The Medieval Academy Blog

Thanks to you, we have exceeded our two-year goal of raising $150,000 to trigger the Match, and we did it in only eighteen months! In fact, since the beginning of the Campaign in 2023, we have raised nearly $175,000.

But we aren’t done yet…

Help us raise an additional $50,000 by year’s end, an amount that will bring us to $225,000 for 2025, our Centennial year.

By making an end-of-year donation to the Campaign, you will help ensure that the MAA can continue its important support of scholars, scholarship, and expanded programming to fulfill our vision of a stronger, more inclusive Medieval Studies. Members wishing to support Speculum specifically should note that funds donated to our Endowment are used, via the annual Draw on these funds, to directly support operating expenses such as Speculum staffing. 

Click here for more information and to make a donation. Thank you for your support!

Dear colleagues,

As you know. the Medieval Academy will celebrate its centennial in 2025. There’s a lot to celebrate!

1) 100th Annual Meeting: The commemorations will kick off at the Annual Meeting in March, with hundreds of papers, panels, and roundtables, four plenaries, celebratory gatherings, and even a few surprises. We’ll be commemorating our history, of course, but also celebrating you: honoring your scholarship by acknowleding everyone in attendance who has ever been awarded an MAA grant, won a publication prize, been elected to the Fellows, or presented at the Annual Meeting; and acknowledging with gratitude the efforts of everyone who has ever served in our governance or on one of our committees. Join us in Cambridge, Massachusetts in March as we commemorate our past, celebrate our present, and imagine our future. The program and registration will be available in a few months.

2) Centennial Grants: Thanks to the anonymous Matching Challenge donor and your generous contributions, the Centennial Committee has awarded twenty-one grants of $5,000 each to projects across North America. Watch your email for an event near you!

Arkansas: The Plays of Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim: Bringing the Medieval to Arkansas, University of Arkansas // Two Headed Repertory

California: Summer Institute for Late Medieval Polyphony, University of California, Berkeley

Georgia: Medieval on my Mind: The Past, Present, and Future of Medieval Manuscripts in the Deep South, University of Georgia

Illinois: Cartooning the Medieval: Comics, Narrative Art, and New Audiences for Medieval Studies, Newberry Library

Illinois: Medievalists Design Games, University of Chicago

Indiana: The Bayeux Tapestry from Scratch, Indiana University

Louisiana: Medievalists of Northern Louisiana, Grambling State University

Massachusetts: Art in an Early Global World at WAM: A Digital Resource, College of the Holy Cross

Michigan: 2025 Mostly Medieval Theatre Festival “Book of Silence” Adaptation Premiere, Western Michigan University

Minnesota: Virtual Medieval Books in the Schools, University of Minnesota

New Jersey/ DC: The Middle Ages for Educators Open Access Resource (OAR) Sweet Sixteen Playoffs, Independent Scholar/Princeton University

New Mexico: The Interconnected Middle Ages, University of New Mexico

New York: Medieval Drama in Brooklyn and in Toronto, Brooklyn College/CUNY Graduate Center

North Carolina: Vagantes Conference on Medieval Studies 2025, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Duke University

Ohio: Mothers and Sisters of the Veil, Trobár Medieval, Cleveland

Oklahoma: Inaugural Manuscripts Lecture Series, Oklahoma State University

Texas: Space City Medievalism, University of Houston

Virginia: Public Medieval: A Workshop for Graduate Students, ECRs, and Underemployed Medievalists, Virginia Tech

Washington: Medieval Joy Event and Undergraduate Conference, Seattle University

Puerto Rico: Jornadas caribeñas de estudios medievales: dedicadas a la Dra. Isabel Gutierrez del Arroyo (Caribbean Conferences on Medieval Studies: In Memory of Dr. Isabel Guitierrez del Arroyo), University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus

Ontario: York Plays 2025, University of Toronto

3) Speculum: Special issues of our journal will commemorate the MAA’s centennial (forthcoming, January 2025) and the 100th volume of Speculum (titled Speculations, to be published in January 2026). We congratulate Editor Katherine Jansen and her staff on a spectacular five-year tenure even as she looks forward to her retirement next year. We will welcome a new Editor in the summer of 2025 (more on that soon).

4) Centennial Speakers’ Series: In collaboration with CARA, the Fellows have established a Centennial lecture series that will bring senior medievalists to campuses across North America. Click here to arrange a visit to your campus or city!

5) Online programming: We will be greatly expanding our online programming in 2025 and beyond, offering author conversations, open discussion forums, podcasts, administrative workshops, skills training, and other programs. Watch your email for more information!

6) Long-term planning: As we begin our second century, we are carefully and comprehensively analyzing all MAA programs and policies in order to ensure that all of our programming and procedures are efficient, sustainable, productive, mission-driven, and in keeping with our values statement: “The Medieval Academy of America is a scholarly community committed to deepening, broadening, and sharing knowledge of the medieval past in an inclusive and equitable way.”

I look forward to celebrating with you!

– Lisa

Lisa Fagin Davis
Executive Director
LFD@TheMedievalAcademy.org

Greetings from the Editor’s Desk at Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies. Though the October issue (99/4) marks the last publication of the year for the journal, it nonetheless contains an abundance of riches, beginning with a cluster of articles entitled “The Textual Cult of Richard Rolle: Writing Contemplation in Later Medieval England,” edited by Andrew Albin and Andrew Kraebel.  As the editors’ introduction explains, the essays aim to reassess the works of the Hermit of Hampole (d. 1349) in light of a generation of scholarship dedicated to this charismatic ascetic.  The essays by Timothy Glover, “‘Strange in His Ways, Strange in His Words’: Eccentricity, Eremitism, and Autobiography in the Works of Richard Rolle,” Katherine Zieman, “Resonant Charisma: Richard Rolle as Public Contemplative,” Andrew Kraebel, “Hermit Libraries: Material Sources and the Making of Richard Rolle’s Prose,” Ann Killian, “Lyric Anonymity: Songs of Love and Pastoral Care in Lambeth 853,” Tekla Bude, “Solitary Lives and Social Texts: Carthusian Responses to Richard Rolle’s Amore langueo,” Andrew Albin, “Theorizing Richard Rolle’s Sound Art,” and Nicholas Watson’s afterword, “The Nightingale and the Cuckoo,” examine Rolle’s construction as an eremitical writer and as a “public contemplative,” while also analyzing his reception by the laity, his spiritual heirs, and indeed by contemporary scholars. The essays are an invitation to medievalists—not just literary scholars—to (re)discover Rolle’s works and contributions to the religious sensibility of later medieval Europe. The cluster is also the subject of our Speculum Spotlight podcast that features a lively interview in which our host and producer, Jonathan Correa-Reyes, goes behind the scenes to interview the editors about the making of this collection of essays.

This issue also contains three further articles, each a world unto its own, and each offering a different disciplinary perspective. The first, “Dukus Horant: The Codicology of a Mediterranean Epic,” by Uri Zvi Shachar, takes a close look at the material support—the paper—of the Cairo Genizah manuscript containing the epic poem, Dukus Horant, to argue, contrary to prevailing scholarship, that it was created in the eastern Mediterranean for a community of displaced Ashkenazi Jews. Christoph T. Maier’s “How Modern Are Modern Crusade Studies?” is a critical reflection on the historiography of the crusades that has tended to foreground methodological debates at the cost of obscuring the truly innovative work that is being done in the field. And finally, like Albin’s analysis of Rolle’s “sound art” in the cluster, Julie Singer’s “Hearing an Urban Plague Soundscape: Gilles li Muisis in Tournai, 1349–50” turns our ears toward the sonic world the blind chronicler Gilles amplifies in his account of the arrival of the Black Death in Tournai.

In addition to the articles and eighty-eight book reviews, readers will notice our first publication of the list of materials added this year to the Medieval Digital Resources site, a peer-reviewed database of digital projects for studying the Middle Ages, housed on the MAA website. And apropos of digital resources, the ad hoc committee of the Editorial Board has recently drafted guidelines for reviewers of DH projects that can be found here. My thanks to Caroline Goodson, Sierra Lomuto, Samantha Seal, and Máire ní Mhaonaigh, chair of the committee, for their work on this initiative.

In looking forward to next year, as readers of this newsletter have now seen, 2025 marks the centennial year of the Medieval Academy of America and many initiatives are waiting in the wings to mark the occasion, including the January issue of Speculum, guest edited by Roland Betancourt and Karla Mallette. The invited essays look at the “role of our institutions in the practices of knowledge making.” The issue promises to be a critical examination of our institutions and ourselves.

Though we are indeed looking forward to 2025, we must also look backward for a moment, in this case to congratulate Justin Willson, whose article, “On the Aesthetic of Diagrams in Byzantine Art,” Speculum 98/3 (2023) was awarded the 2023 Emerging Scholar Prize by the Society for Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art & Architecture (SHERA). Please do let us know if your article wins a prize so that we can congratulate you in this newsletter.

And finally, as always, we invite your article submissions to the journal. If you find yourself at the Haskins Society conference in November, I’ll be happy to discuss your prospective essay in person, there and then.

Until next year,

Katherine L. Jansen
Editor, Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies

The Medieval Academy of America’s Committee on Centers and Regional Associations (CARA) invites nominations to fill three upcoming vacancies on its Executive Committee. With a special focus upon teaching at all levels, CARA strives to assist institutions and individual medievalists in meeting the challenges that face medieval studies in the classroom, the library, and other institutional settings locally and nationally.

Members of the Executive Committee serve four-year terms; in addition to working with the CARA Chair on programming, outreach, and curricular initiatives, each member serves on two of CARA’s four subcommittees responsible for the CARA Teaching Award, the CARA Robert Kendrick Service Prize, the CARA Regional Conference Grant, and the MAA-CARA Graduate Student Summer Scholarships.

Service on the CARA Executive Committee is open to all members in good standing of the Medieval Academy of America, who may nominate themselves or be nominated by another individual. Given our goals to have regional representation on the Executive Committee, we are particularly encouraging medievalists with experience or appointments in the southwest, southeast, or on the west coast to apply. Nominations should include the following:

1. Name of nominee;

2. Nominee’s institutional or professional affiliation (including that of independent scholar);

3. A brief (c. 250-word) statement indicating the nominee’s qualifications for Executive Committee service, including their contributions to the areas of teaching, center or program administration, and/or professional collaboration and development in the field of Medieval Studies.

In accordance with CARA’s Policies and Procedures, nominations will be accepted until 1 November 2024 and reviewed thereafter by the CARA Executive Committee, which will forward its recommended candidate for approval by the Medieval Academy’s Council. The term of service for new members will begin at the conclusion of CARA’s annual meeting at Harvard University in March 2025. Please send nominations, as well as any questions or requests for further information, to the CARA Chair, Lauren Mancia (LaurenMancia@brooklyn.cuny.edu).

The Medieval Academy of America invites applications for the following grants. Please note that applicants must be members in good standing as of September 15 in order to be eligible for Medieval Academy awards.

Schallek Fellowship
Funded by the Richard III Society, American Branch. As of July 2024, the scope and amount of the Schallek program have changed in accordance with the Society’s instructions, as follows: “Applications will be solicited from graduate students whose work, in any relevant discipline, focuses primarily on the late medieval period in England or any of the British Isles, or which involves British connections to the European Continent in the late medieval period. ‘Late Medieval’ will be defined broadly as the period c.1350-1500 or so.” The Schallek Fellowship provides a one-year grant of $40,000 to support Ph.D. dissertation research. (Deadline 15 October 2024)

Travel Grants
The Medieval Academy provides travel grants to help Academy members who hold doctorates but are not in full-time faculty positions, or are contingent faculty without access to institutional funding, attend conferences to present their work. (Deadline 1 November 2024 for meetings to be held between 16 February and 31 August 2024)

MAA/CARA Conference Grant
The MAA/CARA Conference Grant for Regional Associations and Programs awards $1,000 to help support a regional or consortial conference taking place in 2024. (Deadline 15 October 2024)