The Medieval Academy Blog

The Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture is pleased to announce the 2023–2024 edition of its annual lecture with the Harvard University Standing Committee on Medieval Studies.

Friday, February 16, 2024 | 12:00 PM EST | Zoom
Byzantium as Europe’s Black Mirror
Anthony Kaldellis, University of Chicago

In the course of its long self-fashioning, “the West” (later “Europe”) set itself off as a superior alternative to a number of imagined Others, including the infidel world of Islam, the primitive nature of the New World, and even its own regressive past, the Middle Ages. This lecture will explore the unique role that Byzantium played in this process. While it too was identified as the antithesis of an idealized Europe, this was done in a specific way with lasting consequences down to the present. Byzantium was constructed not to be fully an Other, but rather to function as an inversion of the Christian, Roman, and Hellenic ideals that Europe itself aspired to embody even as it appropriated those patrimonies from the eastern empire. It became Europe’s twin evil brother, its internal “Black Mirror.” Once we understand this dynamic, we can chart a new path forward for both scholarly and popular perceptions of the eastern empire that are no longer beholden to western anxieties.

Anthony Kaldellis is a Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago.

Advance registration required at https://maryjahariscenter.org/events/byzantium-as-europes-black-mirror

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Harvard University Standing Committee on Medieval Studies.

Contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture with any questions.

Poetry in the Medieval World explores premodern literature from a global perspective, it is an infrastructure for learning and dialoguing on medieval poetry through a cross-disciplinary approach.

As one of our first activities, we are delighted to introduce “Projecting Poetry”, an initiative designed to promote cross-disciplinary discussion, foster collaboration, and provide a platform for DPhil/PhD students at an early stage of their programs, who are engaged in research across various fields and working on medieval poetry. The goal is to create an opportunity to present ongoing research to a diverse audience of fellow students and seniors.

For further information and submission guidelines, see: https://torch.ox.ac.uk/event/call-for-papers-doctoral-seminar-projecting-poetry.For more information about the network, see https://torch.ox.ac.uk/poetry-in-the-medieval-world or contact Ugo Mondini (ugo.mondini@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk). We also have a mailing list: send a blank email to poetrymedievalworld-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk (now working!).

Greetings from Rare Book School!

Expand your understanding of book history during a Rare Book School course this summer! Our five-day intensive courses on the history of manuscript, print, and digital materials will be offered online and in person at the University of Virginia and other partner institutions. 

Among our forty-two courses, we are pleased to offer several pertinent to those involved in medieval studies. The following is a sample of the breadth of the RBS offerings: 

— H-25: “Fifteenth-Century Books in Print & Manuscript,” taught by Paul Needham (Retired Scheide Librarian, Princeton University), Will Noel, and Eric White (both of Princeton University) 

— L-145: “Medieval Manuscript Fragments: Cataloging & Discoverability,” taught by Lisa Fagin Davis (of the Medieval Academy of America) 

— M-20: “Seminar in Western Codicology,” taught by M. Michèle Mulchahey (Leonard E. Boyle Chair in Manuscript Studies at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies) 

—  M-85: “Introduction to Islamicate Manuscripts,” taught by Marianna Shreve Simpson (former Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania) and Kelly Tuttle (of the Editorial Board for Manuscript Studies) 

— M-105v: “Using Digitized Manuscripts,” taught by Dot Porter (of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies)

To be considered in the first round of admissions decisions, course applications should be submitted no later than February 19. Applications received after that date will be reviewed on a rolling basis. Visit our website at www.rarebookschool.org for course details, instructions for applying, and evaluations by past students. Contact us at rbsprograms@virginia.edu with questions. 

Please share this information with colleagues, students, and friends.  

We hope to see you at Rare Book School soon! 

With kindest regards,
The RBS Programs Team

Zoom Webinar 

January 25, 2024, 5:00–6:30 pm EST 

Please join us for the book launch of Wan-Chuan Kao’s White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages (Manchester University Press, 2024).

This book is supported by the Medieval Academy Inclusivity and Diversity Book Subvention award.

What difference does temporality make in the recognition politics of whiteness? If whiteness has hardened into a modern identity politics defined by skin tone, it has not always been so. 

Resisting a reflexive, biopolitical understanding of whiteness, White before Whiteness interrogates how whiteness as a representational trope produces and delimits a range of medieval ideological regimes: love, aesthetics, subjectivity, salvation, chivalry, labour, materiality and sociality. The book analyses works such as Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, Pearl, The King of Tars and others, rethinking premodern whiteness as operations of fragility, precarity and racialicity across bodily and nonbodily figurations. 

Deploying diverse methodologies, this ground-breaking book offers a series of provocative diagnoses and original readings that reconceive whiteness as a systemic edge, generating operative differences that are never transparent, stable or permanent.

Speakers:

Nancy Coleman (Washington and Lee University)
Lisa H. Cooper (University of Wisconsin–Madison)
Sarah Friedman (University of Wisconsin–Madison)
Carissa Harris (Temple University)
Mike Hill (University at Albany, SUNY)
Elliot Kendall (University of Exeter)
Mariah Min (Brown University)
Susie Phillips (Northwestern University)

Register for Zoom webinar at whiteb4whiteness@gmail.com by January 24, 2024.

Participants will receive limited-time e-access to the Introduction and a discount code.

Sponsored by Washington and Lee University Library and The Medieval Studies Program, University of Wisconsin–Madison