The Medieval Academy Blog

Haskins Medal Winners at Carol Woods. Left to right: Jaroslav Folda, Richard Pfaff, Siegfried Wenzel. Photo courtesy of David Hughes.

The campus of Carol Woods is located in the northern part of Chapel Hill, NC, amidst rolling hills with forests of pine trees, oaks, and dogwoods. On a 120-acre site, formerly part of the Weaver Dairy Farm, Carol Woods is now a retirement community of approximately 455 people. Founded in 1979 by a consortium of local business and university people, Carol Woods is made up of a diverse group ranging in age from 62 to 102, from many backgrounds — professional and nonprofessional — including academic, nursing, librarian, legal, business, politics, public policy, medical, social work, urban planning, technological and scientific, with about three-quarters of the population coming from North Carolina and a quarter from elsewhere in the United States. It is a very interesting group of people with fascinating life stories. Some are medievalists and at least four belong to the Medieval Academy.

In the midst of this group of interesting people, however, Carol Woods has a very unusual distinction. Three of the persons who have become residents since 2008 have also been awarded the Haskins Medal by the Medieval Academy of America. Jaroslav Folda entered Carol Woods with his wife Linda in July 2008. He was awarded the Haskins Medal in 1999, for his book on The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1098-1187 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), which the citation calls “a grand synthesis that touches on every aspect of art production in the Latin Kingdom.” Siegfried Wenzel moved to Carol Woods in February of 2009. His Haskins Medal was awarded in 1996 for his study entitled, Macaronic Sermons: Bilingualism and Preaching in Late-Medieval England (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994). The citation points out how Siegfried Wenzel “merges philology and sermon studies in especially innovative and fruitful ways,” and how his “love of the word” has greatly enriched our understanding of medieval culture. And Richard Pfaff entered Carol Woods in March 2011. He received the Haskins Medal at the recent 2012 annual meeting of the Medieval Academy in St. Louis for his magnum opus, The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009). His citation states that “Historians of all of medieval Europe, not just medieval England, will have reason to be profoundly grateful to Richard Pfaff; … The Liturgy in Medieval England represents the crowning achievement of a long and influential career.” Professors Pfaff and Folda were both members of the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in the departments of History and Art respectively, before their retirement. Professor Wenzel taught at the University of North Carolina before joining the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was on the faculty when he won his medal.

I think it is fair to say that the director of admissions at Carol Woods, Karen Daniel, pays little if any attention to scholarly awards of this kind when admitting new residents, but she seemed quite pleasantly surprised when informed of this remarkable distinction. With three Haskins Medal award winners in residence, the fact is, however, that Carol Woods has more than many universities in the United States.  — Jaroslav Folda

At the end of 2011 the Medieval Academy officially completed the terms of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and published online thirty-eight electronic versions of previously published Medieval Academy books.

These works are available as searchable PDF files and as HTML texts at http://www.medievalacademy.org/BooksOnline.html

XML versions of these titles are also available upon request.

Jacqueline Brown and Paul E. Szarmach of the Medieval Academy were the project Co-Directors, while Patrick W. Conner of West Virginia University was Senior Consultant. Constance B. Bouchard (University of Akron), Siân Echard (University of British Columbia, Vancouver), David F. Johnson (Florida State University), Christopher Kleinhenz (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Deborah McGrady (University of Virginia), Patrick O’Neill (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), and Eckehard Simon (Harvard University) served on the project Advisory Board. Grapevine Publishing (http://www.grapevineps.com) provided technical services. Additional reviewers included James Gregory (University of Georgia), Justin Stover (Harvard University), Bridget Balint (Indiana University), Ann Marie Rasmussen (Duke University), and Lisa Fagin Davis (independent scholar).

Under warm and sunny skies the Medieval Academy met for its 87th Annual Meeting in St. Louis, Missouri from 22-24 March 2012. The meeting was a busy and energetic gathering and offered fifty sessions, approximately 380 registered attendants, three plenary speakers (Caroline Bruzelius, Alice-Mary Talbot, and William Chester Jordan), and a CARA Plenary Session. The meeting’s interests were wide-ranging, from medieval piety to Irish and crusades studies and Byzantine topics. The receptions, banquet and business meeting were all well attended and at last count attendance was higher than anticipated. The meeting was hosted by the St. Louis University Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Our thanks to Tom Madden, Teresa Harvey, staff and grad students for a wonderful meeting. A full report will be published in the July issue of Speculum.

Photo: The Haskins Medal. The Medieval Academy of America

The 2012 Haskins Medal was presented to Richard William Pfaff for his magnum opus, The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). The committee wrote that this work “represents the sum of a life’s work dedicated to the recovery and analysis of the sources for the first comprehensive account of the liturgy in medieval England, from early Anglo-Saxon origins right up until the Reformation.” President Alice-Mary Talbot presented Prof. Pfaff with the gold medal, which was designed in 1939 by Graham Carey. Jeffrey F. Hamburger (Chair), Dyan H. Elliott, and Jennifer Summit served on the 2012 committee.

Christopher MacEvitt, associate professor in the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College, was the recipient of the John Nicholas Brown Prize for 2012 for his work, The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), which successfully introduces a new paradigm for the relations of the crusaders with indigenous Christians in the twelfth-century Levant. The committee for 2012 included Robert Nelson (Chair), Sara Lipton, and Paolo Squatriti. President Alice-Mary Talbot presented the award.

Lee Manion was awarded the 2012 Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize for his article “The Loss of the Holy Land and Sir Isumbras: Literary Contributions to Fourteenth-Century Crusade Discourse,” Speculum 85 (2010): 65-90. Deborah Deliyannis, chair of the selection committee, presented the award to Dr. Manion, assistant professor of English at Stern College for Women. His study “stood out for its interdisciplinary range, and for the implications of his conclusions that crusading ideals permeated late-medieval culture far beyond clerical and military circles.” Joel Kaye and Deborah McGrady also served on this committee.

The Student Travel Fund Bursary made grants to six graduate students who presented papers at the Annual Meeting: Samantha Katz (Yale), Andrew Kraebel (Yale), Brendan Sullivan (NYU), Kristine Tanton (USC), Bridget Whearty (Stanford) and Barbara Zimbalist (UC Davis).

Two medievalists are among the nine recipients of the ACLS 2012 Digital Innovation Fellowships.

Margot Fassler Photo courtesy of ACLS

Margot Fassler (Professor, Theology and Music, University of Notre Dame) will create a digitized, sounding model of Hildegard of Bingen’s conception of the cosmos, employing the advanced technology of Notre Dame’s Digital Visualization Theater.

Massimo Lollini Photo courtesy of ACLS

Massimo Lollini (Professor, Romance Languages, University of Oregon) will make Petrarch’s early manuscripts available to scholars online via an interface that provides new tools for rich linking and layering of texts as well as visualizations of documents.

Other projects of interest to medievalists include Assistant Professor Jesse Rodin’s Josquin Research Project (Stanford University) on new tools for making Renaissance music searchable; and three GIS projects covering Rome, Saqqara (Egypt), and the North Atlantic.

These fellows will spend a year dedicated to a major scholarly project intended to advance digital humanistic scholarship by broadening understanding of its nature and exemplifying the robust infrastructure necessary for creating such works. These projects span disciplines and methodologies, but all create new means of scholarly investigation and sharing. For more information see http://www.acls.org/programs/digital/.

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