The Medieval Academy Blog

The 92nd Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will be held in Toronto, Ontario, on 6-8 April 2017, hosted by the University of Toronto and The Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies.

The Organizing Committee invites proposals for papers on all topics and in all disciplines and periods of medieval studies. Any member of the Medieval Academy may submit a paper proposal, excepting those who presented papers at the annual meetings of the Medieval Academy in 2015 or 2016; others may submit proposals as well but must become members in order to present papers at the meeting. Special consideration will be given to individuals whose field would not normally involve membership in the Medieval Academy. The due date for proposals is 15 June 2016.

Rather than an overarching theme, the 2017 meeting will provide a variety of thematic connections among sessions. The Medieval Academy welcomes innovative sessions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries or that use various disciplinary approaches to examine an individual topic. To both facilitate and emphasize interdisciplinarity, the Call for Papers is organized in “threads.” Sessions listed under these threads have been proposed to or by the Organizing Committee but the list provided in the Call for Papers is not meant to be exhaustive or exclusive.

The complete Call for Papers, with proposed threads and sessions as well as instructions for submitting proposals, can be found here:
http://medievalacademy.site-ym.com/?page=2017Meeting.

Please contact the organizing committee if you have further questions about the meeting, at MAA2017@TheMedievalAcademy.org.

Preparing chocolate for the MAA’s KZOO Table

As always, the Medieval Academy of America will have a strong presence at the 2016 International Congress on Medieval Studies  (May 12-15).

1) The Friday morning plenary, sponsored by the Academy, will be delivered by Jane Chance (Rice Univ.). Her topic will be “How We Read J. R. R. Tolkien Reading Grendel’s Mother” (Friday, 8:30 AM, Bernhard, East Ballroom). Two related sessions on the topic of “How We Read” will take place on Friday at 10 AM (Session 215) and 1:30 PM (Session 267). Both sessions will be in Bernhard 158.

2) On Thursday at 3:30 PM, the Graduate Student Committee is sponsoring a roundtable titled “The Modern Grail: Insider Tips from Search Committees to Land That Academic Job” (Session 100, Valley 1, Hadley 101). The GSC reception will take place immediately afterwards, in Fetzer 1055.

3) The Committee on Centers and Regional Associations (CARA) is sponsoring two panels this year. The first, “Addressing Career Diversity for Medievalists,” will take place on Thursday at 10 AM (Session 5, Valley 1, Hadley 102). The second, “Reflections on the Medieval Mediterranean NEH Summer Institutes,” will take place on Thursday at 3:30 (Session 125, Schneider 1280).

4) The annual CARA Luncheon will take place on Friday at noon (Bernhard, President’s Dining Room). If you would like to attend as a representative of your program or institution, please register online. There is no fee to attend, but pre-registration is required. All are welcome!

5) Finally, we invite you to stop by our staffed table in the exhibit hall to introduce yourself, transact any Medieval Academy business you may have, or pick up some chocolate to keep you going during those long afternoon sessions.

See you at the ‘Zoo!

We offer our congratulations to these Medieval Academy members:

– David Nirenberg (Univ. of Chicago) and Ralph Hexter (Univ. of California, Davis), who have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences;

– Hussein Fancy (Univ. of Michigan) and John Lansdowne (Princeton Univ.), who have each been awarded a Rome Prize in Medieval Studies from the American Academy in Rome;

– Margaret Gaida (University of Oklahoma) and Jacob Hobson (Univ. of California, Berkeley), who have each been awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

The International John Gower Society has awarded the 2016 John Hurt Fisher Prize for a “significant contribution to the field of John Gower Studies” to Sebastian Sobecki for his Speculum essay on Gower’s autograph hand and the Trentham manuscript (Speculum 90/4, pp. 925-959).

Please send any such announcements to the Executive Director  for inclusion in upcoming issues of Medieval Academy News.

The Medieval Academy of America is proud to announce the publication of Medieval Academy Books, vol. 115: William D. Paden, Two medieval Occitan Toll Registers from Tarascon (Univ. of Toronto Press, 2016).

Two Medieval Toll Registers from Tarascon presents an edition, translation, and discussion of two vernacular toll registers from fourteenth and fifteenth-century Provence. These two registers are a valuable new source for the economic, linguistic, and transportation history of medieval France, offering a window onto the commercial life of Tarascon, a fortified town on the east bank of the Rhône between Avignon and Arles. In this volume, William D. Paden discusses the developing fiscal policy of the counts of Provence, for whom the tolls were collected, and the practice and vocabulary of medieval toll-keeping. An afterword considers the toll registers in relation to the poetry of troubadours, arguing that the realism of the registers and the idealism of troubadour poetry overlapped in the world of medieval Tarascon.

Since 1926, the Medieval Academy of America has published monographs in the Medieval Academy Books series. For Medieval Academy Books volumes 1-105 (and other series), see our publications page. Most books published by the Academy are available in at least one of the following formats: hardcopy first-edition (through the Medieval Academy’s online bookstore); print-on-demand at Amazon.com; open-access PDF or HTML on the Academy website; or through the subscription-based ACLS Humanities e-Book Library. Vols. 106-115 are published and sold in partnership with the University of Toronto Press; those volumes are available on the UTP website.