The Medieval Academy Blog

Court of Common Pleas

Your membership in the Medieval Academy provides you with a growing list of benefits, ranging from the print and digital editions of Speculum, to our MAA News, Conference Calendar and Blog to book discounts and our annual meeting.

As important, your dues also help fund our growing program of support to younger scholars in the form of book subventions, research and travel grants and awards. In so many ways your dues help support medieval studies and humanistic scholarship at a time of shrinking resources and cultural change.

Paper renewal forms have now been mailed to all members who have not yet renewed their memberships online for 2013.  We hope that you will respond to this mailing at your earliest convenience or visit the website at: http://www.medievalacademy.org.
Please be as generous as you can.

Michael Psellos (left) with his student, Byzantine Emperor Michael VII Doukas., Mount Athos, Pantokrator Monastery, Codex 234, fol. 245a

The Freeman Foundation and its founder Weston Milliken have generously offered a $10,000 matching grant to the MAA to enable the Academy to award the John Boswell Dissertation Grant annually. To receive these funds, the MAA will need to raise $10,000 by June 30th. So far we have raised $3,775 of this total with $6,255 more to go.

A successful campaign would bring the number of MAA Dissertation Grants to eight annually, each named for a prominent medievalist. The Committee for Professional Development judges this award competition.

With the money already raised, the Boswell Grant is now biennial, and the first award will be made in 2013.

With $5 from each graduate student member of the MAA — or $50 from each Fellow — the MAA would easily meet this challenge. We urge them and everyone in between to make a donation in any amount to support graduate-student funding and to honor the legacy of John Boswell. Online donations can be made here.

John Boswell, a medieval historian who taught at Yale University from 1975 until his death in 1994 at age 47, was a pioneer in two fields that have developed significantly over the past two decades: the study of Christian-Muslim-Jewish relations, especially in the Iberian Peninsula, and GLBT studies. His scholarly legacy is found not only in his four monographs but also in the many students, both undergraduate and graduate, who followed him into the profession. Before his death he also served on the board of the Freeman Foundation, which has now offered this matching grant in his honor.

“Modern Book Printing,” fourth sculpture (of six) of the Berlin Walk of Ideas.

The Medieval Academy Book Subvention Program provides funding of up to $2,500 to university or other non-profit scholarly presses to support the publication of first books by Medieval Academy members.

Applications for subventions will be accepted only from the publisher and only for books that have already been approved for publication. Eligible Academy members who wish to have their books considered for a subvention should ask their publishers to apply directly to the Academy, following the guidelines outlined at  http://www.medievalacademy.org/?page=MAA_Book_Subvention.

The deadline for applications is 1 May 2013.

The Medieval Academy is pleased to announce the revival of the Speculum Books series. As many will recall, this series is devoted to reprinting distinguished and influential articles from past issues of Speculum in paperback collections. The series aims to present the best of past scholarship, to bring new insight to the state of a scholarly field, and to trace most recent developments and desiderata for future research agendas.  Its audience includes both students and non-specialists.

Past volumes have included the highly successful and well received collections Studying Medieval Women, ed. Nancy F. Partner (1993); and Approaches to Medieval Art, ed. Lawrence Nees (1998).

Each new volume in the series will contain about six essays, an introduction and index, and will be supplemented with additional illustrations and select ancillary materials where appropriate. We plan initially to publish two volumes a year. The first volume announced is Liturgy and Art. It will be published later this year and will present an introduction by Susan Boynton and the following essays: Beth Williamson, “Altarpieces, Liturgy, and Devotion,” Speculum 79.2 (April 2004): 341-406; Carolyn Marino Malone, “The Rotunda of Sancta Maria in Dijon as ‘Ostwerk’,” Speculum 75.2 (April 2000): 285-317; Marchita B. Mauck,”The Mosaic of the Triumphal Arch of S. Prassede: A Liturgical Interpretation,” Speculum 62.4 (October 1987): 813-28; Meredith Parsons Lillich,”King Solomon in Bed, Archbishop Hincmar, the ‘Ordo’ of 1250 and the Stained-Glass Program of the Nave of Reims Cathedral,” Speculum 80.3 (July 2005): 764-801; Cynthia Hahn, “Seeing and Believing: The Construction of Sanctity in Early Medieval Saints’ Shrines,” Speculum 72.4 (October 1997): 1079-1106; and Margot Fassler,”Mary’s Nativity, Fulbert of Chartres, and the Stirps Jesse: Liturgical Innovation circa 1000 and Its Afterlife,” Speculum 75.2 (April 2000): 389-434.

The Speculum Books Board has been appointed for its prominence and cross-disciplinary expertise. It includes Susan Boynton (Columbia University); John Contreni (Purdue University); Colum Hourihane, chair (Princeton University); Wendy Scase (Birmingham University); and William Tronzo (University of California, San Diego).

Now that the digital version of Speculum, including the entire archive dating back to 1926, is available free to all members of the Medieval Academy, several members have already requested that we discontinue sending them print Speculum. This saves paper, printing, postage and shelf space.  Would you too like to opt out of the print?

This is not an automatic change. Members will continue to receive the print edition unless they positively opt out. We will be happy to accommodate any requests in writing, via email, specifying that a member no longer wants to receive print copies. Once this request is initiated, quarterly print copies of Speculum will no longer be mailed to that member. If a member decides to opt back in to the print version, the MAA also has to be notified in writing. We will, however, not be able to provide print copies retrospectively for those issues mailed during a member’s opt-out period.

To opt-out please email: info@themedievalacademy.org.

James Ginther, Digital Theologist.

Saint Louis University has received a grant of $933,000 over two years from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of software development of a tool for the editing of scholarly works. MAA member James Ginther, PhD, Director of the Center for Digital Theology and Professor of Medieval Theology, will lead the project. Prof. Ginther is also the chair of the MAA Digital Initiatives Advisory Board.

The grant will fund the development and implementation of a web-based application that will assist scholars in the creation and publication of scholarly digital editions. In addition, the grant will fund six editing projects as use cases, ensuring that the new digital tool will be able to facilitate different forms of scholarly research as well as communication from print to web-based to dynamic editions.

The project has been a dream of Ginther for more than a decade as he has sought to use computational methods to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of scholarly editing.

“Scholarly editing in the digital world is not just about using a computer,” Ginther notes. “A digital editing tool allows for scholars around the world to share both their data and findings. Perhaps its real power will be in the opportunity for scholars to move seamlessly from one editing method to another, so as to discover the best way to produce editions of the highest quality.”

Scholarly editions of texts are the bedrock of the Humanities, Ginther adds, and the more effective tools scholars have to create these works, the more rigorous the scholarship built upon them will be.

The Center for Digital Theology creates multimedia and electronic products that support research and teaching in Theological Studies. Housed in the Department of Theological Studies, the Center also seeks to support other disciplines in the Humanities.

The Center’s research has produced databases of medieval texts, 3DRT models of medieval churches, and databases that integrate text and image from the Middle Ages. The Center’s most recent project was T-PEN, an open-source tool for digital transcription, which was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2010.

The Center is part of an international consortium that collaborates to build interoperable tools for the digital Humanities. Participating universities also include Stanford, Yale, Oxford, John Hopkins, Waterloo, Drew and Fribourg (Switzerland). For this project, Ginther also will work with scholars at Indiana University, the Arizona State University and York University in the United Kingdom.

Strickland Brooch, 9th c., silver with gilt niello and blue glass.

The Fellows’ Elections for 2013 have added five new Fellows and three new Corresponding Fellows to the roster of scholars who have made notable contributions to furthering the stated purposes of the Academy, which are “to conduct, encourage, promote and support research, publication, and instruction in medieval records, literature, languages, arts, archaeology, history, philosophy, science, life, and all other aspects of medieval civilization, by publications, by research, and by such other means as may be desirable.”

The new Fellows are Robert E. Bjork, (English, Arizona State University), Caroline Astrid Bruzelius (Art History, Duke University), Thomas Madden (History, St. Louis University), Teofilo Ruiz (History, University of California, Los Angeles) and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (English, Fordham University). These bring the number of Fellows to 118 of the 125 total possible.

The new Corresponding Fellows are Wendy Davies (History, University College London), Claude Gauvard (History, L’Université Paris I, Pantheon-Sorbonne) and Dominique Iogna-Prat (History, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales). Three new Corresponding Fellows will join the current 62, bringing the number of Corresponding Fellows to 65.

Formal inductions will take place at the Annual Meeting in Knoxville, on Saturday, 6 April at 4:00 PM in Hilton Knoxville Ballroom on the Mezzanine Level.

Golden Haggadah, Spain. c. 1320, British Library, Add. MS 27210, f. 15r, detail.

The MAA elections closed on 15 January 2013. Almost 25 percent of the membership voted in the election, up 15% from last year and well above the average for learned society participation. Thank you!

The ballots will be presented at the Annual Business Meeting of the Medieval Academy in Knoxville on Friday, 5 April at 1:00 PM in Hilton Knoxville Ballroom on the Mezzanine Level.

The newly elected Officers are:
President: Richard W. Unger (History, University of British Columbia)
First Vice-President: William Chester Jordan (History, Princeton University)
Second Vice-President: Barbara Newman (English, Northwestern University)

The new Councillors are:
Susan Einbinder (Literature, University of Connecticut)
Thomas Madden (History, St. Louis University)
Elizabeth Morrison (Manuscript Studies, Getty Museum)
Anders Winroth (History, Yale University)

The new members of the Nominating Committee are:
Scott Bruce (History, University of Colorado, Boulder)
Ken Pennington (History, Catholic University)

The members of the Medieval Academy congratulate their new officers and councillors, who will begin their terms at the close of the 2013 Annual Meeting, and the new members of the Nominating Committee, who will begin their terms at their meeting during the 2013 Annual Meeting.

The members also extend thanks to all those who generously stood for election.