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
