from Medieval Academy News (Winter 2003)

Ten Years of Medieval Studies at Central European University, Budapest
by J. M. Bak

The presence of a Department for Medieval Studies in the Central European University (CEU), an English-language graduate school founded in 1990 by the Hungarian-American philanthropist, George Soros, to educate professionals for transforming Eastern and Central Europe into an “open society” in Karl Popper’s sense, may seem anomalous. Certainly no one would claim that medieval Europe was an open society. However, Gábor Klaniczay argued for the establishment of such a department some twelve years ago when he had the ear of the university’s founder. He held that in order better to understand the deep-rooted and often murderous rifts between the peoples of the region, one must study the pre-modern centuries, when these differences gradually evolved.

Moreover, Klaniczay argued, medieval memories (and myths), as well as standing and ruined monuments of that age, play a central role in their present national consciousness throughout the region. Finally, he pointed to the unique regional “human resources” in this discipline: those academics who managed to survive (some of them openly opposing) the dictatorships, “hiding” in their libraries, museums, and archives. Medieval studies would be a way to involve them in the mental reconstruction of post-Communist societies. Klaniczay proposed to rediscover—or even invent—the Central European Middle Ages (“Medieval Origins of Central Europe,” in Paradoxes of Unintentional Consequences, ed. L. Dahrendorf).

These arguments were apparently convincing enough that we got a chance to experiment with an interdisciplinary program in medieval studies. It was one of those rare occasions when a group of academics has a chance to design a program without a priori parameters, freely building on their experiences inside and outside of higher education in Central Europe and abroad, attempting to make their various dreams come true. And many of them did. In due course, after an inspection by medievalist colleagues (Peggy Brown and others), a Master of Arts program was accredited by the “University of the State of New York” (CEU is chartered in that state). After a few years and another visit (this time by Giles Constable and Paul Szarmach), we were the first in the university to be granted the right to confer doctoral degrees.

In the past ten years, over 250 students have earned M.A.s, and twenty have already earned Ph.D.s in medieval studies at CEU. They came from thirty countries, mostly from the target region of the university, with a few from Western Europe and North America. Approximately sixty percent of our graduates are in academic or professional positions; many others, of course, are still completing postgraduate studies elsewhere.

We are enormously proud of these young colleagues. For the M.A. they have nine months to adjust to an entirely different style of university, acquire up-to-date research methods frequently unknown in their home countries, widen their (usually very good) specialist training into interdisciplinary expertise—and write a scholarly thesis, adjudicated by external readers and defended in public debate in a foreign language which they usually never had a chance to practice “in real life.” (To say nothing of the trials of living in a city where an obscure “Uralic–Turkic” language is spoken in shops and pubs, totally different from the mother tongue of all but the locals!)

Many (if not all) M.A. theses are major “cutting edge” contributions to scholarship, and the doctoral dissertations can all claim to be so. Having disentangled a complicated manuscript transmission, the first doctor of the department, Stanko Andric, wrote a pioneering study of the miracles of St. John Capistran; others made exemplary inquiries into loan-words in famous Glagolitic missals, Slavic slaves in the Muslim world, early medieval Bulgarian monasticism, Central European eremitism, Neo-Platonism in medieval Georgia, courtly dress in a Hungarian manuscript, aristocratic sponsorship of a Transylvanian church, performance of liturgical drama in Cracow, magic manuscripts in the region’s libraries, forest and woodland in medieval Hungary, the development of the image of the Lithuanian prince Vytautas (Witold), and so on.

These arbitrarily selected topics show that we have succeeded in addressing many aspects of the field over a fairly wide geographical range. While we did intend to cover more than the usual medievalist curriculum, much of our “breadth” was the result of challenges from our incoming students. In the short time of our one-year M.A. program, students have to start out with a fair idea and some well-prepared documentation: they came up with research projects on Armenian texts of Greek church fathers, on the rich legal documentation of the Lithuanian Metrika, and an inquiry into the possible Gnostic traditions surviving among the Kurdish community of the Yazidi—matters of which we previously knew close to nothing.

We learned a lot—and had to do so—to be able to help them accomplish what they intended to do while imparting new methods and guiding them to resources that were unimaginable to them at home. (The rich resources of the region were also much appreciated by our American friends who came to the CARA–CEU Summer Institute in 2000 [see Medieval Academy News, Nov. 2000, pp. 1, 12]).

What has been the secret of our success? Two words occur to me: novelty and friendship. For many years (maybe still), to come to such an excitingly new program was a thrill for both students and visiting professors. (The resident faculty has always been quite small; it is the occasional and “recurrent” visitors from “East” and “West” who offer widely varied subjects in seminars and supervision.) We have managed to remain the same small group of friends as when we started—and can call upon scores of friends in the profession from all around the world. Close to a hundred medievalists have spent some time teaching at CEU and many more have served as external consultants and readers. A good part of our progress is due to them and we are very grateful for it.

Additionally, we have been able to adjust to changing conditions. To mention just a few: in the first years, the applicants who had managed to pass the English test were still far from fluent in the language of instruction; therefore, we held pre-semester immersion courses in “academic English.” In the course of “modernization,” the traditionally good training in Latin, Greek, or Old Slavonic has declined (but is still better than in many other parts of the world, teste the almost perfect record of our students at the Toronto Medieval Latin exam). We now offer Latin “make-up” immersion every September.

With the development of Internet resources for medieval reference, we now spend less time than earlier in the introductory courses on bibliography and handbooks and much more on such new fields as medieval archaeology, historical anthropology, and environmental history.

No doubt, finances, more generous than anywhere else in the region, have made a big difference. Until recently, all students from the former Soviet bloc received full tuition waivers and scholarships, and we had no problems financing regular scholarly field trips to important sites in Hungary and the neighboring countries. Now, since CEU received its endowment—and is thus exposed to the ups and downs of the stock market and the dollar-exchange—we have to economize, too. Considering the woes of humanities departments everywhere, we should not complain, but that we have no budget to hire a full-time Slavist and an art historian, for example, limits our possibilities painfully.

That’s our story. What do others think? Peggy Brown noted that from the beginning “there was plentiful dedication and determination,” and Marianna Brinbaum explains CEU’s success as “a labor of Love.” Nancy van Deusen thinks, “the program stands at the forefront of interdisciplinary Medieval Studies, is attracting qualified graduate students to an expanding curriculum, and is developing . . . an exciting center of intellectual life.” Patrick Geary credits much of what we achieved to the fact that the “faculty is there”—and “the faculty is there for the students . . . [not] for the money or the prestige . . . because of this extraordinary group of students, and the enthusiasm of the one group fed the enthusiasm of the other.”

Doctoral candidate and junior faculty member in Pula, Croatia, Ivan Jurkovic, compared CEU with the European-wide influence of medieval universities and noted that “thanks to Medieval Studies . . . there is now a modern network of young scholars from the Baltic to the Adriatic.” And Richard Unger wrote to us that the program “has generated something . . . unique, highly successful, and already fond memories.” All we can hope is that both our friends and we shall be able to keep up the spirit and the enthusiasm of the first ten years for the next ten—and more.

Editor’s note. Quotations are from “messages and memories” sent to the department for the decennium and printed in Ten Years of Medieval Studies at CEU 1993–2003, ed. J. M. Bak and K. Szende (Budapest: CEU, 2003). This booklet also contains a complete list of defended theses and dissertations, as well as work in progress. Abstracts of theses and dissertations are also published in the department’s Annual of Medieval Studies, together with articles by graduates, faculty, and guests (http://www.ceu.hu/medstud/medstrdir.html).