2008

2008 Visiting Professor: Henrietta Leyser

Annual Medieval Studies Secondary Schools Outreach Seminar

Coming Soon: A Mute Gospel: The People and Culture of the Medieval English Common Fields

2007

Ph.D. Student Awarded Heckman Stipend

Recently Published Works from Medieval Studies Professor Fred Biggs

Jeremy DeAngelo Awarded First Place in 2007 AETNA Critical Essay Contest

Current Review in Mystics Quarterly by Ph.D. Student Andy Pfrenger

Recently Published Article By Britt Rothauser

Medieval Studies Students Named Humanities Institute Dissertation Fellows

Erin Heidkamp Awarded German Historical Institute Medieval History Seminar Scholarship

John Sexton Accepts Position at Bridgewater State College

2007 Visiting Professor: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne

2006

Thank You to Maddie Hoofnagle, Author of the Annual Holiday Party Play!

Congratulations to the New Members of the Medieval Studies Steering Committee

Forthcoming Article By Frank Napolitano

Medieval Studies Ph.D. Student Recognized by Classical Association of Connecticut

John Sexton Awarded First Place in 2006 AETNA Critical Essay Contest

Sarah Girard to Sing in Collegium Musicum

Coming Soon: Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200-1550

Josh Eyler Accepts Assistant Professor Position at Columbus State University

Mark Pearsall to Attend the American School of Classical Studies at Athens

Fellowship Awarded to Medieval Studies Ph.D. Student

2006 Visiting Professor: Robert Mills

2005

The Medieval Studies Program is pleased to announce that the 2008 Charles A. Owen, Jr. Visiting Professor of Medieval Studies will be Mrs. Henrietta Leyser. Recommended by our previous Visiting Professor, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Mrs. Leyser has held many posts at Oxford Colleges; she is currently at St. Peter's College, Oxford. Her publications include Medieval Women: A Social History of Women in England , 450-1500 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995; 6th impression, 2004) and Hermits and the New Monasticism (Macmillan, 1984). She is also co-editor of Christina of Markyate: a Twelfth-Century Holy Woman (Routledge, 2005) as well as the revised edition of The Life of Christina of Markyate ( Oxford : World’s Classics, 2008). Her current project is entitled The Doors of Heaven: English Piety 1000-1300. Mrs. Leyser's course in the Fall will be concerned with "English Piety and Place c.1100-1250" and encompass the study of theology and hagiography, among other topics.

Course Title: Piety and Place in England 1000-1300
Course Description: ‘The island of Britain lies virtually at the end of the world’ (Gildas.)
The fascination of the people of England with their own geography, their sense of their importance as an island ‘at the end of the world’ has over the centuries, had remarkable tenacity. Appearing early in Gildas, a writer of the sixth century, it arguably reached its most poetic form in the sixteenth in Shakespeare’s Richard II with the description of England as ‘a precious stone set in a silver sea.’ In the intervening centuries England had remained a rich prize, coveted and invaded by successive generations from across the North sea and the English Channel: first Saxons; then Vikings and most famously in 1066 , Normans. (Richard II it is worth noting was written shortly after the unsuccessful attempt at invasion by the Spanish Armada of 1588.) In this course we will be concentrating on the particular challenges facing the invaders of 1066 – their need to appropriate the traditions of places conquered initially for the sake of exploitation but which nonetheless demanded to be understood and even cherished and developed.

We will focus mainly on the cathedrals and abbeys of England, sites rich in pre-conquest traditions, in order to trace how the Normans claimed and -quite literally - re-built the past. Places to be considered will include Westminster – the mausoleum of Edward the Confessor the last Saxon king of England (bar Harold); Glastonbury, allegedly the burial place of King Arthur of Round Table fame; Canterbury, a cathedral that came to be forever associated with the murder of its archbishop Thomas Becket; Durham, home to one of the few Anglo-Saxon saints (Cuthbert) whom neither William the Conqueror nor even Henry VIII during the English Reformation dared disturb. Finally we will take a brief look at the geography of the afterlife and its extraordinary localisation in this period in Britain’s furthermost point: Donegal where Lough Derg even today continues to attract pilgrims in search of eternity.

Ph.D. student Kisha Tracy was recently awarded a Heckman Stipend from the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML), located on the campus of Saint John's Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minnesota. The grant is intended to cover expenses related to conducting research at HMML, which houses the largest collection of manuscript images in the world.

Medieval Studies professor Fred Biggs has recently been involved in several projects, several of which have resulted in the following publications:

Books

Source of Wisdom: Old English and Early Medieval Latin Studies in Honour of Thomas D. Hill. Edited Charles D. Wright, Frederick M. Biggs, and Thomas N. Hall. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2007.

The Apocrypha. Instrumenta Anglistica Mediaevalia 1. Edited Frederick M. Biggs. With contributions from Biggs, Mary Clayton, Thomas N. Hall, A. diPaolo Healey, Clare A. Lees, James H. Morey, Michael W. Twomey, and Charles D. Wright. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University. 2007. Pp. xx + 117.

Congratulations to Medieval Studies M.A. student Jeremy DeAngelo for winning the 2007 AETNA Graduate Critical Essay Contest Award for his essay entitled "The Matter with the North: the Finnar in the Medieval Sagas." His essay seeks to explain the singular treatment of the Lapps and Finns in the Norse Sagas; it ultimately concludes that, among other things, the Lapps and Finns' position north of the saga writers' home base led to them being depicted in negative ways.

A review of Paul and His Theology (edited by Stanley E. Porter) by Ph.D. student Andy Pfrenger recently appeared in the current issue of Mystics Quarterly [33.1-2 (2007): 67-71].

Britt Rothauser, a Ph.D. student in the Medieval Studies Program and the Charles A. Owen, Jr. Memorial Library Librarian, has recently had an article included in a collection of essays entitled Old Age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Neglected Topic [ed. Albrecht Classen, Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture 2 (New York: DeGruyter, 2007)]. Britt's article is titled "Winter in Heorot: Looking at Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of Age and Kingship through the Character of Hrothgar"  (103-120).

From DeGruyter: "After an extensive introduction that takes stock of the relevant research literature on Old Age in the Middle Ages and the early modern age, the contributors discuss the phenomenon of old age in many different fields of late antique, medieval, and early modern literature, history, and art history."

Only two Humanities Institute Dissertation Fellows are named each year; for 2007-2008, we are honored to announce that both, Andy Pfrenger and Kate O'Sullivan, are students in Medieval Studies. Dissertation Fellows receive a full graduate assistantship in order to concentrate on completion of their dissertations in addition to research and travel funding.

Erin Heidkamp has been awarded the German Historical Institute’s scholarship to participate in the fifth Medieval History Seminar to be held in Washington, D.C., from October 11-14, 2007.  The seminar is designed to bring together American, British, and German Ph.D. candidates and recent Ph.D. recipients in German medieval history for a seminar of scholarly discussion and collaboration.  Recipients will present their research to their peers as well as distinguished scholars in the field (including, but not limited to, conveners Patrick Geary, Barbara Rosenwein, and Miri Rubin).  Erin ’s paper, which will present the preliminary research she has done for her dissertation, is entitled “Cistercian ‘Localism’: a Regional History of Altenberg Abbey, c. 1400-1550.”

The Medieval Studies Program would like to congratulate John Sexton on accepting a tenure-track position  at Bridgewater State College in Bridgewater, Massachusetts.  John defended his dissertation, entitled "In the Saint's Embrace: The Sanctuary Privilege in Medieval Religious Writing," at the end of last semester and will be receiving his degree in May.

2007 Visiting Professor: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne

The Medieval Studies Program has invited Professor Jocelyn Wogan-Browne of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York, to be our Fall 2007 Charles Owen, Jr. Distinguished Visiting Professor.  She will be teaching "The French of England: Documentary and Literary Cultures."  Professor Wogan-Browne has interests in medieval women, medieval virginities, and saints' lives; some of her works include Saints' Lives and the Literary Culture of Women, c. 1150-c. 1300: Virginity and its Authorizations; Voicing Medieval Women; Medieval English Prose for Women; A Computer Concordance to Ancrene Wisse and A Computer Concordance to the Katherine Group and the Wooing Group (research tools). She is editor/co-editor of a number of collections including Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain; New Trends in Feminine Spirituality: the Holy Women of Liège and Their Impact, and Household, Family and Christianities in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (forthcoming).  She has also published many articles and book chapters.

Course Description: 415-01 SEMINAR IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE: The French of England

For four centuries French was a major language of literature in medieval Britain, as well as an important language of record in law, government, administration, and various professions and trades. A significant literary corpus (nearly a thousand texts) remains understudied because nationalising literary histories have often allowed it to fall between continental French and English scholarship.  Beyond the few well-known works famously kidnapped for French national literary history (the Chanson de Roland, the lais of Marie de France), there is a wealth of post-Conquest historiography, epic, romance, saints’ lives, lyric, devotional and other works in the French of England, from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries.  Taking this literature into account involves re-mapping the literary history of medieval England in several ways.  Not only do francophone texts and documents themselves demand--and amply repay--study, but their presence creates new shapes and chronologies in our mental maps of medieval literary history.  Much further work is needed on interrelations between Middle English and French, interrelations which are often visible on individual manuscript pages, in whole manuscript books, and in the various texts and documents associated with particular communities and families, but which are given little attention in the nationalizing literary histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  When francophone works are taken into account, for instance, a complex post-colonial literature emerges as the Normans re-write their past--in French--as English; several centuries of composition by women can be added to a tradition sometimes still supposed as beginning with Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe; and a more complicated account emerges of the interrelations between the record keeping, literacies, and languages and class groups of multilingual medieval England.  This course is necessarily a selective one.  It aims to give students (especially students of medieval English literature and History as well as students of medieval continental French language and literature) the opportunity of reading some major texts as texts of the French of England and to combine this with selected explorations of less frequently studied documentary and literary works.   Since linguistic experience in the French of England is likely to be very varied among graduates, the course will be based on reading in translation combined with attention to short excerpts in the original language (so allowing awareness of rhetorical and stylistic features which may not be fully apparent in translation).  Original passages from each seminar’s materials will be set at different levels from beginners to advanced. Students with no previous experience of French who nevertheless want to know about the French of England are encouraged to take the course, and may, if appropriate, substitute extra time spent on translated French of England texts for work in the original language.

This year, the Annual Medieval Studies Holiday Party play was written by Maddie Hoofnagle (11-year-old daughter of Ph.D. student Wendy Hoofnagle) and was entitled "Morgan le Fay and the Christmas Fairies."  For those of you who did not get a chance to see the play (and for those of you who want to relive it!), Maddie's script can be found here.  Take a look; our author did a wonderful job!  Thanks, Maddie!

Congratulations to the New Members of the Medieval Studies Steering Committee

Frank Napolitano, a friend of the Medieval Studies Program and a Ph.D. student in the English Department, has recently had an article accepted for publication in Studies in Philology.  The article, entitled "Discursive Competition in the Towneley Crucifixion," is tentatively scheduled to appear in the spring 2009 issue (SP 106.2).

Medieval Studies Ph.D. Student Recognized by Classical Association of Connecticut

Cover illustration: Copenhagen, Kongelige Bibliotek MS GKS 227 2

Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200-1550, co-edited by UConn Art History and Medieval Studies professor Jean Givens, will appear later this year. Professor Givens's co-editors are Karen M. Reeds and Alain Touwaide, and the book is being published by Ashgate Publications (Aldershot: UK). This cross-disciplinary volume addresses fundamental questions about the interplay of art and science from the thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth century to expand the definition of the "scientific" image in both its historical and modernist contexts.  The studies of medieval texts and illustration offered here--in works as diverse as herbals, jewelry, surgery manuals, lay health guides, cinquecento paintings, manuscripts of Pliny's Natural History, and the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci--address the complex relationships between words and images, the intentions of the makers, and the ways such texts and pictures were actually used. The volume's chronological and geographical range undermines traditional divisions of time (medieval, Renaissance, early modern) and place to emphasize   the connections between medieval medical images and early modern science as well as the interconnections among Mediterranean cultures. As a scholarly effort, this project capitalizes upon current, lively interest in the role of scientific visualization and the rationale for the production of scientific images, and it draws upon the methods of both art history and the history of science.  It is directed toward a broad readership that includes historians of art and science as well as other scholars whose work engages issues of perception, representation, and textual analysis.  Professor Givens, in addition to co-editing the volume, also has an article included in it.

The Medieval Studies Program would like to congratulate Josh Eyler on accepting a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of English at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia.  Josh will be defending his dissertation, entitled "Conditioning the Soul: Spiritual Athleticism in Medieval English Theology and Literature," at the end of April and will be receiving his degree in May.

Medieval Studies Ph.D. student Mark Pearsall has been accepted to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens for the 2006 Summer Session.  This is a six-week program, running from June 12th through July 26th, under the direction of Professor Daniel Levine from the University of Arkansas, and is an "intensive introduction to Greece from antiquity through the modern period."  Also, Mark has been awarded funding from the Rea Silvia Borza Scholarship and the Phinney Fellowship in order to attend the American School.

Medieval Studies Ph.D. student and Program Assistant Erin Heidkamp has been awarded the "Deutsche Akademische Austausch Dienst (DAAD) Graduate Research Grant." As a result of receiving this honor, Erin will be doing archival and on-site research in Germany for two months this summer.

Course Description: 415-01 SEMINAR IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE: The Body of the Medieval Friend

This intensive graduate seminar will focus on medieval representations of friendship, with a particular emphasis on England after the eleventh century. Taking stock of the recent surge of scholarship in this field, notably Alan Bray’s The Friend (2003), students will encounter a range of literatures representing friendship and fellowship in medieval culture.  Our investigations will encompass courtly and religious writings in Middle English, French, and Latin (some texts will be read with the aid of translations); there may also be opportunities to explore the rhetoric of friendship and same-sex intimacy in medieval visual culture, e.g. the inscribed marble tomb-slab marking the shared grave of Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, two knights in the coterie of Richard II.  Themes will include: homosocial relations, sworn brotherhood, and artificial kinship; the gestures and rituals of same-sex intimacy; spiritual friendship in monastic and anchoritic settings; gender and fellowship between women; homoeroticism and sodomy polemic. Above all, we will consider the extent to which the idealized language of fidelity and love through which friendship was constructed in medieval culture was not simply empty convention but a locus of bodily affect. It is the body of the friend, rather than friendship as an abstract rhetorical entity, that provides the point of departure for this seminar.

On October 7th, George Greenia spoke to the Spanish and Medieval Studies Programs and presented some very useful publishing advice from the viewpoints of both the editor and the author. If you are interested in reading Professor Greenia's handout "Getting Published in Scholarly Journals" with information on "Scoping Out the Territory," "Do's and Don'ts," and "Becoming a Player in the Game," click here.

George D. Greenia is Professor of Modern Languages at the College of William & Mary, Editor of La corónica: A Journal of Medieval Spanish Language and Literature, Editor of American Pilgrim, and Former Director of the Program in Medieval & Renaissance Studies at the College of William & Mary.

Hot Off the Presses!

The Medieval Studies Program celebrates the recent publication of Reading Old English: A Primer and First Reader (West Virginia University Press, 2005), written by our own Bob Hasenfratz and Tom Jambeck.

"This book focuses on giving you the skills necessary to read Old English quickly and accurately, and while it assumes a minimum of prior linguistic knowledge, it aims to provide a full explanation of a number of grammatical and syntactical nuances that will allow you to read both literary and historical documents with precision. We have written Reading Old English with advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and auto-didacts in mind, and have provided a number of graded exercises and readings to guide you through the learning process." (Preface to Reading Old English)

Congratulations to Professors Hasenfratz and Jambeck!!

Website for Reading Old English

Publication Celebration

• Medieval Studies Ph.D. students Josh Eyler and John Sexton have a forthcoming article in The Chaucer Review entitled “Once More to the Grove: A Note on Symbolic Space in the Knight’s Tale.”

• Medieval Studies Ph.D. student Kate O'Sullivan has a forthcoming article in Mediaevalia entitled "John Lydgate's Lyf of Our Lady: Translation and Authority in Fifteenth-Century England."

• Medieval Studies Ph.D. student Kisha Tracy has a forthcoming article in Tristania entitled "Character Memory and Reinvention of the Past in Béroul’s Roman de Tristan."

2005 Visiting Professor

The UConn Medieval Studies Program is proud to welcome Diane Watt (University of Wales, Aberyswyth) as the 2005 Distinguished Visiting Professor. Professor Watt has been involved in a wide variety of recent scholarship (see her website for more details: http://www.aber.ac.uk/english/staffinfo/pdw.html), and we are honored to have her as this year's Visiting Professor. She will be teaching a course on "Women and Writing in the Middle Ages."

Course Description: 415-01 SEMINAR IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE: WOMEN AND WRITING IN THE MIDDLE AGES: In this course we will examine closely writing by and for women produced in England between 1100-1500, written in Latin, French and Middle English. We will concentrate on selected texts and writers, such as The Life of Christina of Markyate, the St. Albans Psalter, the works of Marie de France, The Book of Margery Kempe, and the letters of the Paston women. We will explore constructions of authorship in relation to women 'writers' (addressing issues of literacy and collaboration) and the nature of the readership/audience (discussing communities of readers, literary networks, and the emergency of lay readers in the context of increasing vernacularity). We will also examine questions about women's literary history in the pre-modern period, the functionality of the texts, and the complex ways in which authors and readers/audience work together to produce meaning.

Bob Hasenfratz has taken over the editorship of Mystics Quarterly.  The Fall/Winter 2005/6 edition will be his first edition as the new editor. Mystics Quarterly was founded as the 14th Century English Mystics Newsletter by Valerie Lagorio and Ritamary Bradley in 1974 and was formerly edited by Alexandra Barratt at the University of Waikato (New Zealand).