The Medieval Academy Blog

I am thrilled to welcome you, at last, to the Centennial of the Medieval Academy of America! Years of planning have led us to this moment, and we have much to celebrate.

In the 1926 publication Progress of Medieval Studies in the United States of America, Prof. James Willard of the University of Colorado announced the incorporation of the “Mediaeval Academy of America,” the result of five years of planning by a dozen prominent American medievalists. They couldn’t unanimously agree on the name of the organization; they couldn’t agree on the title of its journal. One thing they did agree on was the choice of the Mediaeval Academy’s first president, E. K. Rand. In the inaugural issue of Speculum, Rand expressed a straightforward vision for the new organization: “The formation in America of a Mediaeval Academy is an encouraging sign of the times…[it] will, we hope, become a rallying point for the cultivation and study of these Middle Ages.” (Speculum 1/1, p. 3) (check out the January 2025 issue of Speculum to learn more about our origins and history).

The establishment of the Mediaeval Academy and the publication of Speculum were greeted with enthusiasm at home and abroad (albeit with a touch of skepticism overseas). In the German daily Neueste Nachrichten, Munich professor Paul Lehmann gasped, “Mittelalter und Amerika!” In Les Nouvelles Littéraires, French ex-pat Alcide de Andria, of Boston University, reported: “Une académie n’est pas aisée à fonder. C’est quelque chose qui ne se fait pas du jour au lendemain : il y a des obstacles, des lenteurs, que n’y a-t-il pas? Mais les Américains, gens supremement pratiques, ne connaissent pas ces embarras, et sans lettres patentes, sans un Richelieu, un Colbert, sans même un Mussolini, voilà, puisque académie il y a, qu’une Académie est immédiatement constituée. Rien de plus simple.”

When E. K. Rand delivered his 1926 presidential address, “Mediaeval Gloom and Mediaeval Uniformity,” the Academy had 503 members and $15,000 cash-on-hand. We’ve come a long way since then, with nearly 3,000 members worldwide and a significant endowment. As we enter our 100th year, Speculum continues to be the flagship journal of medieval studies, and we have expanded our grantmaking programming to support dozens of scholars every year with more than $115,000 in fellowship support. Although we’ve lost the “æ” in “Mediaeval,” our objectives remain the same as they were in our Articles of Incorporation: “to conduct, encourage, promote and support research, publication and instruction in Mediaeval records, literature, languages, arts, archaeology, history, philosophy, science, life, and all other aspects of Mediaeval civilization, by publications, by research, and by such other means as may be desirable, and to hold property for such purpose.” Today, as our mission statement declares, 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. Join us as we celebrate our past and look towards our future! Here is some of what we have planned for 2025:

1) A Celebration that spans the continent! Our twenty-one Centennial Grant recipients are offering events and programs from Puerto Rico to Toronto and New Mexico to Massachusetts! Check out the combined calendar for an event near you, and be sure to read the Newsletter for updates and the monthly Centennial Spotlight to find out more.

2) Coming to a Campus near you: Thanks to a collaboration between CARA and the Fellows Executive Committee, we are able to facilitate a Centennial Speaker Series that will bring our Fellows to your campus. Click here for more information and to schedule a lecture!

3) Join us Online: We are thrilled to be offering significantly expanded online programming to celebrate our Centennial year, programs sponsored by the Digital Humanities Committee, the Graduate Student Committee, the Inclusivity & Diversity Committee, and more! See below for the latest announcements.

4) Our 100th Annual Meeting! Registration has opened for our Centennial Annual Meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 20-22 March. Thanks to the generosity of our donors and multiple institutional sponsors of the conference, seventy-eight travel bursaries of $500 each have been granted to underfunded scholars so that they may travel to Massachusetts to present their work. This will be our largest and most complex meeting ever, with nearly 500 presenters, multiple exhibits, concerts and other performances, open houses, and some exciting surprises. The Program Committee has done a tremendous job of planning the conference, and I am so grateful to them all. See below for more information and to register!

We are extremely grateful to Tom Dale, Chair of the Centennial Committee, for his leadership of this planning process for the last several years, and to all of the Committee members for their work.

As Academy Fellow George La Piana wrote in his unpublished 1941 ode “De Mediaevalis Academiae,”

In aevum semper obstet malis
academia mediaevalis
vivat, crescat, floreat!

I look forward to celebrating with you!

– Lisa

Happy New Year from the Editor’s Desk at Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies.

Founded in 1925, the Medieval Academy of America marks its centennial anniversary this year. As you will have seen from other columns in this newsletter, many events around the country have been planned to honor this milestone.  Here at Speculum, we are contributing to the commemoration by dedicating our January issue to the theme of “Medieval Studies and Its Institutions.” Commissioned by former MAA President Thomas Dale and the MAA Council, from a proposal by Sara Lipton and Suzanne Akbari, and guest edited by Roland Betancourt and Karla Mallette, this issue may have already landed in your mailbox.  It marks the MAA’s centennial by examining the historical context from which it emerged and, equally importantly, the organizations that grew up alongside it to challenge and subvert—as much as to supplement and enhance—the approaches and subject matter of medieval studies represented by the MAA. It is a critical look in the mirror from which all medievalists can learn and benefit.

After the editor’s introduction (free to read on our website), which lays out the themes, subthemes, and stakes of the issue, Carol Symes, Renée R. Trilling, and D. Fairchild Ruggles look at the MAA’s foundational moment with “Medievalists in the Mirror: Looking Back to the World of 1925 and Its Legacy,” while Sarah LaVoy-Brunette and Dusti C. Bridges tackle the topic of “Anglo-Saxonism and Indigenous Dispossession: Land-Grab Universities and the Emergence of Medieval Studies” of the period. Turning to the “micro-communities” of medievalists that developed to push the field to think more broadly, Melissa Ridley Elmes and Nicole Lopez-Jantzen examine the “Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship and Medieval Studies: Our Institutions, Our Selves; Our Past, and Our Future,” while Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy and Myra Seaman, in an article drawing on oral histories, recall “Why, Sometimes We’ve Believed Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The BABEL Working Group.” Appropriately for the final article of the issue, the Material Collective’s “In Praise of Collectivity: Why Radical Solidarity Is Our Only Hope” looks both backward and forward in its assessment of the field, closing with a Manifesto for a Modern Medieval Studies that encourages medievalists to build “cooperatives in their own academic communities.” The issue concludes with a roundtable of short pieces by Tarren Andrews, Alexander Beecroft, Shirin Fozi, Sharon Kinoshita, Ali A. Olomi, Zrinka Stahuljak, and Anna Wilson, who reflect on current institutional crises and propose solutions for the future.  The curated essays in this issue are written by senior scholars and graduate students alike and do the work of historicizing the foundation of the MAA, while at the same time demonstrating how our shared field has developed, been shaped by, and ultimately refashioned by “para-institutions” over the course of the century.  It is a must-read issue for all medievalists who wish to know about our past, present, and even our future. Many thanks to the Karla and Roland whose guiding hands brought the issue from proposal to publication.

As is now our established practice, a companion podcast, Speculum Spotlight—a collaboration between the Multicultural Middle Ages team and Speculum—will have now posted. This episode, produced and hosted by Will Beattie, features a far-reaching conversation with the editors of the centennial issue that takes us above and beyond it to discuss the state of the humanities in our current apprehensive moment. As the editors note, their hope is that the issue serves “as a time capsule for future historiographers” which demonstrates how far our field has come over the course of one hundred years.

Turning to the future, as most members of the medievalist community already know, Barbara Newman has been named as the incoming editor of Speculum, and she will take over the reins of the journal in July. The staff and I congratulate Barbara on this appointment and look forward to working with her and her team during the transition period starting later this spring.

Until then, as the gyre turns and the journal itself moves toward its own centennial year in 2026, readers can expect upcoming issues of Speculum to represent the best of our multidisciplinary field, with forthcoming articles on early medieval burial archeology and plague studies; Carolingian codicological innovation; early medieval queens and textile production; the shifting landscape of orientalist motifs in crusading literature; the Minneleich by the Middle High German poet Frauenlob; chronology, mobility, and diet in early medieval Britain; temporality and history in the frescos at Anagni; emotions in Old Norse literature; the dowries of grooms in Catalonia; the Hebrew Bible’s story of Joseph in medieval France; Greco-Arabic literature in the Baghdad translation movement; the social functions of Latin-runic epigraphy in medieval Scandinavia; Islam in the writings of Eulogius; and East-West encounters in Asia. And in January 2026, we will publish Speculations, the centennial issue of the journal. Though this list indicates our deep pipeline of articles, like Janus we also look forward to and welcome your submissions!

We’ll see you in Cambridge at the centennial meeting of the MAA in March.

Until then, Happy New Year from the entire staff at Speculum!

Katherine L. Jansen

Editor

The Centennial Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will take place on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts on 20-22 March 2025, hosted by Harvard University in collaboration with Boston College, Boston University, Brandeis University, Fitchburg State University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stonehill College, Tufts University, and Wellesley College. This year’s Centennial program will bring together nearly 500 scholars from three continents, 23 countries, over 200 academic institutions, and a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds for 114 paper sessions, four plenary lectures, and a host of associated workshops and events, addressing the medieval world from the North Atlantic to the Sea of Japan as well as the histories and possible futures of Medieval Studies itself. While this will be an in-person meeting, our plenary lectures—given by Kristina Richardson (Professor of History and Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia), Sara Lipton (President of the Medieval Academy of America and Professor of History at Stony Brook University), Wendy Belcher (Professor of Comparative Literature and African American Studies at Princeton University), and a diverse group of medieval scholars and administrators—will be live streamed.

Click here for more information and to register. Be sure to log into your MAA account first to receive the Member discount! We are excited to welcome you to Cambridge and look forward to meeting you, learning from you, and celebrating our shared commitment to Medieval Studies.

The two-year Matching Campaign officially concluded on 31 December. The Campaign was an enormous success, thanks to you! The Match was fulfilled on June 21, at which point we crossed the $150,000 mark and allocated the $150,000 Match among the various Funds. Since that time, we have raised an additional $117,148. The total raised, including the Match, is an astonishing $417,148! We are extremely grateful to the 662 of you who contributed to this campaign, including three anonymous donors of $150,000 (to fund the Match), $50,000, and $20,000 respectively.

At its meeting in December, following the advice of the Finance Committee, the Council determined that 75% of unrestricted donations should be allocated to support the endowment, with the remainder adding to the donor-restricted allocations. The final allocations are as follows:

Mentoring: $33,515 to support stipends and honoraria for the participants in the 2025 Summer Mentoring Program (more details coming soon).
Centennial: $135,750 to support the twenty-one Centennial Grant projects and 40 Centennial Bursaries of $500 each, as well as other Centennial-related expenses.
MedievALLists: $14,790 to support medievalists working beyond the tenure track, with specific programming to be determined by Council in the coming months.
Unrestricted: $18,631 remaining for purposes to be determined by Council in the coming months.
Endowment: $214,012 to invest in the future of the MAA.

Thank you for your support!

To the members of the Medieval Academy of America:

I am very pleased to announce the results of the 2025 governance election:

President: Peggy McCracken (Univ. of Michigan, French and Comparative Literature)
1st Vice-President: Haruko Momma (New York Univ., English)
2nd Vice-President: Thomas Burman (Univ. of Notre Dame, History)

Council:
Abigail Balbale (New York University, Middle Eastern Studies)
Tom Barton (University of San Diego, History)
Carrie Beneš (New College of Florida, History)
Diane Reilly (Indiana University, Art History)

Nominating Committee:
Chair (appointed by MAA President): Jessica Goldberg (UCLA, History)
Elected members:
Sarah Guérin (Univ. of Pennsylvania, Art History)
Laura Smoller (Univ. of Rochester, History)

My thanks to all who voted and to all who stood for election, and my congratulations to all who were elected.

Lisa Fagin Davis
Executive Director, Medieval Academy of America

We are sorry to inform you that Mary-Jo Arn, a long-time staff member at the Medieval Academy office in Boston, passed away on December 14 from injuries sustained after she was struck by a car. No one who knew her will be surprised to learn that she was on her way home from her local library when the accident occurred. Mary-Jo spent more than a decade in the early 2000s working in the MAA office, primarily as the book review manager for Speculum and editor of the monthly “Medieval Academy News.” She was the host of many collegial gatherings of manuscript scholars in her Dorchester home and a regular presence in scholarly gatherings around the Boston area. To the broader community of medievalists, she was well-known as a leading expert on the poetry and works of Charles d’Orléans, having published a 2008 volume in the Early Book Society’s series, Texts & translation: The Poet’s Notebook: The Personal Manuscripts of Charles d’ Orléans (Paris, BnF, MS fr. 25458). After suffering a major stroke several years ago, Mary-Jo worked tirelessly on her recovery and successfully resumed her scholarship in the final years of her life. Just before she was injured, she took delivery of her final project, having served as an editor on the newly-published Cannon & Simpson Oxford Chaucer.

A celebration of Mary-Jo’s life will take place on 18 January at All Saints Episcopal Parish in Dorchester, Massachusetts. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Derek Pearsall Travel and Research Fund, a fund operated by the International Piers Plowman Society in order to “provide financial aid to students and scholars traveling to conferences on, or conducting archival research related to, Piers Plowman.” More information may be found here.

The MAA staff remembers Mary-Jo’s humor and dedication, and we will all miss her.

The 2025 Election of Fellows and Corresponding Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America closed on Sunday, 5 January. The results have been certified by the President of the Fellows and the Fellows Nominating Committee, and the new Fellows have been informed of their election.

We are very pleased to introduce the Fellows Class of 2025:

Fellows:
Marina Brownlee (Spanish and Portuguese Literature)
Thomas Burman (History)
Christopher Cannon (English)
Peggy McCracken (French Literature)
Haruko Momma (English)
Elizabeth Morrison (Art History)

Corresponding Fellows:
Elisheva Baumgarten (Judaic Studies and History, Israel)
Stefan Esders (History, Germany)
Judith Olszowy-Schlanger (Judaic Studies, France)
Eric Palazzo (Art History, France)
Elisabeth Van Houts (History, England)

The chief purpose of the Fellowship is to honor major long-term scholarly achievement within the field of Medieval Studies. Fellows are nominated by MAA members and elected by the Fellows. To learn more about the Fellows and Corresponding Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America, please see the Fellows section of our website.

Please join us as we honor these colleagues at the annual Induction Ceremony for new Fellows during the Fellows Plenary Session at the upcoming Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America on Saturday, 22 March at Harvard University.

We are thrilled to announce that the 2025-2026 Schallek Fellowship has been awarded to Jack McCart (University of Toronto). In his words:

The present study, “The Material Cultures of Memory: Death, Patronage, and Self-Presentation in Later-Medieval London,” explores the types of self-presentation that were embedded in Londoners’ activities as patrons, donors, and benefactors. It is interested in questions of how medieval Londoners defined themselves as patrons and sought to shape the posthumous memory of their patronage. It considers here their material interventions, commemorative foundations, and the documentary strategies they used to establish and sustain them. Urban patronage, whether concentrated within the parish or ward or at ecclesiastical sites as prominent as Old St. Paul’s or Greyfriars London (which have attracted considerable scholarly attention), functioned both as an effort to secure the soul’s salvation and as a form of conspicuous social display. Methodologically, therefore, this study takes cues both from the extensive historiography of death and commemoration (in England as well as continental Europe) and more recent interest in the textual, material, and spatial strategies of demarcating status and identity within premodern urban environments. By approaching Londoners’ patronage through the lens of self-presentation and foregrounding its financial bases, it draws attention to how patrons’ and benefactors’ legacies were, then as now, often carefully and deliberately shaped.

The study therefore traces these threads of patronage and self-presentation through Londoners’ building works, material donations, and documentary provisions. In particular it demonstrates that many of their foundations and endowments (such as chantries and collegiate chapels) were gradual and accretive processes, realized in stages over the course of longstanding patronal relationships, whether individual or familial. Some of these works actively, indeed by design, reshaped the religious topography of their parishes or wards even during their founders’ lives. As sites of (perpetual) commemoration and intercession, these foundations were also the recipients of material largesse, including of objects commissioned and displayed during life and repurposed after death, as in the case of armorial textiles, signets and seal-chains that became altar adornments associated posthumously with their patrons. Throughout the study, several individual vignettes, including the patronage of the fourteenth-century London mayor and financier John de Pulteney, serve to draw together these themes and illustrate the processes at play patronal self-presentation.

The relationship between patronage and documentary practice, too, is of interest here, for in a highly commercialized urban milieu that relied on pragmatic literacy, the evidentiary and probative role of the written word became increasingly central to the process and practice of commemoration. By extension, written and documentary forms became central to the kinds of self-presentation that lay at the heart of patrons’ efforts. Londoners sought also to shape their memory through the contracts, indentures, and testamentary stipulations they used to manage their commemorative and intercessory foundations and ensure their perpetual observance. It is partly for this reason that in their patronage of parish churches and local priories they furnished scripts for their identification as founders (fundatores), affixed letters and names to the tombs of their forebears, and integrated the clauses of their wills into devotional sculpture. These memorial modes served both as material reminders of obligation, anchors for intercessory prayer, and means of fixing the terms of their remembrance as benefactors. Where the written word provided the connective link between writing, obligation, and remembrance, such acts were strategies of self-presentation aimed toward eternity.

The study itself relies on in situ consultation of a wide range of materials, mainly archival and manuscript (wills, accounts, inventories, and institutional memoranda and registers) but also material and architectural, particularly where Londoners’ patronage extended outside the city. The Schallek Fellowship will enable me to complete this program of research, and I am therefore deeply grateful to the Schallek estate for making this award possible and to the Medieval Academy of America and the Richard III Society-American Branch for generously supporting my postgraduate work.