The Medieval Academy Blog

Dear Academy Members,

In this first opportunity to write to you as President of the Academy, I would simply like to extend my thanks to all of you. Your support of the Academy as a member is deeply appreciated. I felt this gratitude in a special way at our recent Annual Meeting, graciously and superbly hosted by our colleagues at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, when I had the honor of congratulating winners of the many prizes the Academy awards annually. These prizes, as well as the numerous grants and fellowships awarded each year, are made possible, in part, by membership dues. The financial support of your membership dues is critical to all the MAA’s programs.

I am also grateful for the precious gift of your time. All of the Academy’s officers and committee members are volunteers, as are all of those organizing each year’s annual meeting and participating in other MAA events. Please know that your efforts are seen and valued. With gratitude and warmest regards,

Maureen C. Miller, President of the Medieval Academy of America

The latest issue of Speculum is now available on the University of Chicago Press Journals website.

To access your members-only journal subscription, log in to the MAA website using your username and password associated with your membership (contact us at info@themedievalacademy.org if you have forgotten either), and choose “Speculum Online” from the “Speculum” menu. As a reminder, your MAA membership provides exclusive online access to the full run of Speculum in full text, PDF, and e-Book editions – at no additional charge.

Speculum, Volume 97, Number 2 (April 2022)

Articles

The Provenance, Date, and Patron of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308
Elizabeth Eva Leach

Draining the Swamp: National and Local Regulation of Drainage in a 1396 English Sewer Commission Report
Andrew Moore and Steven Bednarski

Old English in the Irish Charms
Deborah Hayden

Remembering Outremer in the West: The Secunda pars historiae Iherosolimitane and the Crisis of Crusading in Mid-twelfth-century France
Andrew D. Buck

Connoisseurship, Art History, and the Paleographical Impasse in Middle English Studies
Sonja Drimmer

Book Reviews
This issue of Speculum features more than 75 book reviews, including:

David Abulafia, The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans
Reviewed by Prasenjit Duara

Fabio Acerbi and Gudrun Vuillemin-Diem, La transmission du savoir grec en Occident: Guillaume de Moerbeke, le Laur. Plut. 87.25 (Thémistius, “in De an.”) et la bibliothèque de Boniface VIII
Reviewed by Michele Trizio

Augustine, Confessions, trans. Thomas Williams
Reviewed by Raymond Van Dam

Michal Biran, Jonathan Brack, and Francesca Fiaschetti, eds., Along the Silk Roads in Mongol Eurasia: Generals, Merchants, and Intellectuals
Reviewed by Devin DeWeese

David Carpenter, Henry III: The Rise to Power and Personal Rule, 1207–1258
Reviewed by Robert Stacey

Johan Huizinga, Graeme Small, Anton van der Lem, and Diane Webb, eds., Autumntide of the Middle Ages: A Study of Forms of Life and Thought of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries in France and the Low Countries; Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, ed., L’odeur du sang et des roses: Relire Johan Huizinga aujourd’hui
Reviewed by Peter Arnade

William Chester Jordan, The Apple of His Eye: Converts from Islam in the Reign of Louis IX
Reviewed by Suzanne Conklin Akbari

Samantha Katz Seal, Father Chaucer: Generating Authority in “The Canterbury Tales”
Reviewed by Thomas Prendergast

Christine Smith and Joseph F. O’Connor, Eyewitness to Old St. Peter’s: A Study of Maffeo Vegio’s “Remembering the Ancient History of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome,” with Translation and a Digital Reconstruction of the Church
Reviewed by Joseph Connors

Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt, eds., Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography
Reviewed by Hilary Rhodes

MAA members also receive a 30% discount on all books and e-Books published by the University of Chicago Press, and a 20% discount on individual Chicago Manual of Style Online subscriptions. To access your discount code, log in to your MAA account, and click here. Please include this code while checking out from the University of Chicago Press website.

Sincerely,
The Medieval Academy of America

2022 Fellows Inductees: Front row: Elina Gertsman and M. Cecilia Gaposchkin; Back row: Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Jerome Singerman, Fiona Griffiths, Adam Kosto, Marcia Kupfer, Deborah Deliyannis, Daniel Lord Smail, Laura Smoller.

We are all so grateful to the organizers and implementers of this year’s MAA Annual Meeting at the University of Virginia. There is much to celebrate! Although COVID social-distancing restrictions compelled us to limit in-person attendance to 175, because of the hybrid format we welcomed more than 400 online attendees from all over the world. With multiple sessions running concurrently at any given time, technical difficulties were inevitable but were generally resolved relatively quickly by an amazing team of UVA students, to whom we are exceedingly grateful.

This Annual Meeting was without doubt the most intellectually and demographically diverse in our history, and we invite you to peruse the online program to investigate the extraordinary variety of topics and sessions. Plenaries were delivered by Roland Betancourt, Seeta Chaganti, and outgoing MAA President Thomas E. Dale. Before the closing plenary, ten scholars were inducted into the Society of Fellows. We also awarded our annual Publication, Teaching, and Student Prizes. Graduate Student Prizes were awarded to Giulia Accornero, Mariechristine Garcia, Jared Scott Miller, and Shannah Rose. Congratulations to all!

Given the variety of technical arrangements available at different Annual Meeting venues going forward, we cannot guarantee that every conference will be held in a hybrid format. Even so, as we consider various possible formats for future meetings, we invite you to provide feedback on this meeting here.

We hope to see you in Washington, DC for the 98th Annual Meeting next February!

98th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America
The Grand Hyatt, Washington, DC
23-26 February, 2023

The 98th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will take place at the Grand Hyatt Washington in downtown Washington, DC. The meeting is jointly hosted by the Medieval Academy of America and a consortium of medievalists from DC, Northern Virginia, and Maryland.

The conference program will feature sessions highlighting innovative scholarship across the many disciplines contributing to medieval studies. The Program Committee invites proposals for papers on all topics and in all disciplines and periods of medieval studies and medievalism, including on the themes and strands proposed below. Any member of the Medieval Academy may submit a paper proposal; others may submit proposals as well but must become members in order to present papers at the meeting. Special consideration will be given to individuals whose field would not normally involve membership in the Medieval Academy. We are particularly interested in receiving submissions from those working outside of traditional academic positions, including independent scholars, emeritus or adjunct faculty, university administrators, those working in cultural heritage institutions (libraries, archives, museums, scholarly societies, or cultural research centers), editors and publishers, and other fellow medievalists. The Program Committee seeks to construct a program that fully reflects and expands the diversity of the Medieval Academy’s membership with respect to research areas and representation.

Plenary addresses will be delivered by Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Professor of Medieval Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; Anne Dunlop, Herald Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne; and Maureen Miller, Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley, and incoming president of the Academy.

Click here for the full call for papers.

To the Members of the Medieval Academy of America:

After a year of research, discussion, and hard work, the MAA Council recently approved a new Advocacy Policy to guide us in composing our own advocacy statements and signing on to statements published by other learned societies. We are very grateful to Councilors Hussein Fancy (who has just completed his term) and Elina Gertsman for their work in crafting this new policy. The Advocacy Policy has been posted in the Policies section of our website and is given in full below:

Medieval Academy of America Advocacy Policy

MAA advocacy statements are made by the Advocacy Committee. The Committee may decide to move the question to the vote of the Council or the entire membership. The MAA should be strategic in selecting matters on which to speak out, and public statements should address matters of clear and common professional interest and concern. They should be issued only on matters about which the members have special knowledge and/or expertise. The statement itself should include language that demonstrates such special knowledge. The Committee is also charged with reviewing and signing on to the statements issued by other scholarly societies. In cases where the decision must be made swiftly, the decision to endorse will be made by approval of the three Presidential Officers and will represent their opinions alone.

The Advocacy Committee is composed of six members, holding two-year staggered terms, selected by the Council. Members of the Advocacy Committee may seek to renew their terms with approval of the Council. The Executive Director of the Medieval Academy serves as an additional, ex-officio member of the Advocacy Committee.

For the inaugural committee, three members will be selected for a one-year term and three members will be selected for a two-year term; once the first group rotates off the committee, their replacements will be selected for the regular two-year term.

If you are interested in serving on the inaugural Advocacy Committee, please fill out the self-nomination form found here. Self-nomination forms must be submitted by 1 May 2022.

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

The Medieval Academy Inclusivity and Diversity Book Subvention Program provides subventions of up to $5,000 to university or other non-profit scholarly presses to support the publication of books concerning the study of inclusivity and diversity in the Middle Ages (broadly conceived) by Medieval Academy members. Click here for more information.

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 on the relevant webpage. The deadline for proposals is 1 May 2021.

Travel Grants

As always, the Medieval Academy of America will have a strong presence at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, taking place online from May 9 – 14.

1) The 2022 Medieval Academy Plenary Lecture will be delivered by Geraldine Heng (University of Texas at Austin), “An Ordinary Ship and Its Stories of Early Globalism,” on Tuesday, May 10 at 3:00 PM EDT. The lecture will be followed by a discussion with Prof. Heng. Two associated sessions on The Global Middle Ages will take place on May 11 at 5 PM EDT (Session 189) and 7 PM EDT (Session 205).

2) The MAA Graduate Student Committee is sponsoring a roundtable discussion on “Medieval Studies and the Community: Scholarship and Outreach” on May 11 at 5 PM EDT (Session 184). An informal gathering for graduate students will take place on May 9 at 7 PM EDT.

3) CARA (the Committee on Centers and Regional Associations) is sponsoring two roundtables: “Magistri et Artifices: Defining Excellence in the Medieval Studies Classroom” on May 9 at 3 PM EDT (Session 57) and “Insularity and Regionality in the Global Middle Ages” on May 12 at 3 PM EDT (Session 238).

Click here for more information. We hope to “see” you there!

We are very pleased to be able to support the work of these scholars:

Olivia Remie Constable Awards:
Erica Kinias, Sarina C Kuersteiner, Arielle C. McKee, and Emma Snowden

Dissertation Grants:
Helen Maud Cam Dissertation Grant: Lane Bradley Baker (Stanford University)
Hope Emily Allen Dissertation Grant: Lisa Cruikshank (University of Toronto)
John Boswell Dissertation Grant: Frank Joseph Espinosa II (University of Michigan)
Grace Frank Dissertation Grant: Giulia Giamboni (University of California Santa Barbara)
Etienne Gilson Dissertation Grant: Whitney Adana Kite (Columbia University
Robert and Janet Lumiansky Dissertation Grant: Sarah Mathiesen (Florida State University)
Frederic C. Lane Dissertation Grant: Elena Shadrina (Harvard University)
E. K. Rand Dissertation Grant: Eneko Tuduri (University of Nevada, Reno)
Charles T. Wood Dissertation Grant: Dillon Brian-Thomas Webster (Brown University)

Belle da Costa Greene Award:
Amanda Caterina Leong (University of California, Merced)

MAA/GSC Grant:
Living with the Medieval and Letting it Live: High Schoolers and Historical Learning at the Sheesh Mahal, Delhi; The Medievalist Toolkit; Coding Codices Podcast; Meeting in the Middle Ages Podcast; and Middle School Paleography Workshop.

Schallek Awards:
Bethany Donovan (University of Michigan)
Sarah Jane Friedman (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Margaret McCurry (New York University)
Kristen M Vitale (University of Connecticut)

This month, all of our Good News comes from members of the MAA Council. Congratulations!

Elina Gertsman’s monograph Absent Image has been awarded the College Art Association’s Charles Rufus Morey Award for the most distinguished art history book of the year.

Tracy Chapman Hamilton has been awarded the 2022 Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship. Hamilton will receive the $25,000 fellowship and the support of a mentor in her field as she completes her research that explores questions of gender in premodern Europe and the Mediterranean. The Wheeler Fellowship will help her complete a book on The Ceremonial Landscape: Art, Gender, and Geography in Late Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. In it, Hamilton studies how women patrons of the Late Capetian and early Valois periods perceived, celebrated, and manipulated events such as weddings, tournaments, pilgrimages, funerals, and foundation ceremonies to create visual backdrops for a geographical web of objects they created, exchanged, and commissioned.

Sara Lipton will be a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Princeton IAS in Fall 2022, and a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College Oxford in Spring 2023.

If you have Good News to share, please send it to Executive Director Lisa Fagin Davis.