The Medieval Academy Blog

It has long come to the attention of members of the Medieval Academy of America that policies need to be established and formally registered concerning behavioral expectations for MAA Annual Meetings. The MAA encourages open discourse among colleagues of all disciplines and career stages, and does so anticipating healthy differences of opinion over a wide variety of scholarly issues. The openness of our discourse means that everyone, each individual person, needs to feel safe while engaged in the collaborative work of our annual meeting. Protection must be afforded for all members from negative or threatening actions, including verbal abuse, discrimination, bullying, and harassment of any type, including sexual harassment. The means of enforcing these policies are to be discussed by a newly-established Ad Hoc Committee, with suggested proposals for reporting and adjudication of formal complaints to be presented as part of its work. At some stage we will also need to have counsel vet the proposal before we post it and make it official policy.

The charge of the Ad Hoc Committee, established by president Margot Fassler and chaired by 2nd VP Ruth Mazo Karras, will be to develop these formal policies and proposals for enforcement.

The committee will work from January 2018 to January 2019, with regular reporting by Professor Karras to the Executive Committee of the MAA on progress being made. Policies and procedures evolved will then be vetted by the Executive Committee in preparation for their formal presentation to the Council at the annual meeting in 2019. If they are deemed ready, a vote will be taken and they will be posted as part of our literature.

It would also be possible, if the committee deems it is ready, to submit the proposal to the Executive Committee in the early Fall, 2018, to receive their feedback, to amend the proposal accordingly, and to present it to the Council electronically. In that case, it might be possible to have the policies in place for the 2019 annual meeting. This possibility should not be seen, however, as an inducement or prod to work in haste.

The committee — chosen to represent multiple constituencies within the Medieval Academy — has been named as follows:

Theodore Chelis; Michelle Sauer; Wan-Chuan Kao; Laura Morreale; Therese Martin; and Ruth Mazo Karras, Chair

An initial report will be given by Professor Karras at the Annual Meeting of the Council, March, 2018. Please contact Prof. Karras <profkarras@gmail.com> with questions or concerns about the work of this committee

Registration for the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America is now open! The meeting will take place at the Emory University Conference Center in Atlanta, from 1-3 March 2018. The program, registration, and hotel information are available here. Register by January 31 to take advantage of the early-bird discount, and make your hotel reservations at the Conference Center as soon as possible to lock in discounted rates. We look forward to seeing you in Atlanta!

I am very pleased to announce the results of the 2018 Governance election:

President: David Wallace (Univ. of Pennsylvania)

1st Vice-President: Ruth Mazo Karras (Univ. of Minnesota)

2nd Vice-President: Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski (Univ. of Pittsburgh)

Councillors:

Raymond Clemens (Beinecke Library, Yale Univ.)

Valerie L. Garver (Northern Illinois Univ.)

Lucy K. Pick (Univ. of Chicago) Kathryn A. Smith (New York University)

Nominating Committee:

Robin Fleming (Boston College)
Catherine Saucier (Arizona State Univ.)

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

The Medieval Academy of America seeks to appoint an Editor for Speculum.  The position is configured as part-time, requiring around 25 hours per week. The Editor is appointed for an expected five-year term, subject to acceptable yearly performance reviews, with the possibility of a second five-year term by mutual agreement. The editor should be an established scholar with academic credentials in some field(s) of medieval studies, broadly defined, with good organizational and decision-making skills. Experience in journal or book editing will be helpful but not necessary. The new editor should plan on taking office in the late Spring of 2019, and at the latest by July 1, 2019. Terms and conditions are to be negotiated, as is the physical location of the Editor.

Applications should be sent to the MAA by July 30, 2018. There will be electronic interviews in Fall 2018 and interviews with finalists in early December, 2018. Cover letters may be addressed to David Wallace, Chair of the Search Committee. In addition to a curriculum vitae, the cover letter should include ideas about future directions for the journal, and discussion of how s/he envisions setting up the position, either in the MAA office, now in Cambridge, MA, or by moving the operation to a university campus. If the latter, s/he will describe possible institutional support. The search committee wants to identify the best pool of candidates, and the MAA is willing to be flexible in finding ways to accommodate the various modes of professional life encountered in the searching process. However, wherever the ultimate location of the Editor, there will need to be access to a major research library and to graduate students who can be hired for assistance. Candidates should also include the names and email addresses of three scholars who can speak to the candidate’s editorial experience and scholarship; these references will only be contacted for long-listed candidates. The MAA President would be happy to respond to immediate questions about the duties involved, but candidates should also consult the fuller description of duties posted on the Academy website. The MAA also encourages nominations for the position, and there is a place to submit these on the website as well; all nominees will be sent a letter encouraging application.

For additional information, contact:
EditorSearch@TheMedievalAcademy.org

Click here for a full job description and to apply.

Click here to submit a nomination.

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.  Please refer to this video tutorial if you are having difficulty. 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 93, Issue 1 (January 2018)

Articles

“Ala grant temps de douleur languissant”: Grief and Mourning in Girart d’Amiens’ Istoire le roy Charlemaine

Daisy Delogu

“Partout la figure du lion”: Thomas of Marle and the Enduring Legacy of the Coucy Donjon Tympanum

Richard A. Leson

On Lying

Introduction

Dallas G. Denery II

“Consider the Future as Present”: The Paranoid World of Kekaumenos

Jake Ransohoff

“Your Words Are the Truth”: Rabbi Qalonymous and Archbishop Ruthard of Mainz

Susan L. Einbinder

Serpents and Lies

Nancy Mandeville Caciola

Lies, Puns, Tallies: Marital and Material Deceit in Langland and Chaucer

Jamie Taylor

The Medieval Liar

Gyula Klima

Articles

Glossing Vergil and Pagan Learning in the Carolingian Age

Sinéad O’Sullivan

Book Reviews

This issue of Speculum features more than 70 book reviews, including:

Lindy Grant, Blanche of Castile, Queen of France

Reviewed by William Chester Jordan

Catherine Hanley, Louis: The French Prince Who Invaded England

Reviewed by Hagar Barak

David Wallace, ed., Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418

Reviewed by Marisa Galvez and Niklaus Largier

Warren T. Woodfin, The Embodied Icon: Liturgical Vestments and Sacramental Power in Byzantium

Reviewed by Maureen C. Miller

Piotr Górecki, The Text and the World: The Henryków Book, Its Authors, and Their Region, 1160-1310

Reviewed by Wojtek Jezierski

Anna Baldwin, An Introduction to Medieval English Literature 1300-1485; Michael Calabrese, An Introduction to Piers Plowman

Reviewed by Ellen K. Rentz

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.

MAA Dissertation Grants (deadline 15 February):

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.

Schallek Awards (deadline 15 February):

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.

MAA/GSC Grant for Innovation in Community-Building and Professionalization (deadline 15 February):

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.

Olivia Remie Constable Award (deadline 15 February):

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.

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 is very pleased to announce that the 2018-2020 Baldwin Fellowship has been awarded to Juliana Amorim Goskes (New York University), “Sharing the Throne: The Queen’s Body, Representation, and Performance (France, 1223-1435).” 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 and is endowed through the generosity of her family. The Baldwin Fellowship provides a grant of $20,000 per year for up to two years to support a graduate student in a North American university who is researching and writing a significant dissertation for the Ph.D. on any subject in French medieval history that can be realized only by sustained research in the archives and libraries of France. Juliana’s summary of her topic follows:

My dissertation, “Sharing the Throne: The Queen’s Body, Representation, and Performance (France, 1223-1435),” explores the ways that the queen’s body, as a physical and discursive entity, enabled theoretical reflections and contested ideological innovations in late Capetian and Valois France. At a time when the French body politic was going through intense conceptualization and when the king’s body was itself being manipulated for such purposes, the queen’s body was equally integral to the political language: in the descriptions of her as a bride, wife and mother; in the images produced of her and dispersed in royal and ecclesiastical circles; in the language reporting her coronation, governmental input, and public presence; and in the care for her sick and deceased body. Because it is liminal, the queen’s body is ideal for an exploration of how ideology of royal sovereignty was elaborated and put into practice. Royal but not born such, powerful but female, part of the royal family but also of her own bloodline, in the queen’s body converged her family, her husband, and her children, multipliable beyond the limits of the crown and the realm. By examining how the queen’s body becomes a French royal body, I seek to contribute a broader understanding of the spatial and material dimensions of queenly life, thereby extending the “political” to spheres that reach beyond the apparatus of royal institutions.

I argue that, despite the privilege enjoyed by texts as doorways to knowledge of the past, other forms of sign-production can be equally revealing of attitudes toward power and its constitution, and that the royal body becomes one such signifying template through interdisciplinary engagement with material culture, performance, and archaeology. For this, I follow a thematic development evoking the careers of queens rather than individual biographies. Marriage and coronation, intimate life and childbearing, public appearances and actions, cultural patronage, funerary dispositions, and commemoration by heirs and successors become key themes through which to explore how the queen’s body was spoken of and represented and how it interacted with material artifacts. This will articulate topics often explored by historians, art historians, and literary historians by considering cultural productions in their intrinsic connections with contemporary constructions of royal ideology. In addition to this, I also claim that a gendered but inclusive approach to the construction of the royal aura allows for a reconsideration of the transition between Capetians and Valois rulers following the 1314-1328 succession crises, since the growth of queenly prestige was parallel to and indeed influenced the developments of kingship, and was therefore constitutive of what it meant to be “royal.” As such, focusing on topics rather than incumbents, across the period at hand and on either side of the dynastic transition, helps visualize traditions and highlight innovations.

The support of the Birgit Baldwin Fellowship will allow me to dedicate a full academic year to research in French repositories such as the National Archives and the National Library in Paris, as well as other institutions. Queenly donations and commissions for religious institutions (through the series of ecclesiastical documents L and S of the Archives) and account records of the hôtel of the queens, alongside smaller documents signed or sealed by them (mostly through early modern copies but also in collections of originals in the BnF), are of particular importance to me at this stage of my research. Furthermore, work on secondary sources has signaled specific documents on other archival series housed in the Archives and flagged the possibility of relevant material in the departmental archives. Being in Paris will also allow me to consult objects known to have been owned by queens and manuscripts that have not been digitized (or whose digital reproduction is of poor quality and requires on-site consultation), following my interest in tracing how the queen’s body is represented and how it interacted with material artifacts. The Fellowship will thus allow me to pursue an in-depth inter-media exploration, drawing upon iconographic, artefactual, and textual sources to identify the ways that cultural and political issues raised by the presence of a female body in a predominantly male sphere shaped medieval rulership.

The Medieval Academy of America is very pleased to announce that the 2018 – 2019 Schallek Fellowship has been awarded to Lindsey McNellis (West Virginia University), “Vi et Armis: Violence and Injury before the Common Pleas.” The Schallek Fellowship provides a one-year grant of $30,000 to support Ph.D. dissertation research in any relevant discipline dealing with late-medieval Britain (ca. 1350-1500). The fellowship is supported by a generous gift to the Richard III Society from William B. and Maryloo Spooner Schallek. Lindsey’s summary of her topic follows:

Assault, forceful breaking and entering, kidnapping, theft, and false imprisonment have all been studied extensively through the lens of criminal courts in late medieval London, but civil litigation of these torts has received less attention. Within the records of the Court of Common Pleas, writs of trespass covered an array of violent torts wherein people sought compensation for violence done to their person or property. The fact that some violence warranted legal action not only suggests a sliding scale of the social and cultural categorization of violence, but also that this scale was highly personalized; what was regular and accepted for one person might not be regular and accepted by another. Additionally, acceptance of these violent acts, as well as a valuation of their cost, is contingent on the intersection of a variety of factors.

My dissertation examines how fifteenth-century Londoners conceptualized violence and injury. I investigate the role that gender, occupation, and status played in the cases before the Court of Common Pleas. The Common Pleas was one of the royal common law courts; its purview was civil litigation for cases with claims of forty shillings or more. While this court was more accessible to a Londoner than, say, someone from Lancashire, there were local (non-royal) London courts which could also try a civil suit. Therefore, I also explore the possible forum shopping done by Londoners between the less expensive local courts available to them and this royal court for their suits. These civil cases offer a glimpse into how medieval Londoners placed value on themselves and their property, as well as a way to examine the relationship between gender, class, and occupation and the institutes of justice.

I use writs of trespass, specifically ones concerning vi et armis torts, and focus on cases enrolled in the records of the Common Pleas between 1405 and 1415. For this time period, there was an abundance of well-preserved records, which offer an enticing amount of detail and open a number of avenues of analysis. This concentrated set of sources also permits me to examine actors operating under the consistency of one ruler amid the surrounding tumultuous decades, those leading to the Lancastrian rise to power and its demise. The records are legal briefs recorded by the prothonotaries of the Common Pleas and contain the original writ, the cause (a more detailed explanation of the tort or wrong action), the plea by the defendant, and finally a resolution (if one was made). Some cases contain more detail than others and very few are resolved. However, a resolution is not paramount to the questions my dissertation seeks to answer.

Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, I am noting the parish and ward in London where the violent tort occurred, the goods stolen and the value the plaintiff placed on them, the people assaulted or kidnapped and the value the plaintiff placed on the injury, weapons used, and damages requested. I am also examining special defenses put forth by litigants, pursuing a comparison of injury value and rationale in assault, analyzing damages requested for theft cases, and considering the legal maneuverings employed by both plaintiffs and defendants in the pursuit of the justice.

Creating a baseline understanding of violence, injury, and trespass is an important step towards identifying contemporary ideas of injury. Further, such an examination will allow me to explore what items and injuries were valuable enough to initiate costly litigation. Through my investigation into the role that gender, class, and occupation plays in these cases, I hope to detect constructions of identity that the court and the litigants created. Currently, society is focusing more on the intersections of race, gender, and class and how this influences interactions with institutes of power, including the justice system. My dissertation takes some of those themes and examines how they influenced fifteenth-century Londoners’ perceptions of violence, injury, and worth.

The Medieval Academy supports conference travel for unaffiliated or contingent scholars through our Travel Grant program. MAA Travel Grants are funded by donations to the Medieval Academy of America Travel Fund. The most recent awardees are:

Christine Axen, “Relocating the Sisters of St Catherine: Cistercian Identity and Urban Space in Thirteenth-Century Avignon” (Medieval Academy of America, 1-3 March 2018, Atlanta, Georgia)

William Campbell, “Monastic Preaching to the Laity in Thirteenth-Century England” (Medieval Monks, Nuns and Monastic Life,15-20 July 2018, University of Bristol, England)

Jitske Jasperse, “Three Twelfth-Century Sisters: Matilda, Leonor and Joanna Displaying Dynastic Connections Through Art” (Celebrating Female Agency in the Arts, 26-27 June 2018, New York City, New York)

Megan Camille McNamee, “Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Phillipps 1833: A ‘Bridge to Arithmetic'” (Medieval Academy of America, 1-3 March 2018, Atlanta, Georgia)

Robey Clark Patrick, “Exhuming Anushiruwān (Khosrow I): Leaves of Eternal Life and Alfonsine Historiography” (International Congress on Medieval Studies, 10-13 May 2018, Kalamazoo, Michigan)

Carla Maria Thomas, “Poetic Mutation: Old English Content in Latin Form” (2018 Congress of the New Chaucer Society, 10-15 July 2018, Toronto, Ontario, Canada)

Hope Deejune Williard, “The Epistolary Friendships of Anglo-Saxon Women” (Medieval Academy of America, 1-3 March 2018, Atlanta, Georgia)

The 2018 Elliott Prize has been awarded to Alison Locke Perchuk (California State University Channel Islands) for her article, “Schismatic (Re)Visions: Sant’Elia near Nepi and Sta. Maria in Trastevere in Rome, 1120-1143,” Gesta 55 (2016), 179-212. The Elliott Prize is awarded for a first article in the field of medieval studies judged by the selection committee to be of outstanding quality. Van Courtlandt Elliott was Executive Secretary of the Academy and Editor of Speculum from 1965 to 1970. The prize that bears his name consists of a certificate and a monetary award of $500.