The Medieval Academy Blog

On March 9, we were compelled to cancel the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America due to the COVID-19 outbreak. We made a decision, in consultation with the Program Committee and the MAA governance, to turn the meeting into a Zoom-based conference instead, to take place on the same dates as originally scheduled. After surveying participants, we hosted eleven sessions, the Presidential Plenary, the CARA Meeting, and the Business Meeting on March 27-29. The remaining sessions chose to cancel or to defer to 2021, and two plenarists chose to record their lectures and post them publicly on the MAA YouTube channel. President Ruth Mazo Karras’ Presidential Lecture was viewed by 180 attendees, and between 50-70 attended the concurrent sessions.

The revised program is on our website, where recordings of the most of the sessions can be viewed as well. We were all disappointed that we couldn’t greet and learn from each other in person, and we hope that we will be able to be together next year in Bloomington for MAA 2021. Until then, stay safe and be well.

In the present crisis, as a growing number of our medievalist colleagues find themselves facing financial precarity, job insecurity, and difficulty accessing research resources, your  Medieval Academy membership matters more than ever.

With your help, the Academy increased its support of members in 2019, especially student, independent, and contingent scholars, through the numerous awards and fellowships offered annually. We have recently implemented programming in support of medievalists of color and of medievalists working in various professional contexts, and we are working to improve the representation of the Middle Ages in K-12 classrooms. As we work towards a more expansive Middle Ages, we are also working to build a more inclusive Medieval Studies. We sincerely hope that you will renew your valued membership in the Academy as we continue this work in 2020.

The combination of the dramatic recent downturn in the stock-market and an anticipated decrease in dues revenue will directly and significantly impact the MAA’s budget. If you are able to renew your membership for 2020, please do. Your membership dues will directly help us continue to award grants and fellowships in 2020 and beyond; keep dues at a lower level for independent, contingent, unemployed, and retired medievalists; and expand our programming.

You can easily pay your dues and/or make a donation through the  MAA website where, after you sign into your account, you can also adjust your membership category if necessary. Please consider supplementing your membership by becoming a Contributing or Sustaining member or by making a tax-deductible donation. In order to make membership more affordable for those in financially precarious circumstances, we have recently revised our dues structure.

You may also wish to remember the Academy with a bequest as a member of our Legacy Society (for more information, please contact the Executive Director).

When you renew, please take a few minutes to update your profile page so that members with similar interests can find you, and you can find them. You can also check a box to indicate your interest in serving on a Medieval Academy committee or reviewing for Speculum. Your profile page now includes an option to indicate gender and racial/ethnic identity. This information will not be visible to other members, but it will help the Academy immensely as we strive to increase our understanding of member demographics and work to improve diversity and inclusivity in Medieval Studies. If you have forgotten your username and/or password, please contact us for assistance.

Thank you for your support. We look forward to working with you in 2020 and hope to see you at the  2021 Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Stay safe –

Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, President
Lisa Fagin Davis, Executive Director

p.s. if you have already renewed, please ignore this message and accept our thanks!

The latest issue of Speculum is now available on the University of Chicago Press Journals website.

To access your members-only journal subscription, log in to the MAA website using your username and password associated with your membership (contact us at info@themedievalacademy.org if you have forgotten either), and choose “Speculum Online” from the “Speculum” menu.  As a reminder, your MAA membership provides exclusive online access to the full run of Speculum in full text, PDF, and e-Book editions – at no additional charge.

Speculum, Volume 95, Number 2 (April 2020)
Articles

The Scribes of the Silos Apocalypse (London, British Library, Add. MS 11695) and the Scriptorium of Silos in the Late Eleventh Century
Ainoa Castro Correa

From Purification to Protection: Plague Response in Late Medieval Valencia
Abigail Agresta

Performative Images and Cosmic Sound in the Exultet Liturgy of Southern Italy
Bissera V. Pentcheva

The Ages of the World and the Ages of Man: Irish and European Learning in the Twelfth Century
Michael Clarke and Máire Ní Mhaonaigh

Book Reviews
This issue of Speculum features more than 80 book reviews, including:

Lola Badia, Joan Santanach, and Albert Soler, Ramon Llull as a Vernacular Writer: Communicating a New Kind of Knowledge; Raymond Lulle and Patrick Gifreu, Proverbes de Raymond; Josep E. Rubio, Raymond Lulle: le langage et la raison; Une introduction à la genèse de l'”Ars“
Reviewed by Mark D. Johnston

François-Xavier Fauvelle, The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages
Reviewed by Esra Akın-Kıvanç

Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages
Reviewed by Joseph Ziegler

Bryan C. Keene and Alexandra Kaczenski, Sacred Landscapes: Nature in Renaissance Manuscripts; Nicole R. Myers, Michel Pastoureau, Elisabeth Taburet-Delahaye, and Michel Zink, eds., Art and Nature in the Middle Ages
Reviewed by Jacqueline Jung

Robin Chapman Stacey, Law and the Imagination in Medieval Wales
Reviewed by Thomas Charles-Edwards

Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity
Reviewed by James H. S. McGregor

MAA members also receive a 30% discount on all books and e-Books published by the University of Chicago Press, and a 20% discount on individual Chicago Manual of Style Online subscriptions. To access your discount code, log in to your MAA account, and click here.  Please include this code while checking out from the University of Chicago Press website.

Sincerely,

The Medieval Academy of America

Because the 2020 International Medieval Congress and International Congress on Medieval Studies have been cancelled, MAA programming for those conferences has been deferred until 2021. We hope you will join us in Kalamazoo next year where the MAA Plenary will be presented by Sharon Kinoshita, and in Leeds, where the MAA Lecture will be presented by Carol Symes.

96th Annual Meeting
Medieval Academy of America 
Indiana University, Bloomington
15-18 April, 2021

Call for Papers

The 96th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will take place on the campus of the Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. The meeting is jointly hosted by the Medieval Academy of America and the Medieval Studies Institute of the Indiana University.  The conference program will feature a diverse range of 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. 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.

The program committee encourages medievalists of all professional standing to submit abstracts. 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 academic-adjacent institutions (libraries, archives, museums, scholarly societies, or cultural research centers), editors and publishers, and other fellow medievalists.

Click here for the Call for Papers and submission instructions: https://maa2021.indiana.edu/

We are very pleased to announce that the 2020 Belle da Costa Greene Award has been presented to Gabriela Andrea Faundez Rojas to support the completion of her dissertation, “Conquest and Hagiography: Rewriting Saints after the Norman Conquest.”

Belle Da Costa Greene (1883-1950) was a prominent art historian and the first manuscript librarian of the Pierpont Morgan collection. She was also the first known person of color and second woman to be elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America (1939). According to the Morgan Library & Museum website, “Greene was barely twenty when Morgan hired her, yet her intelligence, passion, and self-confidence eclipsed her relative inexperience, [and] she managed to help build one of America’s greatest private libraries.” She was, just as importantly, a black woman who passed as white in order to gain entrance and acceptance into the racially fraught professional landscape of early twentieth-century New York. Her legacy highlights the professional difficulties faced by medievalists of color, the personal sacrifices they make in order to belong to the field, and their extraordinary contributions to Medieval Studies. Click here to support the Belle da Costa Greene Fund in support of medievalists of color.

We are very pleased to announce the winners of the 2020 Olivia Remie Constable Awards:

S. C. Kaplan, “Female Literary Culture and Networks in 15th-Century Bourbonnais and Burgundy”; Elizabeth Lastra, “Art and Authority in Medieval Spain: The Story of Carrión”; Shyama Rajendran, “Language Undone: Philology, Race, and Late Medieval Literature”; and Lydia Marie Walker, “Holy Women on the Home Front: The Construction of Female Sanctity in the Context of Thirteenth-Century Crusading Propaganda.”

The OIivia Remie Constable Awards reflect the high standards of Remie’s scholarship, as well as her broader interdisciplinary interests in Medieval Studies (as exemplified by her teaching, her leadership, and her service to the discipline). Click here for more information about this Award program.

In these difficult times, we are particularly pleased to be able to share some good news:

Olga Bush (Vassar College) has been awarded a membership at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton for the Fall 2020 for her current book in progress under the working title Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Visual Culture of al-Andalus and the Medieval Mediterranean in Light of the Environmental Turn.

Michael Johnston (Purdue University) has been awarded the National Humanities Center’s Kent R. Mullikin Fellowship to support his project, “The Reading Nation in the Age of Chaucer: English Books, 1350-1500.”

Jennifer Speed (Univ. of Dayton) and two colleagues have been awarded a Humanities Connections Implementation Grant from the NEH in support of their project, “Paul Laurence Dunbar: Life, Works, and Legacy.”

Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the Medieval Academy of America office will be closed until further notice. The staff are all working from home and are checking email regularly. Phone messages left at the office, however, may go unanswered during this period. Thank you for your understanding. Stay safe, and we look forward to welcoming you to the office when the crisis has passed.