The Medieval Academy Blog

As we celebrate the centennial of Speculum in 2026, we are thrilled to publish Speculations, an ambitious oversized issue featuring more than fifty short articles that highlight possible futures of our field. They range from Dublin to Ethiopia, from paleography to bioarchaeology, from millennial hopes to dystopian fears. Authors include medievalists of all sorts, from graduate students to independent scholars to emeritus Fellows. That’s not to mention the gorgeous full-color cover! As a brand-new editor, I had nothing to do with this issue except proofreading, but I want to congratulate the editorial collective that assembled it: Mohamad Ballan, Cecily J. Hilsdale, Katherine L. Jansen, Sierra Lomuto, and Peggy McCracken. I also want to thank my editorial staff, Ben Weil and Lily Stewart, our trusty collaborators at the University of Chicago Press. We hope you will be as excited about this issue as we are!

Our centennial is also the occasion to launch a major fundraising campaign. The founders of the Medieval Academy always intended for Speculum to have an endowment, but that plan has not yet come to fruition. As a result, editors have often been unpaid or underpaid, relying on university support that will not be sustainable for much longer. So we seek to guarantee the journal’s funding for the next hundred years and beyond. The Speculum Centennial Fund has the ambitious goal of a $3.5 million endowment that will support our future by guaranteeing a living wage for editorial staff, as well as innovations and events related to articles or issues. The Medieval Academy of America welcomes donations in cash or in kind, such as equities. If you are interested in remembering the MAA in your estate or with a stock transfer, please contact the Executive Director for more information.

Thank you for your support!

Barbara Newman (Northwestern Univ.),
Editor of Speculum
BNewman@TheMedievalAcademy.org

Registration is now open for the 101st Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America. The Meeting will take place on March 19–21, 2026 on the campuses of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Amherst College, and will also include events at Mt. Holyoke College and Smith College. Hosted by the Five College Consortium, the theme of the meeting is “Consortiums and Confluences.” The program will bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds addressing the medieval world and critical topics in Medieval Studies. Our plenary lectures will be given by Elly Truitt (Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania), Peggy McCracken (President of the Medieval Academy of America and Professor of French, Women’s Studies, and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan), and Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco (Augustus R. Street Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Comparative Literature at Yale University). We are excited to welcome you to Amherst, Massachusetts, and its environs, and look forward to meeting you, learning from you, and celebrating our shared commitment to Medieval Studies.

Click here for more information and to register!

The 102nd Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will take place on the campus of the University of Toronto, 15-17 April, 2027. The meeting is hosted by The Centre for Medieval Studies, in partnership with the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies and the Canadian Society of Medievalists. The Annual Meeting will be held at Trinity College and St Michael’s College, two of the federated colleges in the University of Toronto college system. Scholars may wish to extend their visit and take advantage of opportunities for research at the library of the Pontifical Institute, one of the premier research libraries in Medieval Studies.

The Program Commitee welcomes innovative panels that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries or that use various disciplinary approaches to examine an individual topic. We encourage papers on Asia, Africa, the Middle East, or Eastern Europe and the networks and exchanges between East and West.

Click here for more information and to submit a proposal. Proposals must be submitted by 1 June 2026.

I am very pleased to announce the results of the 2026 governance election:

President: Haruko Momma (New York University, English)
First Vice-President: Thomas Burman (University of Notre Dame, History)
Second Vice-President: Sally Poor (Princeton Univ., German)

Council:
Mary Doyno (Sacamento State Univ. and Villa I Tatti, Religious Studies)
Catherine Saucier (Arizona State Univ., Musicology)
Anna Siebach-Larsen (Univ. of Rochester, Rossell Hope Robbins Library and Koller-Collins Center)
Don Wyatt (Middlebury College, History)

Nominating Committee:
Sara McDougall (John Jay College of Criminal Justice – CUNY, History)
Claire M. Waters (UC Davis, English)

My thanks to all who voted and to all who stood for election, and my congratulations to all who were elected.

Lisa Fagin Davis
Executive Director
Medieval Academy of America
LFD@TheMedievalAcademy.org

We are very pleased to announce the 2026 Class of Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America:

Fellows:
Thomas Barton (History)
Calvin Bower (Musicology)
Martha Driver (Manuscript Studies)
D. Fairchild Ruggles (Landscape Architecture)
Emily Steiner (English)

Corresponding Fellows:
John H. Arnold (Religion, England)
Helena Hamerow (Archaeology, England)
James Simpson (English, France)
John V. Tolan (History, France)
Dominique Valérian (Mediterranean Studies, France)

These new Fellows were elected in accordance with the Fellows Election Procedures.

Please join us at the Fellows Induction ceremony during the Fellows Plenary Session at the 2026 Annual Meeting as we honor these scholars for their teaching, scholarship, mentoring, and service.

We are very pleased to announce that the 2026 Birgit Baldwin Fellowship has been awarded to Sheridan Kenzie Ward (Johns Hopkins Univ.) to support her dissertation project, “Houses of God: Devotion, Caregiving and Women s Work in Medieval France.” The Birgit Baldwin Fellowship in French Medieval History was established in 2004 by John W. Baldwin and Jenny Jochens in memory of their daughter Birgit. A summary of Ward’s project follows, in her words:

In thirteenth-century France, caring for the sick and needy was women’s work. Active caritas held special appeal for women as one of the few ways they could emulate Christ and the apostles. In the home and in religious institutions, thousands of medieval women cared for the sick, bodies and souls. But historians have struggled to document their actual practices. In my dissertation, Houses of God: Devotion, Caregiving and Women’s Work in Medieval France, I use the rich hospital archives of medieval Lille to analyze how hospital sisters cared for those in need. Hospital sisters decided how to apply the rules and guidelines of monastic life. Every day, they faced such questions as who should be admitted to the hospital, who should staff it, how to organize the day, what prayers should be said and when, who should administer treatments, what foods should be prepared, and more. These quotidian material practices suggest how hospital sisters provided for spiritual and bodily health.

In medieval France, hospital archives have been under-analyzed as key sources for healthcare and caregiving. Historians have documented the significance of women’s care to their communities. As Sharon Farmer has demonstrated, poor women relied on each other’s care to survive illness. In their analyses of medieval religious women, Anne Lester and Sara Ritchey have shown how religious women found meaning through acts of service to lepers and the sick. All too often, however, the details of women’s daily work remain invisible in the written record unless they were exceptional women venerated as saints. Hospital records, however, include remarkable detail to describe ordinary, everyday practice. Historians of medieval French hospitals like Adam Davis and Irène Dietrich-Strobbe have emphasized the role that hospitals played as charities and powerful institutions in their communities; however, I argue that they represent an important site for understanding healthcare. By centering hospital sisters as spiritual authorities and caregivers, my dissertation examines everyday care as a combination of religious devotion and healing work.

At first glance, a hospital’s administrative records appear dedicated to the financial affairs of the hospital. In my dissertation, I employ a material method to account books and inventories, which record the material imprints of caregiving practices when they list expenses for food, clothes, and linens bought for the hospital. Inventories and accounts list objects, which can be analyzed through “textual archaeology” as medieval historians like Daniel Lord Smail and Elizabeth Lambourn have put forward. By considering objects as evidence for practice, I will open a window into the hospital’s daily functioning and the rhythm of a religious life. These objects leave traces of practices like preparing healing foods, praying at the bedside, singing psalms, venerating relics, administering remedies, and laundering bedsheets. Reading this archive through the lens of materiality brings into focus the multiple layers of reinforcing meanings that these practices had for women who did not leave behind records written in their own hands.

The hospital archives of medieval Lille in the north of France provide the robust sources necessary for my material study of caregiving practices. Among the archives of medieval charitable foundations housed in the Archives départmentales du Nord in Lille, account books and inventories have survived in unusual abundance. This untapped resource will allow me to reconstruct women’s caregiving practices in detail, using a material method.

By treating account books and inventories as evidence of practices that kept the hospital functioning, I will argue that women performed healing care through devotional and bodily means. First, I analyze the process of writing account books and consider the significance of accounting to validate the hospital’s charitable function. The city government and the hospital’s patrons sought assurance that hospital sisters managed their resources and cared for the sick appropriately without excess. My second chapter maps these hospitals’ imprint on Lille’s urban landscape. Attending to hospitals’ spatial prominence in their communities sheds light on how people interacted with hospitals for care, for business, or for spiritual edification. The third chapter describes how sisters organized space within the hospital. Considering relics, beds, and linens allows us to glimpse logics of how hospitals used space to enable rest and recovery but also to worship and pray. My fourth chapter analyzes how hospital sisters nourished sick bodies, using evidence of the exchange of foodstuffs. My final chapter considers clothes, books, and the organization of time as healing practices that used devotional logics. Collectively, these chapters aim to highlight hospital sisters’ healing expertise and the significance of their daily work for their community’s wellbeing.

We are very pleased to announce the 2026 Fellows Research Awards. Because of the strength of this year’s applicant pool, the selection committees (comprised of members of the Fellows Executive Committee) elected to fund four Awards instead of two:

Graduate Students:
Emily Gebhardt (Duke Univ.), “The King’s Matter: Text, Flesh, and Power in Late Medieval England”

Zachary Young (Univ. of Florida), “Saturday Masses of the Virgin Mary for Baptized Jews”

Post-Graduate:
Eileen Morgan, “The Role of Food in Venetian Festival Activities Before 1500”

Heather Gaile Wacha, “No Map is an Island: Linking the Vercelli Map to its Archival Context”

The Fellows Research Awards of $5,000 each are made possible by the generosity of the Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America, who both fund and administer these annual Awards. The MAA is exceedingly grateful to the Fellows for their support of these early-career scholars.

We are very pleased to announce the winners of the Spring 2026 Travel Grants:

Nicholas Babich, “Paths of Enchantment: An Anglo-Irish Riddling Tradition?,” Medieval Academy of America Annual Meeting (University of Massachusetts Amherst and Amherst College);

Barbara Denicolò, “Cooking with Wine: Culinary, Dietetic, and Aesthetic Uses in Early Modern Recipe Collections,” Renaisance Society of America Annual Meeting (San Francisco);

Kate Falardeau, “The material afterlife of Bede’s martyrology: liturgy as history in Bavaria, 1000 1200,” Medieval Academy of America Annual Meeting (University of Massachusetts Amherst and Amherst College);

Christopher Flynn, “The Imperial Worldview of the Annals of Xanten, 831-873 CE,” Medieval Academy of America Annual Meeting (University of Massachusetts Amherst and Amherst College);

Carsten Haas, “Literacy Killed the Poetry Star: The Technology of Writing & the Rise and Fall of the Germanic Kenning,” Medieval Academy of America Annual Meeting (University of Massachusetts Amherst and Amherst College);

Stephen Westich, “Through and Through: Material and Memorial Meaning in Schloss Wiehe,” International Congress on Medieval Studies (Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan).

MAA Travel Grants support travel to present at conferences for Academy members who hold PhDs but have no access to institutional travel funding. Exceptions to the PhD requirement may be made for unaffiliated or contingent scholars who are active in Medieval Studies.

How to Talk to Your Dean
Moderated by CARA Board Member Christina Christoforatou
Thursday, 1/15, 6pm EST, on Zoom

So many of us who are working to advocate for Medieval Studies in universities today are trying to better understand our academic administrators. How can we advocate for our programs in an age that seems to increasingly devalue the humanities and premodern studies?

Join us for this special CARA zoom session when we will get the inside scoop thanks to this panel of medievalist-deans: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Dean of the Humanities, Arizona State University), Craig Nakashian (Dean of the Honors College, Texas A&M University), and Lawrence Poos (Former Dean, School of Arts and Sciences, Catholic University of America).

If you want to know how to pitch your medieval curriculum, or advocate for a Medieval Studies program faculty line, or write a conference funding application, join us on Thursday, January 15th at 6pm EST. Moderated by CARA board member Christina Christoforatou Konstantinis (Baruch College, CUNY). To better streamline our conversation, please send any questions you might have for our panel of deans by Friday, 1/9/26 (email them to laurenmancia@brooklyn.cuny.edu).

Click here to register.

Call for Session Proposals:

Shining a Light on the “Dark” Ages: Creative Approaches to Understanding the Middle Ages
2027 AHA Annual Meeting, New Orleans
Proposals due February 1, 2026

The Medieval Academy of America (MAA) invites proposals for sessions at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in New Orleans, LA, January 7-10, 2027.

Increasingly, scholars from a range of historical fields may find themselves the sole member of their department who specializes in the Middle Ages. Learning how to approach the Middle Ages creatively, and with an eye towards increasing understanding of the period among specialists and non-specialists alike is vital to the health of the field. This year, the Medieval Academy aims to co-sponsor sessions that provide support for panels based on increasing our understanding of the Middle Ages for non-specialists, lone medievalists, and others. We hope to spark discussions about how to make learning about the Middle Ages not only more manageable, but also more engaging, for both instructors and students. The AHA Annual Meeting has historically not involved a large number of scholars of the Middle Ages, but the AHA Program Committee is especially interested in supporting panels covering medieval topics, so we hope to see a robust level of interest in proposing panels.

This CFP is meant to be broad and inclusive in order to spark interest among MAA members and a wider audience. We are interested in attracting proposals that explore various facets of this theme and may address, but are not limited to, the following kinds of topics:

●     Quality open access resources: Where to find them and how to use them
●     Useful software (e.g. StoryMaps) for researching and teaching the medieval era
●     Non-traditional pedagogical approaches, such as Reacting to the Past modules
●     Using material culture and experimental archaeology in the classroom
●     Using VR and AR technology to immerse students in the medieval past
●     Engaging students in public history projects
●     How to introduce American students to medieval archives and texts
●     How to creatively teach about the Middle Ages within the constraints of traditional Western Civilization curricula
●     How to broaden the appeal of medieval topics beyond specialists
●     How to draw connections between the medieval and modern

We invite proposals that think beyond traditional paper panels. We are especially interested in proposals for short (approx. 7-10 minute) presentations to be incorporated into a roundtable format. Members may submit individual proposals or proposals for a full roundtable with 3-5 discussants. Proposals for lightning talks, paired teaching and research panels, guided discussions, workshops, digital labs, working sessions, and other innovative and inclusive formats of knowledge-sharing are also welcomed. Please see here for more examples- https://www.historians.org/events/annual-meeting/call-for-proposals/creative-session-formats/

We particularly encourage session proposals from scholars across diverse identity positions and academic ranks and affiliations, including graduate students, K-12 instructors, and independent scholars. Proposals that focus on sources, geographies, and populations under-represented in traditional medieval studies are also highly encouraged.

The committee is available for feedback on draft session proposals. Please contact us at ahacommittee@themedievalacademy.org. Additionally, MAA members can receive feedback on proposals during the review process.

How to Submit a Session Proposal

Session proposal submissions for MAA and AHA co-sponsorship involve a two-stage process:

1) Members of the Medieval Academy submit session proposals to the MAA’s AHA Program Committee via the online submission form by 11:59 p.m., February 1, 2026.

2) Upon approval by the MAA’s AHA Committee, session organizers will be notified by February 11 and will then be responsible for submitting the proposal to the AHA before the deadline of 11:59 p.m., February 15, 2026, indicating that the session has the sponsorship of the Medieval Academy of America.

For more details, please refer to FAQ: Organizing MAA/AHA Sessions.