Austerity, scrupulousness, or inflexibility. But the term has had a variable career. In the medieval scientific community, “rigor” meant bodily stiffness and referred to a physiological effect of illness. Apart from the limit case, rigor mortis, the term could indicate something internal (a patient’s feelings) as well as something external (a patient’s symptoms). Thus rigor has always been an objective ideal with a subjective basis, appearing within a structure of recognition. A monk might call himself “rigorous” because of his abstemious rituals, while his peers might identify him as such by his tonsure and cassock. It is this general sense of rigor as the performance or manifestation of rule-bound behavior that has made the term so useful to disciplines beyond medicine (see REGULATION). Within the contemporary academy, rigor is emblematic of the desire to decompose fields of inquiry into their barest elements. The paradigm for this is the near-constant effort since the seventeenth century to establish a secure foundation for mathematics (see KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION). Calculus survived many attempts to axiomatize its technical procedures, each iteration of the endeavor considered more irreducibly logical than the last. What is curious about this example—what is curious about rigor as an academic concept—is that in aspiration it represents the a priori foundation for inquiry as such; but in practice it emerges as an a posteriori justification within a partially consolidated field, as if to stipulate why it is okay to be doing what is already being done. One might call this phenomenon “rigorization”—the sociology according to which what is ingenious, expedient, or simply popular is made consistent with some (possibly arbitrary) truth-practice. Humanists have been no less attracted to this idea than mathematicians, and today, rigor is de rigueur. A glance at the New York Times will confirm its indiscriminate application to food, architecture, and fashion, such that, for instance, one might read of an angular overcoat as a “rigorous interpretation” of its class of outerwear. Rigor has so completely saturated academic discourse that it has become a general term of approbation, something synonymous with the sophistication of text-based argument (see EXCELLENCE). It is therefore tempting to prognosticate that it will soon become passé, replaced like so many coats out of season.