News & Events

Mona Burkett from the Department of History recently passed her MA exams. Chris Flack in English passed his PhD preliminary exams. Congratulations to you both!

Department of French and Italian Professor Susan Noakes has been named the first holder of the University of Minnesota Arts and Humanities Chair. This two-year award provides Susan with a research fund which she plans to use for the SCGMA (Scholarly Community for the Globalization of the “Middle Ages”) project.

For more information on the project, please see: the CMS website or SCGMA's site.

Many of our Center for Medieval Studies minors have received fellowships, been awarded travel grants, passed preliminary examinations, or defended their dissertations in recent weeks. Congratulations to all of you!

--History graduate student Philip Grace has received a Graduate School Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship to complete his dissertation on fatherhood in late medieval Basel.
--History graduate student Tovah Bender successfully defended her dissertation, “Negotiating Marriage: Artisan Women in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Society.”
--History graduate students Gabriel Hill and Kevin Mummey passed their preliminary examinations.
--English Department graduate student Elissa Hansen was awarded CMS funding for travel to Waukesha, WI to study contemporary reading practices in the Order of Julian of Norwich.
--History graduate student Kevin Mummey was awarded funds to travel to Mallorca for archival work on his dissertation on women slaveholders in 14th century Mallorca.
--History grad student Tiffany Vann Sprecher received a grant for travel to Cambridge, MA to work with a manuscript of Jacques de Vitry’s sermons.
--French and Italian graduate student Rachel Gibson was awarded funds from CMS to travel to Rome this summer in order to pursue an advanced course in Italian.
--CMS has also awarded travel funding from the Carl Shepard Memorial Fund to Ashley Deering, an undergraduate at U of M Morris, to travel to the International Medieval Congress at Leeds to present her research on “Saving Faith in Languedoc: the Dominican Practice of Medieval ‘Doctors of Souls’.” She worked on this project as a UROP with Professor Stephen Martin.

We have a very impressive presence at the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo this year. Please join us in supporting and congratulating such an impressive range of research by UMN professors and students.

The following sessions are sponsored by the Center for Medieval Studies:

--Session 428, “Globalizing the Middle Ages I: What Have We Done So Far and Where Should We Go Next?” (A roundtable).
--Session 485, “Globalizing the Middle Ages II: Mapping the Medieval World,” includes a paper by Maggie Ragnow from the James Ford Bell Library on “Mapping Asia: Perspectives from East and West.”
--Sesson 542, “Globalizing the Middle Ages III: Ghazni, Tabriz, and Samarkand: Sounds and Images from Western and Central Asia,” includes papers by Iraj Bashiri on “Divine and Personal Will in the Thought of Nasir-I Khusrau” and Gabriela Currie on “Imagining Sound in Ilkhanid and Timurid Miniatures.”

Other UMN students and faculty present:

--Session 155, “Law and Life in Occitania: Considering the Costuma d’Agen in Its Contexts” (A roundtable) features Professor Ron Akehurst.
--Session 318, features Professor Akehurst’s paper “Before the South of France Was the pays de Droit Ecrit.”
--Session 344, Diane Anderson will present "Walahfrid Strabo and Hellen Waddell: Re-editing a Queer Icon."
--Session 522, Professor Bernard Bachrach’s “Some Observations on the Merovingian Economy.”
--Session 29, Steve Bivans will present “Viking Warfare in the Ninth Century: The Contributions of the Annales Xantenses and Annales Vedastini.”
--Session 612, Mary Frances Brown’s “The Lyric Encyclopedia: Courtly Song and Fromal Innovation in Matfre Ermengaud’s Breviari d’Amor.”
--Session 264, Erik Carlson will read “Drinking, Speaking, and Acting in Beowulf.”
--Session 291, Ashley Deering "Saving Faith in Languedoc: The Dominican Practice of Medieval "Doctors of Souls."
--Session 282, Philip Grace presents “Motive, Means, and Opportunity: Fathers in Late Medieval Didactic Treatises.”
--Session 391, Elissa Hansen and Lindsay Craig will present, respectively “The ‘Pilgrim Way’: Travel, Ecclesiastical Authority, and Regional Identity in Two Eighth-Century Hagiographies” and “By the Saints and by the Book: Invocations, Implications, and Transmission in Roman de la Rose.”
--Session 457, Jeff Hartman, “Depending on the Utlands: Food and Famine in Fourteenth-Century Iceland.”
--Session 379, Professor Ruth Karras presents “Servanthood and Age at Marriage in England and France.”
--Session 157, Mollie Madden reads “Army Finance: The Accounts of John Henxteworth for 1355-1356.”
--Session 244, Professor Stephen Martin participates in "The Place of Digital Work in Medieval Studies: Where are we Now, Where are We Going?" (a panel discussion)
--Session 291, Professor Stephen Martin reads "Imagining Love and the Middle Ages in Modern Editions of _Aucassin et Nicolete_."
--Session 31, Adam Oberlin presents “’Translating’ Tristan: Hakon Hakonarson’s Norway and the Possibilities of Translatio.”
--Session 344. Stephanie Van D'Elden reads "Deception as Translation: Examples from the Tristan Romance."
--Session 533, Tiffany Vann Sprecher, “’You will be called priest of the Lord’” A Model Sermon by Jacques de Vitry.”

This is not even to mention those who are organizing or presiding over sessions, or the vast number of UMN alumni who have moved on to other places who are presenting this year. We have good reason to be proud.

The research of Department of Anthropology and CMS core faculty Professor Peter Wells was featured in the latest online UMNews, which highlights his newest book, Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered.

To read the full text of the article by Deane Morrison, please see here.

I am presently exploring medieval Jewish versions of scripture and associated rabbinical commentaries as a background for political thought, as expressed in certain polyphonic motets of the first half of the fourteenth century. This approach casts a different light on the influence of Jewish sacred literature in the intellectual milieu of the French court at that time, suggesting that it was more significant than had been supposed. I am concentrating on the evidence of the texts and music of selected ars nova, French polytextual motets with Latin liturgical tenors.

The polyphonic motets I have chosen are constructed over patterned repetitions of a fragment of Gregorian chant. The upper voices simultaneously sing two different melodic lines with two different texts, which may be in French or in Latin. The polytextual aspect makes the French motet an ideal vehicle for sensitive, complex political argument because it can make polemical assertions without providing amplification or justification, as would be necessary in normal discourse, especially political speech.

Close study of the Jewish readings that contribute to the substrates of these motet texts, and also number-symbolic clues in the music, reveal that this group of motets are essentially "position papers" on some of the fundamental issues leading to the outbreak of the Hundred Years War: legitimacy, inheritance, and liege homage. For example, the Jewish commentary explains the nature of the rights given by Isaac to Jacob, but the Christian commentary does not. The motet masks the fact that the poet makes use of one, and not the other.