from Medieval Academy News (Fall 2003)

The Center for Medieval Studies at Fordham University
by Maryanne Kowaleski

Two features have shaped the identity and development of the Center for Medieval Studies at Fordham University. The first is its institutional origins in the Catholic and especially Jesuit traditions, which have fostered a serious commitment to liberal arts education and appreciation for the religious and philosophical values developed during the Middle Ages. The liberal arts focus is reflected in the relatively large size of its medieval faculty. Although Fordham is a medium-size university (with about 15,000 students), Medieval Studies includes twenty-eight full-time faculty in addition to active emeriti and adjunct professors.

The second feature is its location in the cosmopolitan culture of New York City, with Fordham’s main campus in the Bronx and another at Lincoln Center. Medieval Studies courses often schedule class visits to the Cloisters or the medieval collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where one student based her prize-winning M.A. thesis on a liturgical crib from fifteenth-century Louvain. Fordham professors have taught a course on The Book of Hours to coincide with an exhibition at the Pierpont Morgan Library, and this year’s First Year Essay Prize was won by a student inspired by the medieval manuscripts he saw during a class visit to the Jewish Theological Seminary. Other Center students have written theses on manuscripts at the Hispanic Society, the New York Public Library, the Morgan Library, and the Beinecke Library.

Indeed, medievalists in New York City enjoy an embarrassment of riches. Besides Fordham’s own offerings—a lecture series and annual spring conference—New York medievalists can attend the monthly lectures sponsored by the Medieval Club of New York, the Medieval Studies Seminar at Columbia University, and the Medieval and Renaissance Center at New York University, as well as lectures hosted at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).

Less formal groups such as the Friends of the Saints (who gather to discuss hagiographic texts) and the Liturgy Group also offer opportunities for intellectual exchange and collegiality. Medieval conferences include Barnard College’s annual fall conference in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the biennial Medieval Studies conference at CUNY. There is also easy access to medieval talks and conferences at Princeton, Rutgers, Yale, and the State University of New York campuses.

The most distinctive feature of the medievalist scene is the New York City Medieval Studies Doctoral Consortium. Founded in 1978 as one of seven disciplinary committees set up to discuss collaboration between the city’s universities (when reduced enrollments and declining revenues were making an impact), the Consortium’s original members were Columbia, CUNY, Fordham, and New York University. It allows graduate students at member schools to cross-register for courses offered at other Consortium schools and to use each others’ libraries, thereby expanding course options and research opportunities.

One new feature of the Consortium has proved particularly successful. Four years ago a group of Consortium faculty arranged a Doctoral Colloquium to showcase the research of our graduate students and provide a venue for students to exchange experiences and views. Fordham hosted the first Colloquium in 2001, CUNY Graduate Center the second in 2002, New York University in 2003, and Columbia will play host in 2004, when three new Consortium members—Princeton, Rutgers, and SUNY, Stony Brook—will be invited to participate.

In recent years, graduate students have made particularly good use of the Consortium’s access to cross-registration. Students from all four schools, for instance, enrolled in a graduate course on The French of England, taught by Thelma Fenster and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne at Fordham in 2002.

Team-taught courses are one of the defining characteristics of the Medieval Studies curriculum at Fordham. In bringing together students and faculty from different disciplinary backgrounds, these courses have reached beyond the classroom. A course on Medieval Ways of Knowing led to a conference and then a volume of essays on the theme of Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe. Students in The French of England course presented their research in a special panel on the prologues of Anglo-Norman works at the 2003 Doctoral Colloquium, and selected translations of these prologues will appear on our website (http://www.fordham.edu/frenchofengland/), which will include a variety of resources for what has conventionally been called “Anglo-Norman French.”

The significant but under-researched French literature of medieval England has often fallen between modern disciplinary and national boundaries, with English scholars relegating its study to French scholars, who in turn prefer to see it as belonging to England. Besides the nearly one thousand extant literary texts, there are even more pragmatic texts, including chronicles, mercantile records, and a particularly extensive body of legal proceedings, since court pleadings in medieval England were conducted in French. Bibliographic guides for many of these texts will also appear on the website. Fordham is taking advantage of its faculty expertise in this field to establish a research project under the auspices of the Center for Medieval Studies that will heighten attention to Anglo-Norman literature. The results of the collaborative faculty research will appear in a volume on medieval French vernacular theory in England, and in a series of edited translations. A conference across the range of literary and pragmatic Anglo-Norman French is also planned.

Although our team-taught course offerings at the graduate level remain strong, a curriculum revision at the undergraduate level several years ago reduced the Center’s ability to offer such courses to undergraduates. We have adjusted to the realities of this new curriculum by developing courses that fit the new requirements. A course on The Medieval Traveller meets the Global Studies requirement, for example, and sophomore-level courses such as Gods, Heroes, and Monsters meet a literature requirement.

Particularly successful has been our ability to develop courses to fit the Senior Values requirement (which must meet rigorous guidelines regarding contemporary ethical issues). Courses for this requirement include Vikings and Values and The Liberal Arts and Life, with another course on the development of Just War theory in the planning stage. We are also developing undergraduate study-abroad courses for the January intersession and summer sessions in light of Fordham’s renewed emphasis on study-abroad programs. One such course, In the Footsteps of Boccaccio, Dante, and Petrarch, was team-taught by specialists in Italian literature and medieval philosophy, who guided students through Florence, Assisi, and Rome.

Besides offering a B.A. in Medieval Studies, the Center offers an M.A. and a Doctoral Certificate for Ph.D. students enrolled in a participating department. About twenty students are enrolled for the M.A. at any one time, with an additional four students working towards the Doctoral Certificate. The Center coordinates activities for another fifty graduate students in participating departments by providing course descriptions for all medieval courses each semester, publishing an annual graduate-student directory, sponsoring regular lectures and social gatherings, facilitating Latin and Old Norse reading groups, and running two graduate essay prize competitions.

Many of these activities occur at the Center, which comprises three offices, a seminar room, and a small library, with a staff that includes a director, an associate director, a part-time administrative assistant, and several graduate assistants. Fordham’s deans recently funded the position of Associate Director in recognition of the growth of the program not only in terms of students, but also in terms of outreach efforts. The latter include a Medieval Fellows program, which allows post-doctoral researchers to enjoy affiliation with the Center while in the New York City area, a thriving lecture series, a newsletter (Medievalia Fordhamensia), and regular conferences.

Extra funding from the Graduate Dean, the Jesuit community, and the Vice President of Academic Affairs has also allowed us to mount several large conferences. Since 1996, most of the conference talks have been published, some in the Center’s own publication series, but others by Cornell University Press and St. Martin’s Press. The journal Traditio (edited by Joseph Lienhard, S.J.) is also published by Fordham University.

But by far the Center’s most successful outreach effort is the Internet Medieval History Sourcebook (IMHS) created by Paul Halsall (now an associate professor at the University of North Florida) when he was a graduate student in medieval history at Fordham. Designed for pedagogical use by teachers and students, the IMHS includes thousands of English translations of primary sources now used in hundreds of college courses on four continents. The power of the Web is evident in the usage statistics compiled for a sample period in 2002. The Medieval Sourcebook, along with the Ancient and Modern History Sourcebooks (and the nine other thematic sourcebooks based on the three main chronologically-arranged sourcebooks) receive over 25 million hits a year and account 95% of all hits on Fordham’s Website. These impressive figures have both raised the profile of the Medieval Studies program at Fordham and put the Center at the forefront of new ways to reach medievalists all over the world, beyond the metropolitan area and the institutional setting that have shaped medieval studies at Fordham.