The Medieval Academy Blog

98th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America
The Grand Hyatt, Washington, DC
23-26 February, 2023

The 98th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will take place at the Grand Hyatt Washington in downtown Washington, DC. The meeting is jointly hosted by the Medieval Academy of America and a consortium of medievalists from DC, Northern Virginia, and Maryland.

The conference program will feature sessions highlighting innovative scholarship across the many disciplines contributing to medieval studies. The Program Committee invites proposals for papers on all topics and in all disciplines and periods of medieval studies and medievalism, including on the themes and strands proposed below. Any member of the Medieval Academy may submit a paper proposal; others may submit proposals as well but must become members in order to present papers at the meeting. Special consideration will be given to individuals whose field would not normally involve membership in the Medieval Academy. We are particularly interested in receiving submissions from those working outside of traditional academic positions, including independent scholars, emeritus or adjunct faculty, university administrators, those working in cultural heritage institutions (libraries, archives, museums, scholarly societies, or cultural research centers), editors and publishers, and other fellow medievalists. The Program Committee seeks to construct a program that fully reflects and expands the diversity of the Medieval Academy’s membership with respect to research areas and representation.

Plenary addresses will be delivered by Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Professor of Medieval Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; Anne Dunlop, Herald Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne; and Maureen Miller, Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley, and incoming president of the Academy.

Click here for the full call for papers.

Editors:
François-Xavier Fauvelle, Collège de France
Nahir Otaño Gracia, University of New Mexico
Cord J. Whitaker, Wellesley College

For far too long, scholarly consensus held that race and racism were mainly Enlightenment innovations, datable to no earlier than the seventeenth century. As long ago as the early twentieth century, some scholars pushed race’s origins to the sixteenth or even fifteenth centuries, but these scholars were few and far between. The Middle Ages and, with them, medieval studies were set off as a time and discipline innocent of race and racism. This remained generally true until the advent of critical medieval race studies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Now, in 2021, special issues in major journals and no less than six full-length scholarly monographs have treated the imbrications of race with medieval art, literature, religion, and even the periodizing concept of the Middle Ages itself. Many more studies in medieval literature, history, art, religion, and culture have been conceptually informed by race, as have many studies in the modern perceptions and deployments of the Middle Ages. Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies calls for proposals for a themed issue, to be published as one of Speculum’s four quarterly issues, to recognize the intellectual value of the study of race to a comprehensive understanding of the Middle Ages.

We invite proposals for full-length essays (8,000-11,000 words) that interrogate race, race-thinking, and identity in the Middle Ages. For example, essays might consider the roles of race-making and racialization in the Islamic world; how race and identity, together with religion, was negotiated and navigated in border regions such as al-Andalus, Sicily or the Levant (between Latin Christendom and Islam), the Sahara and the Sahel region (between the Islamic world and Subsaharan Africa); how the dynamics of race-thinking informed relations between Latin and Greek Christendom and Islam or the Mongol Empire, or between the Muslim/Islamicate world and Christian, Jewish, Hinduist, and traditional-religious societies within it or beyond its reaches; how race intersected with the dynamics of trade and connectivity, religious affiliation and conversion, slavery and emancipation, peace and war. Essays may also take on the roles of race, race-thinking, and identity in the geography and periodization of the Middle Ages: Are historical moments that are quintessential to the history of race also relevant to medieval-and-modern periodizations? Essays may also consider how and why race, race-thinking, and identity have shaped modern concepts, uses, and scholarship of the Middle Ages.

The editors are open to essays that interrogate race, race-thinking, and identity in the Middle Ages by asking these and other deeply probing questions. Additionally, we are especially interested in essays that consider the globality of the medieval world: those that examine the networked interrelations and interdependences of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe. In addition to scholarship in history and literature, we invite proposals using the tools and methods of anthropology, archaeology, art history, book history, historical linguistics, religious studies, sociology, and other fields germane to the studies of race, identity, and the Middle Ages.

The themed issue on race, race-thinking, and identity and the articles selected for it will be in keeping with Speculum’s purview as stated in the Guidelines for Submission: “preference is ordinarily given to articles of interest to readers in more than one discipline and beyond the specialty in question. Articles taking a more global approach to medieval studies are also welcomed, particularly when the topic engages with one or more of the core areas of study outlined above. Submissions with appeal to a broad cross-section of medievalists are highly encouraged.”

Proposals should be no more than 500 words in length and should be submitted by email to cord.whitaker@wellesley.edu with SPECULUM PROPOSAL in the subject line by 31 January 2022. The authors of selected proposals will be notified by 28 February 2022. Completed essays will be expected by 1 December 2022.

Tori Schmitt

My dissertation examines the early Gothic architecture and sculpture of the now destroyed abbey of Sainte-Geneviève-du-Mont in Paris. Dismantled between 1793 and 1807, the abbey today counts among the numerous medieval churches destroyed in the French Revolution, long regarded within the field of Art History as unknowable architectural monuments lost to time. Working against this pervasive classification, my written dissertation, aided by a digital model and database, examines the architecture of Sainte-Geneviève through a corpus of more than fifty surviving objects, including capitals, sculptural fragments, and architectural illustrations of the abbey. In doing so, my dissertation aims not only to reconstruct and contextualize this significant medieval edifice, but to question how an engrained scholarly preference for extant architecture has shaped scholarly understanding of Gothic architecture and sculpture.

Titled “Reconstructing the Medieval Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, c. 1107-1210,” my project considers the rebuilding of the abbey—understood to be one of the first experiments in the Gothic style—as part of a visual argument to convey the political and religious clout of the abbey and its cult to nearby competitors. By the start of the twelfth century, the abbey was among the oldest foundations in Paris and an important site of pilgrimage; established in 502 as the royal necropolis for the Merovingian King Clovis, the site also housed the tomb of Geneviève (c. 419-502), the patron saint of Paris. After an 1129 miracle of the saint, in which Geneviève’s relics saved the city from a disastrous plague of ergot poisoning, Geneviève reached a new level of popularity in Paris, with multiple sites, most notably the Cathedral Notre-Dame and Sainte-Geneviève, vying for control of her cult in subsequent decades. Examining the reconstruction of Sainte-Geneviève in the 1130s- 1150s through a social historical lens, I argue that the abbey’s early Gothic chevet was not simply an apolitical adoption of an emerging stylistic mode, but rather, part of a larger campaign to bolster the abbey’s claim to Geneviève through art and liturgy.

In each of my four chapters, I examine the twelfth-century architecture of Sainte-Geneviève through the lens of different sets of fragments and archival materials. My first chapter, “Geneviève of Paris,” examines how visual depictions and liturgical performances associated the Nanterre-born saint with Paris and its urban landmarks. In placing the medieval iconography of the saint in dialogue with her liturgical celebration, I aim to show how the abbey and diocese of Paris laid authoritative claim to Genevieve’s cult over other significant locations mentioned in her vita, such as Auxerre and Nanterre. In the second chapter, I discuss the rebuilding of Sainte-Geneviève within the the political and ecclesiastical landscape of 1130s Paris. Evidence for this chapter spans a variety of media; in addition to cross-examining early modern architectural prints of the abbey with modern archeological surveys, my research will include comparison of fragments with extant portions of the abbey’s tower and refectory, now contained within the Lycée Henri IV. In my third and fourth chapters, I turn to the varied corpus of architectural sculpture which survives the abbey and its conservation after the French Revolution at Alexandre Lenoir’s Musée des Monuments français. Through analysis of archival documentation at the Bibliothèque Historique de Ville Paris (BHVP, Ms 3676, Ms 222-264) Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (BSG Ms 90-91, Ms 3888-9) and Archives nationales (AN L/879-887), I seek to trace the survival of the thirty-some sculptural fragments held today in the collections of the Louvre and Musée de Cluny.

In addition to my written dissertation, my project includes a digital model of the twelfth-century abbey. In recent years, advances in three-dimensional modeling have opened radical new possibilities for the study of ancient architecture which have enabled scholars to visualize non-extant architecture with greater accuracy. No longer categorized as “lost to time,” digital modeling allows scholars to propose a comprehensive and data-driven visual argument for how a building may have looked at different moments in time, with the further possibility to explore counterfactuals or propose multiple concurrent hypotheses. The objective of my digital model is to clearly visualize the different sources discussed in my written dissertation; linked metadata and annotations will highlight my own interpretation of measurements and other data contained in primary sources. In doing so, my primary aim is to highlight, rather than obscure, any points of uncertainty in aim of encouraging collaborative future inquiry and to emphasize the rigorous analysis of primary sources which underlies my scholarly reconstruction of Sainte-Geneviève.

Alexandra Atiya

My dissertation, “Economic and Spiritual Conflict in Medieval East Anglian Drama,” investigates the relationship between economic conflicts and dramatic forms in late-medieval morality and miracle plays. Focusing on the depiction of trade, labor rebellion, and corruption in plays including the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Mankind, Wisdom, and The Castle of Perseverance, I argue that contemporary economic conflicts are more than just topical villains or vices slotted into a didactic model of drama; rather, they seem to shape the plays’ variegated and unusual dramatic forms. Building on recent work that re-evaluates the morality play genre, my dissertation employs close reading of play texts, analysis of manuscript evidence, and research into relevant historical contexts to examine the blurring of moral boundaries and the adaptability of allegory in late-medieval performance.

Colouring the Archives: Race Formations in the Late-Medieval Florence
Angela Zhang

My project combines premodern critical theory with archival documents to explore the processes of race formation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I focus on the racializing processes involved in the partial transition from the West Asian slave trade to the West African in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. When Florence legalized the trade of enslaved non-Catholics in 1364, they began recording the physical and ethnographic attributes of the people, mostly women, they enslaved from the east. However, by 1461, the influx of enslaved West-Africans led to a simplification of these terms into a binary black and white. In archival documents, such as letters, bills of sale, tax registers, and foundling hospital records, the change in the descriptive vocabulary of enslaved women from Tatar, Circassian, Russian, and Greek to a universal Black between 1364 and 1480 was a crucial moment for the development of racialized vocabulary and its use in daily life. My research seeks to build on the emerging field of premodern race scholarship by examining race processes as an ongoing phenomenon that is intertwined with gender, sexual violence, domestic labour, and reproduction by examining the minute interactions and vocabularies of Florentines and the people they enslaved.

The Medieval Academy of America invites applications for the following grants. Please note that applicants must be members in good standing as of September 15 in order to be eligible for Medieval Academy awards.

Summer Research Program for early PhD or early PhD-track students.
Organized by the Mentoring Program Committee, the Summer Research Program is designed to mentor early graduate students in fields intersecting with medieval studies by providing sustained mentorship to better help graduate students succeed in their doctoral programs and establish promising careers. Click here for more information. (Deadline 15 January)

Belle Da Costa Greene Award
The Belle Da Costa Greene Award of $2,000 will be granted annually to a medievalist of color for research and travel. The award may be used to visit archives, attend conferences, or to facilitate writing and research. The award will be granted on the basis of the quality of the proposed project, the applicant’s budgetary needs (as expressed by a submitted budget and in the project narrative), and the estimation of the ways in which the award will facilitate the applicant’s research and contribute to the field. Special consideration will be given to graduate students, emerging junior scholars, adjunct, and unaffiliated scholars. Click here for more information. Click here to make a donation in support of the Greene Award. (Deadline 15 February 2022)

Olivia Remie Constable Award
Four Olivia Remie Constable Awards of $1,500 each will be granted to emerging junior faculty, adjunct or unaffiliated scholars (broadly understood: post-doctoral, pre-tenure) for research and travel. Click here for more information. (Deadline 15 February 2022)

MAA Dissertation Grants:
The nine annual Medieval Academy Dissertation Grants support advanced graduate students who are writing Ph.D. dissertations on medieval topics. The $2,000 grants help defray research expenses. Click here for more information. (Deadline 15 February 2022)

Schallek Awards
The five annual Schallek awards support graduate students conducting doctoral research in any relevant discipline dealing with late-medieval Britain (ca. 1350-1500). The $2,000 awards help defray research expenses. Click here for more information. (Deadline 15 February 2022)

MAA/GSC Grant for Innovation in Community-Building and Professionalization
The MAA/GSC Grant(s) will be awarded to an individual or graduate student group from one or more universities. The purpose of this grant is to stimulate new and innovative efforts that support pre-professionalization, encourage communication and collaboration across diverse groups of graduate students, and build communities amongst graduate student medievalists. Click here for more information. (Deadline 15 February 2022)

Applicants for these and other MAA programs must be members in good standing of the Medieval Academy. Please contact the Executive Director for more information about these and other MAA programs.

The Medieval Academy of America invites proposals for sessions at the upcoming annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Philadelphia, January 5-8, 2023.

Each year the Medieval Academy co-sponsors sessions at the AHA’s annual meeting. This year, we aim to sponsor sessions that address an overarching theme of interest both to MAA members and broader audiences:

“(Re)Constructing the Middle Ages through Migrations, Mobilities, Mediations.” We offer this theme in encompassing terms. We imagine that panels might address a range of topics that include: indigenous and global perspectives that extend and challenge previous conceptions of the period; considerations of the field from historical scales that reveal temporal, geographic, or conceptual incongruities, from microhistories to civilizational studies; new narrations of the medieval past from unexpected or previously de-centered locales, objects, or persons; configurations of the field that blur or eradicate geographic, temporal, conceptual, or linguistic boundaries; reckonings of the medieval that jettison or expose its medievalist, nationalist, and colonialist legacies. How does your work invite reconsiderations of what is medieval? We’d love to hear from you!

We invite all manner of session programming, and strongly encourage MAA members to think beyond traditional paper panels. Roundtables, lightning talks, interviews, field conversations, pedagogical workshops, digital labs, performances, working sessions, and any other experimental and inclusive forms of knowledge-sharing you might propose will be received with enthusiasm.

We especially encourage session proposals from scholars representing a variety of identity positions and academic ranks and affiliations, including graduate students and independent scholars. We also encourage session proposals from scholars whose work features sources, geographies, and populations that are under-represented in traditional reckonings of “the medieval.”

The committee is happy to provide feedback on draft session proposals; please reach out to us at ahacommittee@themedievalacademy.org. In addition, MAA members may receive feedback on proposals as part of the review process.

How to submit a session proposal

There is a two-stage process for submitting a session proposal for MAA and AHA co-sponsorship.

1) Members of the Medieval Academy submit session proposals to the MAA’s AHA Program Committee through the online submission form by 11:59 p.m., February 1, 2022.

2) If the session proposal is approved by the MAA’s AHA Committee, the session organizer will be informed by February 11 and will then be responsible for submitting the proposal directly to the AHA before the deadline of 11:59 p.m., February 15, 2022, indicating that the session has the sponsorship of the Medieval Academy of America.

For more information, please see FAQ: Organizing MAA/AHA Sessions.

In honor of his 80th birthday, Dr. Joseph T. Snow was honored by a five-day conference in October 2021 at the National Library of Spain and the Complutense University of Madrid: Congreso internacional de Estudios Medievales Hispánicos en honor de Joseph T. Snow. Several recorded sessions are available here.

Several Medieval Academy members have recently been awarded Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities:

Karen Desmond (Brandeis University): Polyphony and Practices of Music Writing in Worcester Cathedral Priory, c. 1150–1350 .

Laura Smoller (University of Rochester): Astrology and the Sibyls: Paths to Truth in Medieval and Renaissance Europe.

If you have good news to share, please send it to Executive Director Lisa Fagin Davis.