The Medieval Academy Blog

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 92, Issue 1 (January 2017)

Articles

The Case of the Court Entertainer: Popular Culture, Intertextual Dialogue, and the Early Circulation of Boccaccio’s Decameron
William Robins

The Practice of Penance in Communities of Benedictine Women Religious in Central Medieval England
Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis

“Who Owns the Money?” Currency, Property, and Popular Sovereignty in Nicole Oresme’s De moneta
Adam Woodhouse

Rivers of Risk and Redemption in Gregory of Tours’ Writings
Ellen F. Arnold

Ebo of Reims, Pseudo-Isidore, and the Date of the False Decretals
Eric Knibbs

The Enduring Attraction of the Pirenne Thesis
Bonnie Effros

Book Reviews
This issue of Speculum features more than 60 book reviews, including:

David Carpenter, ed. and trans., Magna Carta; J. C. Holt, ed., Magna Carta; David Starkey, Magna Carta: The True Story behind the Charter
Reviewed by James Masschaele

Mary Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages
Reviewed by Jacqueline E. Jung

Garth Fowden, Before and After Muhammad: The First Millennium Refocused
Reviewed by John Tolan

Jonathan Hsy, Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature
Reviewed by Bruce Holsinger

Christina Normore, A Feast for the Eyes: Art, Performance and the Late Medieval Banquet
Reviewed by Peter Arnade

Lucy Freeman Sandler, Illuminators and Patrons in Fourteenth-Century England: The Psalter and Hours of Humphrey de Bohun and the Manuscripts of the Bohun Family
Reviewed by Lynda Dennison

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

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 program.

MAA@AHA

The Medieval Academy of America invites proposals for panels at the 2018 meeting of the American Historical Association in Washington, DC, on January 4-7, 2018. The theme of the 2018 Meeting is “Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism in Global Perspective.”

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 Scott G. Bruce (bruces@colorado.edu) by February 1, 2017. 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, 2017, 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.

Dustin Neighly

Members of the Schallek Fellowship Committee unanimously agree that the 2017-18 Fellowship be awarded to Dustin Neighly, for the dissertation project entitled ‘Nor from the Clamor of the Poor: The Common Law’s Influence on Villein Decision-Making Processes’. Neighly is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers University, working under the supervision of Dr James Masschaele.

The Schallek Committee reports that Dustin Neighly’s dissertation shows every promise of making an exceptional contribution to the field of medieval English legal studies. It sheds important new light on the tangled and multiple legal systems of later medieval England by exploring the strategies by which peasants and villeins not only negotiated, but also subtly altered, the literate practices associated with common-law litigation. The research plan is ambitious but feasible: Neighly explains his aims clearly and offers compelling justification for its methods, source base and overarching structure. About his project, Neighly writes:

“The legal landscape of late-medieval England encompassed a tangled web of overlapping and often competing jurisdictions. A plaintiff or defendant’s success frequently hinged upon their understanding of the complex rules which governed this network of court systems. Engagement with the law was so commonplace that even villeins, whose unfree status was grounds for having their cases dismissed from the common law system, repeatedly attempted to utilize the courts to their advantage. Moreover, when peasants did engage in extralegal actions, such as the 1381 rebellion, they routinely articulated their demands through pseudo-legal frameworks or directed their attentions toward specific legal mechanisms, such as charters or claims to Ancient Demesne.

My research examines the avenues by which England’s peasants gained knowledge of and attempted to utilize the legal frameworks that they interacted with during Edward III’s reign (1327 to 1377). I focus on how the structure of the manor court influenced peasants’ understanding of legal norms and practice, with an emphasis on how this knowledge played a role in shaping villeins’ legal strategies. I aim to re-center England’s peasants as active participants in their own legal personhood, allowing us to recover vestiges of what Paul Hyams has termed the “vernacular sense of law.” Ultimately, I seek to discover how they viewed the legitimacy of the legal power structures that suffused their public lives.

The core of my research centers on Christian Malford and Badbury, two Wiltshire villages belonging to Glastonbury abbey. I chose these villages for their wealth of primary source material and because their manorial courts coincided with hundredal courts, known as “tourns.” Additionally, both villages participated in a concerted and legally-articulated effort to acquire Ancient Demesne status in 1377. Though they ultimately failed, gaining this classification would have provided the villages’ villeins with certain legal privileges.

I used the village court rolls to create a database of names, case information, and interpersonal connections that I am using to reconstruct the social and legal networks of these villages. I hope to make this database publicly available after I complete my dissertation. I am employing methodologies honed over the previous decades by social and legal historians to ensure that I remain cognizant of the biases of the source materials, while also reaping the great wealth of information that they contain.

The support of the Schallek fellowship provided by the Richard III Society and the Medieval Academy will allowe me to expand the scope of my dissertation. I can now cross-reference the individuals in my database with those found in Wiltshire’s common law pleas for the same years, potentially allowing me to trace the legal strategies of individual peasants between both manorial and common law courts. This endeavor is made infinitely more palatable due to the hard work and generous contributions of Robert Palmer and the Anglo-American Legal Tradition website.

I would like to thank my dissertation committee Drs. James Masschaele, Samantha Kelly, Alastair Bellany, Rudolph Bell, and Mark Bailey, my undergraduate mentors Drs. Charity Urbanski and Robert Stacey, and the McNair Scholars program.”

We are very pleased to announce that the first annual Medieval Academy Digital Humanities Prize has been awarded to DigiPal: Digital Resource and Database of Manuscripts, Palaeography and Diplomatics. (London, 2011-14), http://www.digipal.eu/, developed at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, and funded by the European Research Council. Primary Creators are Peter Stokes and Stewart Brookes, and Geoffroy Noël (King’s College London).

DigiPal’s pilot database consists of records for all extant scribal hands writing English Vernacular minuscule and dated to the eleventh century. This amounts to approximately 1600 full or partial manuscripts and documents, containing about 1200 scribal hands and over sixty thousand annotated images of letters. The site is easy to use and offers explanatory search training for non-specialists; it is also enticing and aesthetically pleasing.

DigiPal combines digital photographs of medieval handwriting with detailed descriptions and characterizations of the writing, as well as the text in which it is found, and the content and structure of the manuscript or document as a whole. The project makes it possible to explore and manipulate information, such as annotated images, along with more conventional text-based browse and search functions. It therefore allows scholars to apply new developments in palaeographical method.

The greater value of DigiPal is its generalized framework for the online presentation of palaeographical materials. It is freely available to scholars wishing to create similar projects, several of which are already under way. For instance, DigiPal’s framework is already being used to study Hebrew and Greek, as well as images of later European handwriting and decoration. Recently, DigiPal’s framework has been expanded to include a new feature: users can now view palaeographical forms with the corresponding text, and thus can probe the relationship between text and script.

DigiPal’s innovative framework, collaborative origins, open access, quality design, and skillfully curated pilot collection make it an excellent model for the practice of digital humanities scholarship in the field of medieval studies.

Susan Boynton (Columbia Univ.) was recently awarded a three-year grant from the Partner University Fund (FACE Foundation) for digital humanities and musical iconography, for an exchange with the Sorbonne (http://edblogs.columbia.edu/musiconis/).

Did you know that the Medieval Academy Blog includes Calls for Papers, Job Postings, Conference and Symposium announcements, and many other notices of interest to medievalists? Follow these links for just a few of the resources you’ll find on the Medieval Academy Blog:

Home page:
https://www.themedievalacademyblog.org

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https://www.themedievalacademyblog.org/category/call-for-papers/

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https://www.themedievalacademyblog.org/category/fellowships/

Jobs for Medievalists:
https://www.themedievalacademyblog.org/category/jobs-for-medievalists/

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