The Medieval Academy Blog

Deadline, 5 March 2013.
The MAA urges medievalists to consider applying for grants to sponsor NEH Summer Seminars and Institutes. The next competition will award grants for the Summer of 2014. These grants support faculty development programs in the humanities for school teachers and for college and university faculty. The MAA would be happy to consider requests from members to act as host for proposals. Details are available on the NEH website.

Der Schulmeister von Eßlingen, from Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. germ. 848, Große Heidelberger Liederhandschrift (Codex Manesse), Zürich, c.1300-c.1340, fol. 292v.

Schallek Awards
The Medieval Academy will make five Schallek Awards in 2013 to support graduate students conducting doctoral research in any relevant discipline dealing with late-medieval Britain (c.1350-1500). The $2,000 grants help defray research expenses, such as the cost of travel to research collections and the cost of photographs, photocopies, microfilms, and other research materials. The cost of books or equipment (e.g., computers) is not included. Deadline, 15 February 2013. Click here for more information.

MAA Dissertation Grants
The Medieval Academy will award eight dissertation grants in 2013 to support advanced graduate students who are writing Ph.D. dissertations on medieval topics. The $2,000 grants help defray research expenses, such as the cost of travel to research collections and the cost of photographs, photocopies, microfilms, and other research materials. The cost of books or equipment (e.g., computers) is not included. Deadline, 15 February 2013. Click here for more information.

Book Subvention Program
The Medieval Academy Book Subvention Program provides subventions of up to $2,500 to university or other non-profit scholarly presses to support the publication of first books by Medieval Academy members. Deadline, 1 May 2013. Click here for more information.

Travel Grants
The Medieval Academy provides a limited number of travel grants to independent scholars (including those employed at non-academic institutions with no travel funds) and currently unaffiliated faculty to help them present their work at professional meetings. Awards to support travel in North America are $500; for overseas travel the awards are $750. The deadline for meetings to be held between 1 September and 28 February is 1 May 2013. Click here for more information.

Deirdre Carter

Schallek Fellowship
Deirdre Carter of the Florida State University will receive the 2013 Schallek Fellowship. She is working under Richard K. Emmerson and Paula Gerson on “Art, History and the Creation of Monastic Identity in Late Medieval St. Albans Abbey.” This fellowship, which is supported by the Richard III Society, American Branch, provides a one-year grant of $30,000 to support Ph.D. dissertation research in any relevant discipline dealing with late-medieval Britain (c.1350-1500).

The members of the Schallek Committee in 2012-13 are Leigh Ann Craig, Chair (Virginia Commonwealth University), Joel Rosenthal (SUNY Stony Brook), Nancy Warren (Texas A&M University), and Joyce Coleman (University of Oklahoma).

MAA Travel Grants
The MAA Committee for Professional Development is pleased to announce the Winter 2012-2013 Travel Grant winners: Susan Dudash and Mary Stroll won international awards, and Jennifer Feltman and Sarah Zeiser won domestic awards. In March, Susan Dudash will travel to the Journée d’études on the Livre des fais d’armes in Paris to present a paper; and in April, Mary Stroll will present a paper at Framing Anacletus II (Anti)pope 1130-1138, in Rome. Both Jennifer Feltman and Sarah Zeiser will present papers at the International Congress of Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, May 9-13.

The 2012-13 members of the Committee for Professional Development include Bruce O’Brien, Chair (University of Mary Washington), Karen Mathews (University of Miami), and Georgiana Donavin (Westminster College, Salt Lake City).

Students and scholars at work, in this manuscript from Flanders, c.1300. (Rothschild Canticles. General Collection, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation recently announced a grant of $650,000 to Yale University that will allow four of its medievalists and two principal investigators (four MAA members in all) to apply the newest digital technology to various aspects of manuscript research. The four Yale researchers and their projects are:

• Alastair Minnis: An analysis of inks and pigments used in manuscripts of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and other Middle English works
• Jessica Brantley: A study of variations in textual and visual elements in copies of English books of hours
• Anders Winroth: The preparation of a new edition of

Gratian’s Decretum

• Holly Rushmeier: The development of an image-analysis tool for the comparison of medieval manuscripts.

According to Yale’s announcement, “The rapid advance of digital information technology is generating new opportunities for scholars of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. The proliferation of digitally preserved manuscripts, together with powerful new digital technology with the potential to facilitate their analysis, will enable scholars both to pursue new avenues of inquiry and to develop novel approaches to long-standing issues in the field. In the field of medieval manuscript studies, most research during the modern era has been based on visual observations: e.g., paleographers seeking to identify scribal hands through letterforms; art historians seeking to distinguish the work of an artist through colors, designs, and styles; and textual critics looking for key variant readings in multiple manuscript texts. Today, digital technology can provide scholars of the Middle Ages with new tools that facilitate access and offer new approaches to pursue answers to long-standing questions in the field. ‘Yale researchers will benefit from advances in digital imaging and dissemination technologies’, says Meg Bellinger, director of the Yale Digital Collections Center (YDC2).

“The project will build on digitally enabled scholarship in medieval manuscripts that has been in development at Stanford University Libraries for four years. ‘Given the pioneering efforts by Yale faculty members to apply the new technology to medieval scholarship, as well as the world-renowned collections of medieval manuscripts in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the University is well poised to become the center of cutting-edge research in the field,’ said Barbara Shailor, deputy provost for the arts and a former director of the Beinecke Library.

“Bellinger and Shailor will serve as principal investigators.  The project will leverage Yale’s strengths as a leading center for the study of medieval history and culture, as well as the depth of its collections.  In addition to the expertise of scholars in English, history, and computer science, the project will draw on the resources of the recently established Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage housed at Yale University’s West Campus facility.

“‘Thanks to the generous support of the Mellon Foundation, the Digitally Enabled Scholarship with Medieval Manuscripts at Yale University project will realize the potential of new information technology to transform research in the humanities and humanistic social sciences,’ commented Shailor.”

The original version of this article, by Dorie Baker, appeared in the December 10, 2012 issue of Yale News.

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.

This 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 $10 from each graduate student member of the MAA — or $100 from each Fellow — the MAA would easily meet this challenge. We urge 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 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.