The practical pursuit of persona.

I spoke to Valarius about my persona project white at Michaelmas a couple of weekends ago. He seemed to enjoy the idea, and promptly asked me ''who is the Pope?” I wasn't able to answer immediately, in part because my persona is a Protestant. I mentioned that; my friend responded with “You would still know who the pope is.”

I'm not sure I would. I hardly know who's the pope now that JP2 is dead. I know that it's some conservative German guy, but after that, I could not tell you the name he now uses as Pope, much less his birth name. I only know JP1 and JP2. I don't recall their predecessor. Nor their successor. Who before JP1? Who after JP2? Considering that we are only talking about 4 men in my lifetime, it seems to me even less likely that my persona could recall all the Popes between Pius III and Pius IV, the majority of the life span of Merouda were she to pass away in the 1550's (I.e, presuming outside maximum of about 59 years of intellectual awareness, assuming that Merouda knows nothing of politics in the earliest years of her life).

As a sidebar, this brings up my approach to aging. "Merouda” lives in the 1550's, and I don't care to move farther forward in time. Therefore, Merouda's year of birth moves backwards. It's reasonable that Merouda would remember that Clement was a pope during her lifetime, and that

Anyway, after Valarius mentioned the pope thing, I remembered Caradoc's Persona worksheet. I dug it up on the Internet and was shocked to realize that I know most of the information the questions prompt you to research. At least as far as this measuring tool goes, I'm pretty close. I guess my vision of what I need is bigger than many other people's.

I did my first little in-persona stint @ Michaelmas. It was brief and personal. I ate lunch in persona. No biggie to others, but I enjoyed it. This experience, also, helped convince me that knowing who the pope is may be of less value than expected, mostly because I'd been shopping the night before, trying to find a reasonable cold meal. What, I asked myself, would 16^th c. me have available in the autumn as a cold lunch to be eaten while traveling? The best I was able to do with the knowledge I have was smoked pork chops, apples, farmer's cheese with caraway, and cauliflower. As I walked about, I asked myself: Which of these cheeses were available in the 16th c.? Which of these varieties of apples? And that little hour of shopping was far more useful on a persona study basis than all of Caradoc's questions.

Caradoc's (and others) various questions to help develop persona:

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/cariadoc/little_things.html
http://www2.kumc.edu/itc/staff/RKnight/Persona1.htm
http://www.currentmiddleages.org/tents/persona.htm