title: jquery validate() returning undefined
body: <p>I'm trying to use the Validate plugin for Jquery just to validate one field. I can get it working on a simple test form but when I tried to plug it into a large existing form on my site, calling <code>validate</code> returns <code>undefined</code>.  It's supposed to return a <code>Validator</code> object.  How do I go about figuring out what's wrong?</p>
  
  <p>Here is the example code that's working:</p>
  
  <pre class="lang-js prettyprint-override"><code>&lt;script type="text/javascript"&gt;
  function tst(ctrl) {
      var frm = $(ctrl).parents('form');
      alert('Is email valid? ' + frm.validate({ showErrors: function () { } }).element(ctrl));
  }
  &lt;/script&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <pre class="lang-html prettyprint-override"><code>&lt;form id="form1" action="" method="post"&gt;
      &lt;input type="text" name="email" onblur="tst(this)" class="email"/&gt;
  &lt;/form&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However if I try this on a much larger existing form, the <code>validate</code> call returns undefined, resulting in a JavaScript error calling <code>element</code>.  I think there must be something in the larger form that makes <code>validate</code> "crash", but what could it be?</p>