The Medieval Academy Blog

The Northern Illinois University Medieval Studies Concentration was recently the beneficiary of a generous endowment to support undergraduate programs related to Medieval Studies—the David L. Wagner Medieval Studies Fund. David L. Wagner is an emeritus professor of history and medieval studies at NIU, and students and faculty alike are grateful for his generosity. In 2016, we brought Professor Robert Berkhofer of Western Michigan University to campus to give the inaugural Wagner Lecture in Medieval Culture on “Forgery and Faith in the Liber Traditionum of St. Peter’s Ghent” and to meet with undergraduate students. In 2017, we co-sponsored two public lectures with the Department of History given by Professor Richard Payne of the University of Chicago (“Religion and Empire in Iran”) and Professor Jamie Kreiner of the University of Georgia (“Domesticating Pigs and People in the Early Middle Ages”). Since receiving the endowment we have been able to provide six undergraduate scholarships, to begin funding undergraduate travel for research and conferences, and to start an annual prize for the best Medieval Studies capstone project. You can find us on Facebook at:

https://www.facebook.com/NIU-Concentration-in-Medieval-Studies-1687272954879835/

The Medieval Institute and the medievalist community at Western Michigan University enjoyed in 2016-2017 a year of activities, accomplishments, and accolades.

In June/July 2016, our Richard Rawlinson Center for Anglo-Saxon Studies and Manuscript Research, in collaboration with the Department of English, hosted “Teaching <em>Beowulf</em> in the Context of Old Norse-Icelandic Literature,” a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for College and University Faculty.

Melissa Mayus joined us for the year as a post-doctoral fellow/instructor, teaching the introduction to Old English and a seminar on religion and Old English literature.

The Institute sponsored a lecture by Andrew Scheil (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) in its distinguished lecture series (wmich.edu/medieval/research/loew-lectures) and co-sponsored a lecture by David M. Perry (Dominican University) in the Department of History’s Burnham-Macmillan Lecture Series.

The Institute hosted the 52nd International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 11-14, 2017), which attracted 2,842 medievalists to the campus (wmich.edu/medievalcongress). The Institute’s two research centers, the Richard Rawlinson Center for Anglo-Saxon Studies and Manuscript Research (wmich.edu/medieval/research/anglo-saxon) and the Center for Cistercian and Monastic Studies (wmich.edu/medieval/research/cistercian), both sponsored sessions at the Congress.

Nine students completed the M.A. in medieval studies in April (wmich.edu/medieval/alumni), and three more M.A. candidates are expected to finish their degrees before the end of the summer.

Medieval Institute Publications (MIP) is in the middle of negotiating an ambitious ten-year growth plan. Already MIP has signed up over 100 new titles in 2016 and is due to publish 24 titles in 2017 alongside its existing three journals. MIP has expanded its coverage to include both the late antique and early modern periods, partly thanks to recruiting several experienced acquisitions editors who had formerly worked for Ashgate. Meanwhile, the new “Past Imperfect” series of short-form publications, available for $14.95 and as e-books, seems to have captured the imagination of authors and reviewers alike. The volumes support medievalists’ attempts to engage with a broader public (https://mip-archumanitiespress.org/blog/2017/02/05/3newpi/).

The press has welcomed a new staff member, Nicole Eddy, a recent PhD from Notre Dame who manages peer-reviewing and oversees the press’s accounts. Nicole received an award to attend the recent annual meeting of finance officers of the Association of American University Presses in St. Petersburg, FL. Long-standing managing editor, Theresa Whitaker, represented the press in Wellington, New Zealand in February at the biennial ANZAMEMS meeting. Director, Simon Forde, delivered a plenary at the annual meeting of the Taiwanese medievalists and attended meetings in China and Argentina last fall.

MIP continues to work closely in a consortium partnership with Amsterdam University Press and Arc Humanities Press, the publishing arm of the CARMEN Worldwide Medieval Network, of which the Medieval Academy is a member.

Medieval Institute affiliated faculty member Jeffrey Angles (World Languages and Literatures) won the prestigious Yomiuri Prize for Literature in poetry (wmich.edu/news/2017/02/38292), and Lofton Durham (Theatre) won a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend (wmich.edu/news/2017/04/39426).

M.A. candidate Erin S. Lynch won an All-University Graduate Student Teaching Effectiveness Award.

Affiliated faculty members Robert Felkel (Spanish), Natalio Ohanna (Spanish), Pablo Pastrana-Pérez (Spanish) won College of Arts and Sciences faculty achievement awards (wmich.edu/arts-sciences/2017-faculty-staff-awards) , and Anise Strong (History) won the college’s Gender Scholar Award.

The Medieval and Renaissance Studies (MARS) program at the University of Missouri oversees interdisciplinary minors at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and sponsors/cosponsors several MARS events during the academic year, including lectures, abstract workshops, reading groups, and social events. Our website is at http://medren.missouri.edu.

Program events:  Our medieval and early modern community enjoyed several campus events in the past year, including the annual MARS lecture by Prof. Robin Fleming (History, Boston College) on “Rethinking Early Medieval Migration with Women and Isotopes” in November 2016. In December, medievalists benefitted from the Archaeological Institute of America’s lecture series, which sponsored Prof. Dennis Trout (Classical Studies, MU), on “Pictures with Words: Reading the Apse Mosaic at S. Agnese f.l.m. (Rome).” In March 2017, Prof. Susan Phillips (English, Northwestern University), spoke on “Mercantile Mischief and Popular Pedagogy in Premodern England.” Our MARS Seminar in April 2017 brought dozens of scholars from the region together to discuss works in progress by Jonathan Lamb (English, University of Kansas), Sheila Blair (Fine Arts, Boston College), and Sheeta Chaganti (English, University of California, Davis), on the topic of aesthetics in medieval and early modern culture. The MARS-sponsored session at the 52^nd International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo continued the discussion on “The Aesthetics of Form,” with Prof. Lee Manion (English) presiding. Members of the MARS community thank Prof. Emma Lipton (English) for her three years of hard work as MARS chair, and welcome the incoming chair Prof. Megan Moore (Romance Languages).

Faculty and student news:  Work by five MARS scholars won prizes and fellowships. Prof. Johanna Kramer’s monograph Between Earth and Heaven: Liminality and the Ascension of Christ in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Manchester University Press, 2014) won the 2016 Award for Best First Book from the Southeastern Medieval Association (SEMA).  Christopher Paolella (PhD candidate, History) was awarded the Sherry L. Reames Graduate Student Travel award from the Hagiography Society, and Colby Turberville (PhD student, History) won two awards: the Jim Falls Prize for Best Paper by a Graduate Student at the Mid-America Medieval Association Meeting in September 2016, and the Best Student Paper prize at the Missouri Conference on History in March 2017. Fellowship holders included Prof. Anne Rudloff Stanton (Art History and Archaeology) who held the 2016-17 Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship from the Dallas Foundation, and Stephanie Chapman (ABD, Art History) who held the Herbert L. Schooling Fellowship from MU.

The Department of History welcomed Prof. Kristy Wilson Bowers, and bade farewell to Prof. Russ Zguta, who retired after fifty years at the University and was awarded the 2016 Presidential Award of the Central Slavic Conference for a “lifetime of support” for the Conference and “untiring promotion of Slavic Studies.”

Looking forward:  Students are invited to save the date for an innovative summer experience in 2018! Monastic Worlds (co-taught by Prof. Rabia Gregory (Religious Studies, MU) and Prof. Virginia Blanton (English, UMKC), and other faculty) is an experiential learning course that introduces students to the religious history and culture of premodern Europe and the contemporary American Midwest. The four-week class begins with two weeks of online learning, then moves to two weeks of face-to-face classes held at the Benedictine communities of Conception Abbey in Conception, MO and Mount St Scholastica in Atchison, KS. Onsite, students will observe and participate in communal life, work with manuscripts and early printed books, and visit the largest reliquary collection in North America, housed at a Benedictine convent in Clyde, MO. More information can be found at http://cas2.umkc.edu/mems/monastic-worlds.asp.

Prof. Rabia Gregory (Religious Studies) is pleased to announce a new book series, Christianities Before Modernity, which will be published by ARC Humanities Press and Medieval Institute Publications. More about the series, which will be co-edited by Prof. Gregory, Prof. Kathleen E. Kennedy (Pennsylvania State University, Brandywine), Prof. Susanna A. Throop (Ursinis College), and Charlene Villaseñor Black (UCLA), is available here [https://mip-archumanitiespress.org/series/mip/christianities-before-modernity/].

A special report from Germantown Friends School, an independent K-12 school in Philadelphia. The report was submitted by Latin teacher James Barron.

“Our Medieval studies unit caps off a year of coordinated work in two courses.  At our school, sophomores who study Latin have the option of taking their Ancient and Medieval History course in conjunction with Latin III.  Students opting for this program then study the history of Rome from its origins through to the collapse of the Western empire and the transition to Medieval societies and cultures (we call this course Latin History).  I teach both the Latin III and Latin History courses, so I have these students twice daily in class.  The fourth quarter of the year is focused on bringing students to an awareness and appreciation of the complex process of preservation, transformation, and loss by which late antiquity became the “middle ages.”  Starting with Lactantius’ De Mortibus Persecutorum (Bk 7, the administrative and economic programs of Diocletian), students then read Orosius’ Historiarum Adversum Paganos (Bk 7, the Visigoth Athaulfus’ desire to restore Roman law), Jordanes’ De Origine Actibusque Getarum (Bk 42, Attila and Pope Leo I), Gregory of Tours’ Historiae Francorum (Bk 2, the conversion of Clovis), Einhard’s Vita Karoli Magni (Bk 1, Childeric III the last Merovingian king; Bks 22, 24, and 25, descriptions of Charlemagne and his educational renaissance), and finally, Fulcher of Chartres’ Historia Hierosolymitana (851-853a, the fall of Jerusalem).  Finally, students spend the month of May working on individual translation and research projects in which they select a text from Harrington’s Medieval Latin (2nd edition).  They research the author to provide a brief biography and then locate him or her with respect to time period, society, culture, audience, etc.  In addition to their translation of their chosen author’s text, they also comment upon changes and departures from Classical Latin grammar, vocabulary, and orthography.  The students really get excited about their projects.  For example, two girls this year chose Hildegard of Bingen and presented her from a feminist perspective.  They found recordings of Hildegard’s carmina that they had translated and wrote an alto part for one of the songs so that they, a soprano and an alto, could perform the hymn for the class.  They also made cookies for us, following a recipe of Hildegard.  Among other authors selected this year were Boethius, Pope Gregory I, Isidore of Seville, and Paul the Deacon.  During the last class, the students explain their author and work to their classmates, and as they do so, the rich textures of Western Medieval culture become palpable and amplified.  This exercise makes each student an “expert” to his or her classmates around a Medieval person and text.  It also allows me to ask questions better answered by students than delivered in a lecture, for example, “Why are all of these authors associated with the church,” or “What shared worldviews exist between these writers and their audiences and what is required of us to understand and appreciate that connection on its own terms?” “

Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCL

# Masters training and and past student views about it:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/mars

# The Graduate Students’ Seminar:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/mars/seminars-lectures/imars

# Seminars at the Institute of Historical Research:
http://www.history.ac.uk/events/seminars

• Earlier Middle Ages
• Crusades and the Latin East
• European History 1150-1550
• Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy
• Late Medieval Seminar

Medieval Studies at the University of Vermont

In 2016-2017 an interdisciplinary group of medievalists at the University of Vermont, with the support of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of History, the Department of Romance Languages, and Bailey-Howe Library Special Collections, inaugurated the “UVM College of Arts and Sciences Medieval Studies Lecture Series,” which included:

October 18, 2016:  Alfred J. Andrea (Professor Emeritus, UVM),  “The Crusades in the Context of World History.”

January 19, 2017:  Tracy Adams (University of Auckland), “The French Royal Mistress and the Politics of Representation.”

February 8, 2017:  Ray Clemens (Yale University, Beinecke Library): “The World’s Most Mysterious Manuscript: Theories on Its Origin and Use.”

February 13, 2017:  Jacques Dalarun (IRHT/CNRS, Paris), “The ‘Rediscovered Francis of Assisi’ in the Rediscovered Life by Thomas of Celano.”

Looking ahead:  On July 14, 2017 we are pleased to be hosting the 5th Annual “Vermont Midsummer Medieval Summit,” with pre-circulated papers from Cecilia Gaposchkin (Dartmouth College) and Charles-Louis Morand-Métivier (UVM), supported by the UVM Humanities Center (if you’ll be in the area and would like to attend, contact sean.field@uvm.edu).

The lineup for the 2017-2018 “Medieval Studies Lecture Series” is still being developed, but will include a public lecture by Miri Rubin (Queen Mary, University of London), November 9 (with the support of the Carolyn and Leonard Miller Center for Holocaust Studies), on “The Child Murder Accusation against the Jews of Norwich:  Meaning, Memory and Legacy.”

Finally, we are proud to note that our own Dr. Charles F. Briggs is the winner of the inaugural UVM President’s Distinguished Senior Lecturer Award.  Well done, Charlie!

Click here for CARA news from the University of Toronto.