The Medieval Academy Blog

This summer saw the successful completion of the 2023 MAA Summer Workshop Program!

The new programming run by the Mentoring Programs Committee (MPC) broadly aims to foster and mentor a diverse group of rising medievalists. During the 2022 summer, the MPC (chaired by Teofilo Ruiz, UCLA) successfully organized its pilot program, which convened for multiple weeks over zoom and culminated in an in-person gathering at Yale (hosted by Hussein Fancy).

This summer, the MPC (chaired by Nancy Wu, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), organized a one-day virtual event exclusively focused on grant-writing. Organized and convened by Liz Hardman (Bronx Community College, CUNY) and Ana C. Núñez (Stanford University), the virtual event was hosted by UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS)-Center for Early Global Studies (CEGS). Jennifer Speed (Texas State University) and Nicole Lopez-Jantzen (Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY)—who had previously participated in the 2023 pilot program—led the day’s programming.

This summer, seven students from different American and European universities, across multiple medieval disciplines, gathered together online to learn effective strategies for seeking grants at various stages of one’s career. Participants explored key elements common to grant writing, from addressing institutional mission statements to constructing budgets. Throughout the day, participants discussed model grants and engaged in shared writing exercises describing and pitching their work.

If you would like to get involved in the MPC’s programming, watch for calls for mentors and workshop facilitators for the upcoming 2024 MAA Summer Workshop Program. Next year’s event–convened by Liz Hardman and Thomas Barton (UC San Diego)—will again feature weeks of programming online, with a culminating in-person gathering at UC Berkeley.

The organizers would like to thank everyone at UCLA’s CMRS-CEGS who helped make the day a success: Zrinka Stahuljak, Karen Burgess, and Thi Nguyen.

Greetings from the editor’s desk at Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies. As always, I am delighted to introduce the research articles published in the new issue of the journal, in this case October 98/4 (2023). We again have an issue chock full of work by early career scholars. The issue opens with the article of Georgios Makris, “Jewelry and People in the Byzantine Cemetery of Parapotamos, Epiros,” which shows what jewelry interred in grave sites can tell us about gender, status, trade, and society in one small Greek community.  From archaeology and material culture in Byzantium, we turn to Mary Channen Caldwell’s essay, “Multilingualism, Nova cantica, and the Cult of Saint Nicholas in Medieval England and France,” which moves us to the musical landscape of northwestern Europe to examine multilingualism as it emerges in songs written to honor Saint Nicholas in the high Middle Ages.  Ethan Yeong Lee’s “Instruments of Penance: The Role of Testaments in the Penitential Economy of Thirteenth-Century Italy” reveals how a study of last wills and testaments can throw new light on spirituality and religious devotion of the period. Joshua Easterling’s “Idolatry of Feeling: Walter Hilton and the Inner Life of Heresy” contributes to the history of emotions with his reading of Hilton’s Latin and vernacular writings on heresy. And finally, Matthew Champion’s “Saint Catherine and the Clock: Possible Histories of Sound and Time in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century France” offers a thought experiment about the sonic landscape of Rouen. The issue, then, presents exciting new research and methodologies by scholars representing the fields of art and archaeology; music; English and Latin literature; and history.

I would also like to draw your attention to a new section of the journal, inaugurated in this issue, that will become a feature every October, called “Recognition of Our Peer Reviewers.” Here we acknowledge the work of our unsung peer reviewers—those who have consented to be listed and those who wished to remain anonymous—for the uncredited but important work they do for the journal. Their labor is fundamental to peer review and their feedback serves to strengthen the quality of the articles we publish in Speculum. With this small token, we thank those who have freely given their expertise to the profession.

On a different note, I hope you have had the opportunity to listen to our new podcast, “Speculum Spotlight,” a collaboration with the crew at “The Multicultural Middle Ages.” As I noted in my last column, the scope of the podcast is (ordinarily) to introduce the work of an early career scholar, taking you behind the scenes in the making of a research article. Staying true to that mission, this month, Reed O’Mara, a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve University, engages in a far-reaching conversation with Georgios Makris on his research article cited above, but also taking you behind and beyond it. You can listen here.

New research is the journal’s lifeblood, so we take special pride when Speculum articles have received recognition in their respective fields. Four authors of articles published lately in the journal have been awarded top disciplinary prizes. In alphabetical order, they are:

Petros Bouras-Vallianatos, “Cross-cultural Transfer of Medical Knowledge in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Introduction and Dissemination of Sugar-based Potions from the Islamic World to Byzantium,” Speculum 96/4 (2021): 963–1008. November 2021 Article of the Month for The Mediterranean Seminar and Winner of the 2022 J. Worth Estes Prize, American Association for the History of Medicine.

Mary Harvey Doyno, “Roman Women: Female Religious, the Papacy, and a Growing Dominican Order,” Speculum 97/4 (2022): 1040–72. Runner-up for 2023 Hagiography Society Article Prize.

Elizabeth Papp Kamali, “Tales of the Living Dead: Dealing with Doubt in Medieval English Law,” Speculum 96/2 (2021): 367–417. Winner of the 2022 Sutherland Prize, American Society for Legal History.

Peter V. Loewen, “A Rudder for The Ship of Fools?: Bosch’s Franciscans as Jongleurs of God,” Speculum 96/4 (2021): 1079–1138. Winner of the 2022 H. Colin Slim Award, American Musicological Society.

Congratulations to all our authors on these richly deserved prizes. If your recent Speculum article has won a prize, please do let us know so that we can congratulate you too.

Finally, the editorial collective for Speculations, the upcoming centenary issue of the journal, emphasizes that the call for proposals is an open call. The issue will include 50 short articles, and the collective is committed to a broad and diverse representation of topics, subjects, methods, and medievalists. Our deadline for proposals is 1 December 2023. You can review the call for proposals below in this newsletter. We’d love to have yours among them!

Till next time,

Katherine L. Jansen
Editor

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
The Schallek Fellowship provides a one-year grant of $30,000 to support Ph.D. dissertation research in any relevant discipline dealing with late-medieval Britain (ca. 1350-1500). (Deadline 15 October 2023)

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 2023 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 2023)

Friday, October 20 at 12pm EST 

Felege-Selam Solomon Yirga, Assistant Professor of History
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

“A Roman in Islamic Egypt: Memory and Identity in the Chronicle of John of Nikiu”

The Chronicle of John of Nikiu, written in Coptic in the 7th century but surviving only in the form of a 17th-century Ge’ez translation of an Arabic intermediary, is often treated as an expression of an Egyptian identity rooted in miaphysite Christianity and some degree of antipathy towards and alienation from the Roman state. These readings are informed by a preconceived notion that there was a great degree of continuity between the Coptic church of the Early Islamic period and the Alexandrian church of the Roman empire, and a tacit belief that the Council of Chalcedon created an ideological rift between Alexandria and Constantinople. In this chapter, which will appear in my forthcoming book on the Chronicle, I argue that John of Nikiu’s text in fact reveals a historian who seemed to conceive of the historical Egypt as a core territory of the Roman empire by virtue of the province’s role in Christian history. Furthermore, he seems to view himself, and the Christians of Egypt, as in some way inextricably linked, even tacitly hinting that, should the government and church in Constantinople adopt an anti-Chalcedonian position, the Arab invasion of Egypt could be undone. The implication of this conclusion not only effects our understanding of the emergence of a distinct Coptic identity, but also challenges teleological notions of the inevitability of the long-term presence of Islamic hegemony over formerly Roman lands, which often pervade Islamic narrative sources, and which tend to inform modern scholarship on the subject.

Register at:
https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/raceandgenderglobalmiddleages/