MAA News – Website News

"Monk at Computer" from the Centre for the History of the Book, University of Edinburgh.

Membership coordinator, Chris Cole, has been migrating the current MAA website onto the more robust and dynamic platform of an association management system, as previously recommended by the Digital Initiatives Advisory Board. This work began in early January using the yourmembership.com platform, and the new site is scheduled to be fully operational in mid-2012. It will provide the MAA and its members with new capabilities, tools and opportunities. It will allow members to enter and manage payments for their own memberships, to post information, communicate directly with others and form working groups. As important, it will allow the MAA to create a subscription “firewall” for providing members with access to MAA publications and other resources online.

A beta version of the site is up and is now being tested and fine-tuned. Data is already migrated into the underlying database, and the results should be apparent to all by the late Spring.

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MAA News – Annual Meeting

The 87th Annual Meetingof the Medieval Academy will take place this week from 22-24 March, Thursday to Saturday, in St. Louis at St. Louis University. Registration is strong and is expected to top 350. Plenary speakers will include Caroline Bruzelius (Duke University), MAA President Alice-Mary Talbot (Dumbarton Oaks) and William Chester Jordan (Princeton University).

"Septem artes liberales, from the Hortus deliciarum, by Herrad of Landsberg at the Hohenburg Abbey (c.1180). (Wikimedia Commons)

There will be fifty sessions over the course of the three days, plus receptions, a graduate student pub night, and a banquet on Friday evening. On Saturday the following will be inducted into the company of Fellows of the Medieval Academy: Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, (NYU, elected 2012), Monique Bourin (Université de Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne, elected 2009, Corresponding), Charles Donahue, Jr., (Harvard, elected 2012), Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Notre Dame, elected 2012), Monica H. Green (Arizona State, elected 2011) and Maria Rosa Menocal (Yale, elected 2011).

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MAA News – Message from the President

As I prepare to step down from my presidency of the Medieval Academy at the annual meeting in St. Louis, I look back on an eventful year of transition in the Cambridge offices. I can report with confidence that under the new leadership of Eileen Gardiner and Ronald G. Musto the Academy is functioning in a professional, effective, and fiscally prudent manner, and will soon begin to take full advantage of the possibilities of our new digital world. It is my firm belief that organizations emerge in stronger condition from periods of crisis as a result of focused analysis on existing structures and procedures, and taking the necessary steps to remedy any problems. The revision of the by-laws supervised by my predecessor, Elizabeth A.R. Brown, is an example of recent improvements in the organization of the MAA, as is the complete rewriting of the administrative handbook undertaken by the Executive Committee this past winter.

Rather than dwell further on internal administrative matters, however, I should like to take this opportunity to share with you some final thoughts from the viewpoint of a Byzantinist who has been honored by her selection to lead for a brief time an organization traditionally devoted to medieval western Europe. I trust that this initial inclusionary step may lead in the future to broadening of the perspectives of the Medieval Academy to engage on a regular basis with the worlds of medieval Islam and Byzantium, and with the European and Mediterranean regions as a whole.

Let me mention three events of the year 2011-12 that mark a positive step in this direction in North America, and might set an example for new directions for the MAA. The first was an international loan exhibition on medieval reliquaries organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Walters Art Museum and the British Museum, Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe. This exhibit brought together stunning specimens of reliquaries from the medieval West and Byzantium in a manner that highlighted the very different evolution of these containers in East and West. The presentation in Baltimore was supplemented by a symposium, entitled Saints and Sacred Matter: The Cult of Relics in Byzantium and Beyond, co-organized by Dumbarton Oaks and the Walters, which examined Byzantine, Western medieval and Islamic traditions of relics and reliquaries, and brought together scholars from these three geographical regions. Participants included Julia Smith, who had been a plenary speaker at the MAA annual meeting in Scottsdale.

The second path-breaking exhibition, Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition, opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on March 14. This exhibit covers a period heretofore overlooked in the MMA’s great series of three Byzantine exhibits in 1972, 1997 and 2004, the seventh and eighth centuries, when the newly emergent power of Muslim Arabs conquered the Levantine and North African possessions of the Byzantine Empire and established first the Umayyad caliphate in Damascus and then the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad. After an introduction to the art of the eastern provinces of Byzantium, the exhibit displays masterworks of Islamic art that began to be created in the early centuries of Arab domination of the Near East. It demonstrates the interconnections between these new art forms and the works of Byzantine art that the Arabs encountered in Syria, Palestine and Egypt.

Finally, I should like to call your attention to a new text and translation series, the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, published by Harvard University Press and launched in the fall of 2011. DOML, under the general editorship of Jan Ziolkowski, professor of Medieval Latin at Harvard University and Director of Dumbarton Oaks, will initially publish three series of original language texts and facing translations, in Old English, medieval Latin and Byzantine Greek. Filling the gap between the Loeb Classical Library and the I Tatti Renaissance Library, the DOML volumes will provide students, scholars and the general public alike with access to a wide variety of texts in modern, readable and affordable translations. It is my hope that the availability of these translations will encourage scholars to cross over more readily into adjacent fields for comparative purposes: that medieval Latin historians will read the medieval Greek histories of Michael Attaleiates and Laonikos Chalkokondyles, that specialists in Byzantine monasticism will read the rule of St. Benedict, that scholars of the Chanson de Roland will read Beowulf and Digenis Akritas.

I hope to see many of you in St. Louis, where the organizers have done a superb job in arranging all aspects of the 2012 meeting. Please be sure to thank them for their hard work!

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On the Edge: Medieval Margins Symposium

Symposium, Wednesday May 9th, 2012

University of Chicago, Special Collections Research Center, The University of Chicago Library

1100 East 57th Street Chicago, Illinois 60637

Keynote: Lucy Freeman Sandler, Professor of Art History Emerita, New York University, “Outer Limits: Marginal Illustrations in Gothic Manuscripts”

Honoring the twentieth anniversary of Michael Camille’s Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art, the On the Edge symposium will accompany a special preview of the exhibit of the same name that pairs marginalia in illuminated manuscripts with photographs of life at the University of Chicago.  Camille’s groundbreaking work brought light to the confluence of the serious and the playful, the sacred and the profane in medieval manuscripts and architecture. The serious and the playful also converge at the university.  University life is defined not only by cutting edge research, but also by superstitions, protests, scavenger hunts, streakers in sneakers, social groups, and dance marathons. The papers at the On the Edge symposium explore the margins of medieval art and life.  Lucy Freeman Sandler, Professor of Art History Emerita, New York University will give the keynote speech of symposium, “Outer Limits: Marginal Illustrations in Gothic Manuscripts.” Please contact kLwood@uchicago.edu for questions or comments.

Open to the public.

On the Edge exhibit will be on view from May 21 – August 10, 2012 at the Special Collections Research Center Exhibition Gallery. A select group of manuscripts will be on display during the symposium preview.

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Lecture Medieval Charters

Dear colleagues,

This is to invite you to the last Lieftinck-lecture of this academic year, by Dr. Kathryn Lowe (Glasgow). Her lecture, organized by the Turning Over a New Leaf project, is devoted to charters and titled “Reading the Unreadable: Lay Literacy and Negotiation of Text in Anglo-Saxon England”. The event will take place 4 May, 3-4 pm in the University Library, Leiden.

More information is found in the attached poster and on this web page:

http://www.hum.leiden.edu/icd/turning-over-a-new-leaf/lieftinck-lectures/lowe.html

Could you please let me know before 1 May if you plan to come?

Best wishes,
Erik Kwakkel

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Reminder: Mentoring at Kalamazoo

Dear MAA Members,

The Graduate Student Committee of the Medieval Academy of America invites those attending the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo to participate in the MAA graduate student mentorship program. The program facilitates networking between graduate students and established scholars by pairing a student and scholar according to discipline.

The mentorship exchanges are meant to help students establish professional contacts from whom they can receive career advice. The primary objective of this mentoring exchange is that the relationship be active during the conference, although mentors and mentees sometimes decide to continue communication after a conference has ended.

If you would like to volunteer as a mentor or sign up as a mentee, please fill out the mentorship form (found at the bottom of the page where the word “form” is hyperlinked). Please email it
today to Sarah Celantano  (scelentano@utexas.edu).

Eileen Gardiner and Ronald G. Musto
Executive Directors

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MAA 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.

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/books/book_book_subvention.htm.

The deadline for applications is 1 May 2012.

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British Library Acquires the St Cuthbert Gospel

From Medieval and Early Manuscripts Blog:

The British Library has acquired the St Cuthbert Gospel after the most successful fundraising campaign in the Library’s history. Following a detailed conservation assessment, the manuscript has recently been fully digitised and you can now see it here on our Digitised Manuscripts site. The manuscript has been added to the Library’s collections as Additional MS 89000.

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Writing Europe Open Registration

Click here for open registration for ‘Writing Europe before 1450: A Colloquium’, University of Bergen, 3rd-5th June 2012. Programme and registration details are now available on the conference website <http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/english/news/conferences/writing-europe>, please use the side bar for navigation. Registration will close of 15 May.

Plenary speakers:  William Johnson (Duke University); Kathryn A. Lowe (University of Glasgow); Marilena Maniaci (Universita` di Cassino); David Wallace (University of Pennsylvania)

Writing Europe before 1450 is a collaboration between the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Bergen and the School of English at the University of Leicester, and is generously subsidised by the Centre for Medieval Studies and by the School of English.

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Vatican and Oxford University Share Ancient Texts Online

From The Guardian:

Vatican and Oxford University share ancient texts online

Digitised collections of Greek and Hebrew manuscripts and early
printed books to be made available free online

The Oxford University and Vatican libraries are to jointly digitise
1.5m pages of ancient texts and make them available free online.

The libraries said the digitised collections will centre on three
subject areas: Greek manuscripts, 15th-century printed books and
Hebrew manuscripts and early printed books.

The areas have been chosen for the strength of the collections in both
libraries and their importance for scholarship in their respective
fields.

With approximately two-thirds of the material coming from the Vatican
and the remainder from Oxford University’s Bodleian libraries, the
digitisation effort will also benefit scholars by uniting materials
that have been dispersed between the collections for centuries.

“Transforming these ancient texts and images into digital form helps
transcend the limitations of time and space which have in the past
restricted access to knowledge,” Sarah Thomas, director of the
Bodleian Libraries, said on Thursday.

“Scholars will be able to interrogate these documents in fresh
approaches as a result of their online availability.”

The initiative has been made possible by a £2m award from the Polonsky
Foundation.

“The service to humanity which the Vatican library has accomplished
over almost six centuries, by preserving its cultural treasures and
making them available to readers, finds here a new avenue which
confirms and amplifies its universal vocation through the use of new
tools, thanks to the generosity of the Polonsky Foundation and to the
sharing of expertise with the Bodleian libraries,” Holy See librarian
Cardinal Raffaele Farina said.

 

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