The Medieval Academy Blog

The January 2013 issue of Speculum shipped several weeks ago; please contact us at info@themedievalacademy.org if you haven’t received yours yet. Members will receive the remaining issues for this year (April, July and October) in due course.

Members are invited to submit nominations to the Fellows and Corresponding Fellows of the Medieval Academy. The 2014 election operates under new and revised by-laws and procedures. Under the established rules, the number of slots available in 2014 for new Active Fellows is two, for which there must be at least four nominations; the same is true for Corresponding Fellows. Nominations for the 2014 elections must be received by 15 October 2013. Instructions for nominations are available at: http://www.medievalacademy.org/?page=Election_Procedure

Thanks to the generosity of our members, the $10,000 matching challenge offered by the Freeman Foundation has been successfully met, fully funding the Boswell Dissertation Fund and allowing us to award the grant annually beginning in 2014. The Boswell Dissertation Grant joins a growing list of Medieval Academy grants, fellowships and awards.

Many of the donations to the Boswell fund came with fond memories from friends, students and colleagues, such as this from Melissa Conway, Head of Special Collections at the University of California, Riverside:

“John Boswell did more than anyone to insure that all the students working on medieval topics finished their dissertations–whether or not he served on their committees. Through the monthly lunches he hosted at his apartment, he fostered an environment of support and collaboration.

We encouraged one another to finish–and if one of us hit a particularly rough patch in writing (or in life ), John was there to help us through. He was not only a brilliant scholar and an outstanding teacher, but also one of the kindest and most caring of people.”

Donations made to the Academy in Professor Boswell’s honor will of course continue to be accepted; contributions made in honor of Prof. Boswell after 23 May will go into our general Endowment Fund but will be acknowledged as having been given in his name.

The Boswell Dissertation Fund was established in 2006 by a group of Professor Boswell’s friends and colleagues, spear-headed by Ruth Mazo Karras, Adam Kosto and Ralph Hexter. It is a great pleasure for us to thank them, the Freeman Foundation, and all members of the Academy who contributed to this challenge for their generosity in honoring John Boswell in this way.

Cod. Pal. germ. 848, Große Heidelberger Liederhandschrift (Codex Manesse), Zürich, c.1300-c.1340, fol. 82v.

The Academy encourages its members to apply for grants and residential fellowships in these and other programs:

The American Academy in Rome
The American Philosophical Society
Getty Research Fellowships
Guggenheim Foundation
Institute for Advanced Studies
Mellon Foundation
National Endowment for the Humanities 
National Humanities Center

We will post these and other links to funding opportunities for medievalists on our website. Please contact us at info@TheMedievalAcademy.org with additional programs and awards so that we may make this list as complete as possible.

Boethius, De Musica, from Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III, MS V. A. 14.

Additional grants and awards for medievalists have recently been announced. These include:

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships:
Thomas Burman, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
“The Dominicans, Islam, and Christian Thought, 1220-1320”

Adam Davis, Denison University
“The Rise of the Medieval Hospital and the Formation of a Charitable Society in 12th- and 13th-Century Champagne, France”

Kathy Krause, University of Missouri, Kansas City
“The Role of Noblewomen in Literary Production in Northern France during the Thirteenth-Century”

Deborah Tor, Univ. of Notre Dame
“The Great Seljuq Sultanate and the Formation of Islamic Civilization, 1040-1194”

NEH Digital Humanities Start-up Grants:
Catholic University of America — Washington, DC
“Project Andvari: A Digital Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe”
Lilla Kopar, Project Director
Nancy Wicker, Project Director

University of Missouri, Kansas City — Kansas City, MO
“A Digital Studio for the Optical and Chemical Analysis Of Manuscripts and Printed Books”
Virginia Blanton, Project Director
Jeffrey Rydberg Cox, Project Director
Nathan Oyler, Project Director

American Philosophical Society, Franklin Research Grants:
James Morganstern, Ohio State University
“The Church of Notre-Dame at Jumièges from the Seventh Century to the Present”

Sarah Noonan, Lindenwood University
“The Book in Parts: Selective Reading Practices in Late Medieval England”

Janelle Werner, Kalamazoo College
“Priests and Concubines in England, 1375-1559”

Institute for Advanced Studies faculty appointments:
Cynthia Hahn
Yitzhak Hen

National Humanities Center Fellowships:
Lee Manion, University of Missouri
“The King is Emperor: Sovereignty, Justice, and Theories of Empire in Late Medieval Literature”

Claire Sponsler, University of Iowa
“Reading the Beauchamp Pageant”

Carol Symes, University of Illinois
“Public Acts: Performance, Popular Literacies, and the Documentary Revolution of Medieval Europe”

Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship:
Jerold C. Frakes, University at Buffalo (SUNY)

Two Academy members were recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences:
Teofilo Ruiz, University of California, Los Angeles
Stephen G. Nichols, Johns Hopkins University

We congratulate these scholars for their achievements and look forward to seeing the results of their research.

Printer, from Jost Amman and Hans Sachs, Das Ständebuch. Frankfurt am Main 1568.

We have revamped our publications page to enable members and visitors to easily see which of the more than 150 books published by the Academy are available for purchase and in what format(s):

– 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 will be or are already available as eBooks through the American Council of Learned Society’s Humanities eBook Library (click here to subscribe).

We plan to systematically add to all of these offerings in the future. For those of you who prefer your books in codex format, some of the Academy’s most recent publications can be purchased through our publishing partner, University of Toronto Press, and fifty-one out-of-print volumes are available for sale at the Academy office (at a 20% discount for members).

The entire library of Medieval Academy Books and Speculum Anniversary Monographs is listed here. Next to each title are links that will lead you to each of the various formats in which the book can be accessed or purchased.

Nearly all of the Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching volumes continue to be available through University of Toronto Press and may be found here.

Speculum, published quarterly since 1926, was the first scholarly journal in North America devoted exclusively to the Middle Ages. It remains the premier journal for all fields devoted to study of the Western Middle Ages, a period ranging from approximately 500 to 1500. The journal has been edited in the past by the Executive Director of the Medieval Academy of America, but the organization is now seeking proposals from individuals to assume the role(s) of editor or editors.

Speculum is the intellectual center of the Medieval Academy’s program, and editing the journal to an unfailingly high standard is a challenging and absorbing task. The main challenge for a journal that represents such an enormously diverse field is to publish articles that make substantive contributions to their areas of expertise while appealing to the wide range of scholarly interests of the medievalists in various disciplines that constitute the readership.

The editor(s) will be charged with the final responsibility for peer review and acceptance of manuscripts and book reviews for publication. The editor(s) should be established scholar(s) with academic credentials in some field(s) of medieval studies and should also possess good organizational and decision-making skills. Experience in journal or book editing is helpful but not necessary. The term of service is anticipated to be five years with the possibility of renewal by mutual agreement. The editor(s) enjoy the support and assistance of an editorial board and a board of book review editors, both representative of a broad range of methodologies and areas of specialization. There is provision for one or more editorial assistants, chosen by the editor, as well as an online manuscript-management platform. The new editor(s) should plan on taking office at the beginning of 2014.

Applications should be sent to the chair of the selection committee, Richard Unger [richard.unger@ubc.ca], Department of History, University of British Columbia, 1297-1873 East Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1, Canada, before 15 September 2013. They should include a curriculum vitae, a statement of interest outlining editorial plans for the development of the journal, three letters of reference from scholars who can speak to the applicant’s or applicants’ editorial experience and scholarship, and an indication of the level of support that any host institution is willing to provide. The President of the Medieval Academy, Richard Unger, and the current Acting Editor of Speculum, Jacqueline Brown [jb@themedievalacademy.org] would be happy to respond to questions about the duties involved.