The Medieval Academy Blog

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.

The Medieval Academy of America invites proposals for panels at the 2018 meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, on January 3-6, 2019. The theme of the 2018 Meeting is “Loyalties.”

Each year the Medieval Academy co-sponsors with the AHA several sessions at this meeting that are likely to be of particular interest to MAA members and general interest to a broader audience.

There is a two-stage process:

1) Members of the Medieval Academy submit draft session descriptions to the MAA’s AHA Program Committee by emailing them to the committee chair, Professor Sean Field (slfield@uvm.edu) by January 20, 2018. Descriptions should include the session title, session abstract, paper titles, names and affiliations of the organizer, presenters, and (if relevant) respondent. Individual paper abstracts are requested but not required. Guidelines for sessions and submitting proposals can be found on the AHA website here.

2) If the session proposal is approved by the MAA AHA Committee, the organizer submits the proposal directly to the AHA (using their on-line system) by the deadline of February 15, 2018, indicating that the session has the sponsorship of the Medieval Academy of America.

Please note that only sessions approved by the AHA Program Committee will appear as sponsored by the MAA and AHA on the program and that the MAA does not independently sponsor sessions.

In December, the Modern Language Association announced that it was awarding the Scaglione Publication Award to University of Notre Dame Press to support the publication of Meditations on the Life of Christ: The Short Italian Text by Sarah McNamer (Georgetown Univ.).

Lisa Wolverton (Univ. of Oregon) has been awarded an NEH Fellowship for 2018-19 to support research for her in-progress book, Henry and Vratislav: Medieval Central Europe Transformed

Nicole Rice (St. John’s University, New York) was awarded an NEH Fellowship to complete her book-length study, Hospitals and Literary Production in England, 1350-1550

If you have good news to share, contact Executive Director Lisa Fagin Davis.