The Medieval Academy Blog

MAA News – Upcoming Deadlines

Posted on December 5, 2016 by Chris

“Dante and Virgil in Conversation,” from Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS. Holkham Misc. 48, p. 67. © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

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.

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MAA News – Digital Resources Available on MAA Website

Posted on December 5, 2016 by Chris

The Medieval Academy website provides access to several resources of interest to members:

1) MAA Publications
Since 1925, the Medieval Academy of America has published more than 150 monographs in several series. These are available in multiple formats:

* Forty volumes are available as print-on-demand books at Amazon.com;

* Three dozen volumes are available as freely accessible PDF and/or HTML files on the Medieval Academy website;

* Twenty-seven volumes are available as eBooks through the American Council of Learned Society’s Humanities eBook Library (available to members at a discounted subscription rate);

* Many volumes of the Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching (MART) series as well as the most recent Medieval Academy Books monographs can be purchased through our publishing partner, University of Toronto Press;

* Fifty-one out-of-print volumes are available for sale through the Academy website.

The entire corpus of Medieval Academy monographs, with details about the various types of access for each publication, is listed on our website.

2) Speculum online
To access your members-only journal subscription, log in to the MAA website using the 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.

3) Medieval Academy Blog
Visit the Medieval Academy Blog regularly for notices of conferences and symposia, publications, exhibits, job postings, and other announcements and items of interest to medievalists.

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Extended Due to Popular Demand: Beyond Words at Houghton Library

Posted on December 2, 2016 by Chris

Beyond Words at Houghton Library
Extended Through December 14

Houghton Library is delighted to announce that due to popular demand its exhibition Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collection will run for an extra three days. The library is beyond words with the success of its fall show which has received a record-breaking number of visitors from the Harvard community, Boston-area, rest of the United States and overseas.

Join Beyond Words curators William P. Stoneman and Anne-Marie Eze for tours of the exhibition in Houghton Library’s Edison and Newman Room on Monday December 5, 5.30-6.30pm and Tuesday December 13, 12-1pm.

Houghton Library joined forces with Boston College’s McMullen Museum and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to stage Beyond Words, the largest ever exhibition of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts held in North America. Visit all three venues to see 260 highlights of the art of illumination dating from the ninth to seventeenth centuries drawn from Boston-area collections. For more information go to beyondwords2016.org

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Deadline reminder: The 2016 Grolier Club Library William H. Helfand Fellowship

Posted on December 2, 2016 by Chris

The 2016 Grolier Club Library William H. Helfand Fellowship

New York, December 1, 2016.

A reminder that the application deadline for this year’s fellowship offering is December 30, 2016.

This is the Grolier Club Library‘s fourteenth annual fellowship offering in the art and history of the book, named in honor of Grolier Club benefactor and former president William H. Helfand. Awards of up to $3,000 are available for research in the Library’s areas of strength, with emphasis on the private collecting of books and prints, antiquarian bookselling, and the book and graphic arts. Fellowship awards may be used to pay for travel, housing, and other expenses. A research stay of two weeks is desired, and Helfand Fellows are expected to present the results of their research in a public lecture at the Grolier Club, or in an article submitted to the Club’s journal, The Gazette of the Grolier Club.

APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS

Members of the Grolier Club are not eligible, nor are students enrolled in undergraduate degree programs, but all other interested persons are encouraged to apply. There is no application form. Applicants should submit a curriculum vitae and a proposal, not to exceed 750 words, stating necessary length of residence, historical materials to be used, relevance of the Grolier Club Library collections to the project, a proposed budget, and two letters of recommendation. More information on the Library and its holdings can be found at www.grolierclub.org, under “The Library” in the navigation menu.

The deadline for applications and letters of support is December 30, 2016, and announcement of awards will be made by mid-February, 2017. Research terms can take place any time in the calendar year of 2017, but please note that the Club is closed, and library access is not offered, during the month of August.

Applications should be emailed to ejh@grolierclub.org, or sent via regular mail to the attention of The Helfand Fellowship Committee at:

The Grolier Club
47 East 60th Street
New York, NY 10022

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NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers The Formation and Re-formation of the Book: 1450-1650

Posted on December 1, 2016 by Chris

John N. King of The Ohio State University and Mark Rankin of James Madison University will direct a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers on continuity and change in the production, dissemination, and reading of Western European books during the 200 years following the advent of printing with movable type. In particular, they plan to pose the governing question of whether the advent of printing was a necessary precondition for the Protestant Reformation. Participants will consider ways in which adherents of different religious faiths shared common ground in exploiting elements such as book layout, typography, illustration, and paratext (e.g., prefaces, glosses, and commentaries) in order to inspire reading, but also to restrict interpretation. Employing key methods of the History of the Book, our investigation will consider how the physical nature of books affected ways in which readers understood and assimilated their intellectual contents. This program is geared to meet the needs of teacher-scholars interested in the literary, political, or cultural history of the Renaissance and/or Reformation, the History of the Book, art history, women’s studies, religious studies, bibliography, print culture, library science (including rare book librarians), mass communication, literacy studies, and more.

This seminar will meet from 18 June until 15 July 2017 at The Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, one of the nation’s leading research and cultural centers. Among the Library’s 420,000 rare books and seven million manuscripts are major holdings in medieval manuscripts, books printed before 1501, Renaissance history and literature, maps, travel literature, and the history of science, medicine, and technology. The Huntington also boasts art galleries containing 650 paintings and 440 works of sculpture, as well as twelve botanical gardens containing 15,000 plant varieties.

Those eligible to apply include citizens of USA who are engaged in teaching at the college or university level and independent scholars who have received the terminal degree in their field (usually the Ph.D.). In addition, non-US citizens who have taught and lived in the USA for at least three years prior to March 2017 are eligible to apply. NEH will provide participants with a stipend of $3,300. Up to three spaces will be reserved for adjunct faculty.

Full details and application information are available at http://sites.jmu.edu/NEHformation-reformation-books2017/. For further information, please contact rankinmc@jmu.edu. The deadline for application is March 1, 2017.

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Call for Papers – Culture and Violence

Posted on December 1, 2016 by Chris

38^th Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum
Keene State College
Keene, NH, USA
Friday and Saturday April 21-22, 2017

Call for Papers and Sessions
“Culture and Violence”

Keynote speaker: Professor Richard W. Kaeuper, University of Rochester “From Geoffroi de Charny to Louis de la Tremoille: The Autumn of Chivalry”

We are delighted to announce that the 38^th Medieval and Renaissance Forum will take place on April 21 and 22, 2017 at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire. This year’s keynote speaker is Richard W. Kaeuper, Professor of History at the University of Rochester.

Professor Kaeuper’s research has focused on medieval English and Continental history, justice and public order, and especially on the development of chivalry, with an emphasis on its nexus with violence and religion. Professor Kaeuper’s research bursts traditional disciplinary boundaries, combining institutional and legal history with a strong emphasis on cultural, especially literary and social developments. His most recent book, Medieval Chivalry, appeared this past spring in the distinguished Cambridge Medieval Textbooks series. Among his previous publications are Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry (UPenn, 2009), Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1999), and an extensive introduction to Elspeth Kennedy’s translation of Geoffroi de Charny’s Book of Chivalry (UPenn, 1996; 2^nd edition 2005).

We welcome abstracts (one page or less) or panel proposals that discuss the nature and cultural and religious context of violence in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period.

Papers, however, need not be confined to this theme but may cover other aspects of medieval and Renaissance life, literature, languages, art, philosophy, theology, history, and music.

Students, faculty, and independent scholars are welcome. Please indicate your status (undergraduate, graduate, or faculty), affiliation (if relevant), and full contact information on your proposal.

Undergraduate sessions are welcome but require faculty sponsorship.

Please submit abstracts, audio/visual needs, and full contact information to Dr. Robert G. Sullivan, Assistant Forum Director at sullivan@german.umass.edu.

Abstract deadline: January 15, 2017
Presenters and early registration: March 15, 2017

We look forward to greeting returning and first-time participants to Keene in April!

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University of Illinois-Urbana Rare Book & Manuscript Library Invites Visiting Scholar Applications

Posted on November 23, 2016 by Chris

The John “Bud” Velde Visiting Scholars Program
The Rare Book & Manuscript Library
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: 2017-18 Program Cycle

The Rare Book & Manuscript Library annually awards two stipends of $3,000 to scholars and researchers (unaffiliated with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) who would like to spend a month or more conducting research with our materials.

The holdings of The Rare Book & Manuscript Library are comprehensive and support studies in printing and printing history, Renaissance studies, Elizabethan and Stuart life and letters, John Milton and his age, emblem studies, economic history, Italian history, and works on early science and natural history.

The library also houses the papers of the modern literary figures Carl Sandburg, H.G. Wells, William Maxwell, W.S. Merwin, and the world’s single largest collection of Marcel Proust’s correspondence. In addition, it is anticipated that the papers of Gwendolyn Brooks will be open to the public for this latest program cycle.

For information about this program, how to apply, and to find out more about The Rare Book & Manuscript Library, please visit our Website at:

http://www.library.illinois.edu/rbx/research_fellowships.html

Please contact Dennis Sears with further questions about the program or The Rare Book & Manuscript Library:

Dennis Sears
The Rare Book & Manuscript Library
University of Illinois Library, Room 346
1408 West Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801
USA
(217) 333 7242 voice, (217) 244 1755 fax

Or email Dennis: dsears (at) illinois (dot) edu.

Deadline for application: *17 February 2017*.

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Post-Election Statement from the Council of the Medieval Academy

Posted on November 22, 2016 by Chris

In the aftermath of the recent presidential election in the United States, the Medieval Academy of America reaffirms its commitment “to foster an environment of diversity, inclusion, and academic freedom,” as expressed in our “Statement on Diversity and Academic Freedom” published in February 2016 and available on our website. We join other scholarly associations which have recognized that in our role as teachers, scholars, and students of the humanities we can play an essential role in promoting mutual respect and understanding.

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Jobs for Medievalists

Posted on November 21, 2016 by Chris

Rare Books Cataloger, Boston Public Library

The Boston Public Library is seeking an enthusiastic, highly experienced rare books cataloger to provide original and complex bibliographic description of its rare books and manuscripts. Working in a permanent, full-time position under the title of Rare Books and Manuscripts Librarian, the successful candidate will analyze and thoroughly describe a broad range of materials, including incunabula, early and historic imprints, fine press publications, medieval and early modern manuscripts, and print ephemera, among numerous other formats and genres.

This is a great opportunity to work closely with many of the BPL’s signature collections (http://www.bpl.org/distinction/featured-collections/) while making significant contributions, both to the accessibility of rare materials at the BPL, and to the many fields of scholarship that rely on these collections.

Salary range: $57,412.62 – $77,434.65 in seven steps. Must be a resident of the City of Boston upon the first day of hire.

See the job posting on the City of Boston website for further information or to apply: http://ow.ly/q7Jq306nGw4