from Medieval Academy News (Fall 2004)

The Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Bristol
by Ad Putter

In a blessed borugh that Bristow is named …

Sodeynli ther sourded selcouthe thingis.

(Richard the Redeles, 2–4)

When I was appointed nine years ago to the English Department of the University of Bristol, the Centre for Medieval Studies was already in existence, and it then seemed to me to have been there forever. In actual fact, the center is a very recent development: it was set up as a joint venture by medievalists across the Faculty of Arts, under the dynamic leadership of the center’s founding directors, Carol Meale, Anne Simon, Denys Turner, and Ian Wei. So, by a happy coincidence, I write this on the tenth anniversary of the center, wishing it many happy returns.

The reason for thinking, as I first supposed, that the center must be older than it really is lies in the long and distinguished history of medieval studies at the University of Bristol. The Faculty of Arts had well-known medievalists before the center existed: John Burrow (still very active as teacher and researcher), Jimmy Cross (later professor at Liverpool), Charles Ross, James Sherborne, and Glynne Wickham, to name but a few.

And in many ways, the past lives on. My first office in the English Department had once belonged to Basil Cottle; I first encountered the epigraphic lines from Richard the Redeles on Basil Cottle’s hand-written notice, which had been left outside the office in his memory. Amongst the papers he left was a draft of a book called All the Cathedrals of France, which our librarian Nicholas Lee eventually saw through to publication (London, 2002). The English Department still holds the Ian Bishop Memorial Collection, which contains all kinds of books on things medieval; it also hosts the annual Tucker-Cruse lecture on medieval or eighteenth-century literature, held in memory of Suzy Tucker (whose work includes the translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in English Historical Documents); and the Department now awards the J. A. Burrow bursary to help students on the M.A. in Medieval Studies.

But perhaps the most valuable thing bequeathed to the present was a spirit of cooperation between scholars working in adjacent disciplines. A particularly fruitful product of this interdisciplinary ethos was the 1980 symposium on medieval court culture, sponsored by the Colston Research Society and organized by James Sherborne and John Scattergood (also at Bristol before taking up a chair at Trinity College Dublin). The proceedings, edited by Scattergood and Sherborne, were published as English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages (London: Duckworth; New York, St. Martin’s, 1982). This symposium was an early sign of things to come: here was a subject that genuinely required collaboration across disciplines (literature, history, art history, codicology, and so on); the organizers brought a team of experts together and produced a book that retains its usefulness to this day.

The Colston Research Society has been good to us ever since. Last year, the Society sponsored a stimulating conference on the figure of Eleanor of Aquitaine. True to the interdisciplinary ethos of the center, historians and literary scholars exchanged views and shared insights; we can look forward to the conference book, The World of Eleanor of Aquitaine, edited by Marcus Bull and Catherine Léglu (forthcoming from Boydell and Brewer, 2005). A future Colston symposium, on the history of Atlantic travel and trade, is currently being organised by our archaeologists Mark Horton and Kate Robson-Brown.

The same spirit of cooperation that gave rise to the first medieval Colston symposium led in 1994 to the founding of the Centre for Medieval Studies. The immediate objective was to create a community of scholarship on behalf of all the medievalists who, before the center, were institutionally isolated in their respective departments. For although Bristol had (and fortunately still has) many medievalists in relevant disciplines (including art history, archaeology, French, English, German, hispanic studies, historical studies, Italian, law, music, theology, and religious studies), this strength of numbers was never fully realized until the Centre was started, with the launch of a busy program of visiting lectures, conferences, and various research projects.

The next objective was the introduction of a genuinely interdisciplinary Master of Arts in Medieval Studies, which would offer training in essential research skills, a varied menu of options, and a strong dissertation component. The M.A. in Medieval Studies first ran in 1994–1995, and it has been running very successfully ever since. A new M.A. in Medieval and Early Modern History was launched this year.

Many M.A. students stayed to do their doctoral work at Bristol, and this energetic graduate community then set about changing the face of medieval studies at Bristol for the good: in addition to the center’s own activities, the students run their own reading group (“reading” broadly construed, to include, for instance, excursions to medieval castles), and an annual Alumni Lecture. Last but not least, they run the annual Postgraduate Conference in Medieval Studies, which attracts participants from all over the world. The theme of next year’s conference is The Misfit in the Middle Ages (18–19 February 2005).

A rather more curious tradition which we inherited from the past are the research projects sponsored by the Read-Tuckwell Foundation. The Read-Tuckwell Foundation is one of those grant-awarding bodies whose terms and conditions thankfully prevent too many applications being made to it. According to the terms of the bequest, any beneficiaries must make a contribution to the scholarly study of human immortality. Medievalists have done very well out of (and I hope by) the Read-Tuckwell Foundation, perhaps because the writers we study were generally agreed that the soul was immortal and that the life-to-come was indeed amenable to academic investigation. In 1997 the Foundation sponsored an international conference on medieval attitudes to the future. The book of the conference, entitled Medieval Futures, edited by J. A. Burrow and Ian P. Wei (Boydell and Brewer, 2000), shows the fascinations of the topic. Our current research project, Envisaging Heaven in the Middle Ages, is also sponsored by the Read-Tuckwell Foundation. The project ended with an interdisciplinary conference, with keynote addresses from Bernard McGinn and Barbara Newman (16–19 July 2004).

Looking into the future, I think it is great news that medieval studies has recently been selected as an “exemplar area” by the World Wide University Network (WUN). WUN is an international association of universities (including, in the United States, Illinois, Wisconsin, Penn State, California at San Diego, and Washington) set up with the aim of fostering international research. A three-year Bristol project on multilingualism in the Middle Ages, sponsored by WUN, will begin in October 2004.

The future of medieval studies at Bristol looks pleasantly medieval, and I hope that that many medievalists from outside Bristol will become a part of it. Our website (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/Depts/Medieval) contains information about our activities, and we always welcome suggestions for visiting lecturers or visiting fellowships.