As the Medieval Academy marks its centenary, today’s members may be interested in learning about their counterparts a hundred years ago. The names of most of the first members and some information about them can now be found on the Academy’s website. Here is a brief report by the compiler of the list of first members, Jacqueline Brown: “The results of my research into the first members of the Medieval Academy are mixed. I wasn’t able to find all of the 761 people who had joined the Academy by the end of its first year, but I did come close: 656. Many of the names are still familiar ones to medievalists: the paleographer E. A. Lowe, the Chaucerian scholar John Matthews Manly, the art historian Arthur Kingsley Porter, the economic historian Eileen Power, the historian of science Lynn Thorndike, to cite only a very few. In its early days the Academy also attracted non-academics, among them the artists Charles Connick (stained glass), I. Kirchmayer (woodcarving), Vincent Tack (painting), and Charles Maginnis (architecture); the art collectors Henry Walters, founder of the Walters Art Museum, and Raymond Pitcairn, founder of Glencairn Museum, were members, as were the rare book dealers Lathrop C. Harper and W. M. Voynich. Some early members looked back on the Middle Ages as the best of times (see James J. Walsh, author of The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries); others disagreed (see almost anything written by G. G. Coulton). Today’s members may be surprised, as I was, to find two dukes among our predecessors (Alexander, Grand Duke of Russia; the duke of Berwick and Alba), while two other early members (H. W. L. Dana and John Brooks Wheelwright) were left-wing activists, and another (Margaret Schlauch) fled the US during McCarthyism. In a category by himself is Bernard Fuller, an Illinois priest when he joined the Academy who faked his death a year later and started a new life as a professor of German at Amherst College. Some of the first members remain total mysteries to me, Joseph M. Wallace of the Wallace Studio in Brooklyn, for example, about whom I know only his name and address. The fragmentary information I found about others, Childéric Hill of Leicestershire, for example, left me wanting to know more about them. I hope today’s members will find their predecessors interesting. My project isn’t finished—there are still 105 first-year members to identify—and I would be grateful for corrections, additions, and leads to new sources.”
