- Campuses :
- Twin Cities
- Crookston
- Duluth
- Morris
- Rochester
- Other Locations
Center for Medieval Studies
cmedst@umn.edu
612-626-0805
cmedst@umn.edu
612-626-0805
Elissa Hansen, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, will present her work on "Reading Revelations: Reception Histories for Julian of Norwich." Two short primary source readings are available in advance of the workshop. The first is a compilation of responses to Julian's life and work and the second is a .pdf file of the first several pages of a seventeenth century edition of Julian's life. The workshop will be held at 12:30 p.m. in 235 Nolte Center.
November 19th, 2009Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Professor of Middle English at the University of Notre Dame, and author of Iconography and the Professional Reader: The Politics of Book Production in the Douce Piers Plowman, (University of Minnesota Press, 1999) and, with Linda Olson, Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), will talk to us about "Gender, Authorship and Social Injustice: Some Major Middle English Poetic Manuscripts and their Marginalia."
4:00 p.m. 140 Nolte Center.
David Morgan, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will speak to us about "The Mongols in Iran." Prof. Morgan is the author of two seminal books Medieval Persia 1040-1797 (1988) and The Mongols (1988) among many other publications. His lecture will explore the nature of the Mongol impact on Iran, from the time of the invasions of 1219-23 until the end of the Mongol kingdom in the 1330s. Was it wholly destructive, as traditionally believed, or were there positive elements that historians, without minimizing the death and destruction that the Mongols brought with them, ought also to consider? The workshop will take place at 4:00 p.m. in Nolte 140.
November 6th, 2009Medieval Mosaic: Spain & Morocco is a Global Seminar. Global Seminars are short-term study abroad programs led by University of Minnesota faculty. Instruction is in English by UMN French & Italian Professor Susan Noakes.
Through lectures, readings, and various excursions students will take an interdisciplinary approach to learning about medieval studies. History, literature, visual art, and music will be explored in order to develop a broad sense of how cultural contact worked in the Middle Ages.
This course will examine how the Iberian Peninsula's earliest inhabitants, the Celts, encountered the Romans, as well as the changes that came with the arrival of the Western Goths. Students will explore how the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian cultures coexisted together from the 8th to the 15th centuries.
Prior to departure, students attend a pre-departure orientation and receive pre-departure readings and assignments. Classes consist of lectures, discussions, and excursions. Students will journal daily and develop a creative project or essay as their final project.
Travel the routes and explore the cities of medieval Spain and Morocco. Vast movements of population during the “Middle” Ages, approximately 350 to 1500, often led to tensions when one group met another. On this program you will discover the ways people dealt with these interactions, the reasons these encounters differed, the results of various cultural strategies, and lessons that can emerge for today's global migrations and diasporas.
Students receive 3-credits of 3000 level coursework during this May term course.
Deadline for applications has been extended to 13 March 2009! For further information and applications, see
March 2nd, 2009If you are a student traveling to the International Congress on Medieval Studies and would like to ride along with a fun group of us in the CMS-sponsored van, please RSVP to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com).
The cost for the van will be 50$ per student. This fee is waived if you would like to volunteer to help drive; we’ll take the first three volunteers. Please RSVP and arrange a time to drop off your fee by 1 April 2009.
March 2nd, 2009Wednesday 15 April, 2009 at 4:00pm in the Weber, David Wallace will deliver a talk entitled "Women Living with Women: Nuns in English History and Literary Imagining, 934-1674."
Nuns were few in medieval England but exerted powerful, long-lived effects on literary imagining. Even when they were gone, or moved abroad, their social functions were still lived out by generations of English women. Enclosure proved a defining issue: how did religious women negotiate the clerical principle of /aut virum aut murum/, implying that they should either marry or be permanently immured? And how were their struggles for self-directed, educated living perpetuated in the lives of those women who first sought university education?
This talk begins and ends with poet Andrew Marvell, contemplating the ruins of a former Yorkshire nunnery during the English civil war. It considers the activity of women, up to Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, in the southwest of England: the heartland both of Arthurian romance and of English female communities. Syon Abbey, the most significant religious foundation in England between the Norman Conquest and the Reformation,was an élite community of female readers and worshippers; the nuns of Syon returned to England in 1557 and then returned again in the nineteenth century. The possibilities of women living with women, in circumstances at once liberatory and confined, continue to haunt the imagination-- and to leave traces on the English landscape-- down to our present moment.
On Friday, 17 April, there will also be a "Rap Canterbury Tales" performance by Baba Brinkman, at 3pm in the Weber. January 21st, 2009Last year, Professor Anatoly Lieberman from the department of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch created a website for the study of Old Norse with the help of graduate student Paul Peterson and gracious support from the UMN Language Center. That site is now available to those who are enrolled in the Old Norse course through the WebCT system.
This year he received another grant from the Center ($2,500) for the production a Middle High German website, which will be ready by mid-May. Congratulations to Professor Lieberman, and what great news for his students.
CMS will sponsor a conference on Religion and Law in the Global Middle Ages on October 23-24, 2009. More information will follow.
December 19th, 2008Location: Walter F Mondale Hall (formerly Law Bldg), 45 Medieval Studies Colloquium joins the LAW 6702 Seminar: Legal History Workshop. Speaker will be Daniel Smail, Harvard, on the topic "Goods and Debts in Late Medieval Mediterranean Europe". See the abstract (DOC).
November 2nd, 2007