brush up on my Latin, which has lain neglected for a few months now. The delightful thing about older texts like this is that they are precisely the sort of thing Google Books has digitized, and I found a complete .pdf scanned from an older edition of the book there. True, it doesn't have the sorts of helpful apparatus that more modern editions do, but the price is right. And, should I encounter any problems intractable to my various Latin tools, there is always the scan of a 1913 English translation of the work. Erasmus can be hilariously funny (well, to a geek anyway) so I'm looking forward to dipping into this when I can. Foucault will wait.