Tag Archives: Medieval Studies

Fordham Medievalist Grad Student, Rachel Podd, Lectures on Pandemics to Students at the Bronx High School of Science

As students all over the world and from pre-K to graduate school experience disruption to their educational lives, Fordham doctoral candidate Rachel Podd took some time to discuss the differing ways societies respond to pandemics with some students of the Bronx School of Science. One of the great teachers there, Mr. Matthew Clark, reached out to Fordham’s Center for Medieval Studies looking for a lecturer, and connected with Rachel. She crafted a twenty-minute recorded lecture, including slides, for the students to explore, based on comparing societal responses to two pandemics, the Black Death of the fourteenth century and the current COVID-19 pandemic. Students read a selection from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron recounting the author’s experience of plague in Florence, as well as several current news articles on COVID in New York, focusing specifically on areas of commonality, including a rise in xenophobia and a breakdown in the rituals of death and dying. Students were also asked to consider how the experience of a pandemic is at least partially determined by social class and economic status.

On Wednesday the 6th, Rachel and about forty BSS students gathered on Google Meeting for a question and answer session lasting about an hour and a half. Discussion was wide-ranging and lively, as the students probed how ideas about disease causation – the miasma theory of the Middle Ages versus today’s germ theory – determined the ways governments sought to prevent or reduce the spread of disease, as well as how the medical establishment, past and present,  has responded to moments of intense stress. Finally, Rachel, Matthew and the students discussed how pandemics result in fundamentally changed societies. Though immeasurably painful and demographically catastrophic, the Black Death allowed for considerable social reform, increased female entry into the workforce, and rising social mobility, fundamentally changing the way medieval Europeans lived. How, exactly, COVID-19 will change our own lives remains, as of yet, unknown.

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Filed under Grad Student News, Teaching

Graduate Student Tobias Hrynick awarded a Shallek Grant from the Medieval Academy of America, co-funded with the Richard III Society, American Branch.

Tobias Hrynick has been awarded a Shallek Grant from the Medieval Academy of America, co-funded with the Richard III Society, American Branch.  The fellowship will fund travel to the Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Special Collections at the University of Nottingham in the UK to work on a project related to his Ph.D. thesis, on  “According to the Law of the Marsh”; Medieval Wetland Drainage, Environmental Crisis, and the Invention of the Customs of Romney Marsh.” He will be examining normative texts on marsh law, as well as the manorial records of marsh land-holders, to understand the ways medieval communities responded to environmental crisis.

You can follow Tobias Hrynick on Twitter @elmermalmesbury.

Tobias Hrynick

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Postcard from Spain… PhD candidate Rachel Podd reports on her research.

We’re happy to hear from Rachel Podd in this postcard she sent about her research in Spain this Summer. Rachel is a Ph.D candidate in the History department and helps lead undergraduates on el Camino de Santiago every spring. This summer she stayed after walking the camino to work on her own research. Rachel writes:

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Fordham PhDs and Educating Future Educators

Part of Fordham’s rigorous PhD program is its mandatory Teaching Tutorial. This class uses one-on-one training with a member of Fordham History’s professoriate to give PhD candidates valuable pedagogical training and classroom experience. The tutorial transitions PhDs from their first two years of coursework into their upcoming teaching assignments mandated by the PhD program’s funding package. We caught up with Michael Sanders, a PhD candidate who is finishing his second year at Fordham and recently completed his tutorial with Dr. Héctor Linda-Fuentes, to get his perspective on the experience.

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Filed under Courses, Grad Student News, Teaching

Postcard from Domfront

Graduate students Rebecca Bartels, Toby Hrynick, and Thomas Schellhammer and Professor Rosemary Wakeman spent 3 days in June in the French town of Domfront in Lower Normandy. The stay was organized by Mayor Bernard Soul of Domfront and Eric Fauconnier of the Pays du Bocage Region. Domfront is a picturesque medieval town that played an important role in the wars against the English and the French Wars of Religion. Domfront’s well-known chateau was used by Henry, the youngest son of William the Conqueror to rally the local lords. He eventually became Duke of Normandy and Henry I of England. Domfront’s “Medieval Fair,” held each August, is among the most well-known in France and attracts thousands. Continue reading

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Filed under Grad Student News, Historical Sites and Museums, outreach

The Professor and the Process: Dr. Richard Gyug and The Bishop’s Book of Kotor

Liturgy and Law in a Dalmatian City
The Bishop’s Book of Kotor (Sankt-Peterburg, BRAN, F. no. 200).
ISBN: 978-0-88844-204-8

The History Department was lucky enough to catch up with its very own Prof. Richard Gyug to discuss his newest book, Liturgy and Law in a Dalmatian City: The Bishop’s Book of Kotor (Sankt-Peterburg, BRAN, F. no. 200). Prof. Gyug has recently returned to campus after a semester’s leave. He has been research fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies (PIMS) where he continued work on his long-running funded project the Monumenta Liturgica Beneventana. Our interview with Prof. Gyug will hopefully give hope and insight to many scholars, especially those starting out like the Fordham MA students now beginning their spring projects, as we discussed the process: how does a project move from an idea to a finished product like a book?

History Department: First thing’s first I suppose, how did the project begin?

Dr. Richard Gyug: The present volume is a study and edition of a medieval manuscript. A much shorter version of the study and two of the four parts of the edition were my doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto (1984). The manuscript on which the edition is based is cited several times before 1800 when it was still in Kotor in Montenegro, where it was written and used in the middle ages. After that it disappeared until being noted again by Ljudmila Kisseleva of the Academy of Science in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad). Because the manuscript is written in Beneventan script, which was used in southern Italy and Dalmatia from 800 to 1300 or so, after Kisseleva’s note Virginia Brown listed the manuscript in her 1980 revised edition of E.A. Lowe’s The Benventan Script (original edition 1914). I was then at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, where Brown was, and her colleague, Roger Reynolds, introduced the manuscript to me in a seminar. I continued to work on it, and made it my dissertation.

Plate 4 from Gyug, Liturgy and Law. This is fol. 70v in the Pontifical of Kotor (St. Petersburg, RASL, F. 200) and is part of the dedication of a church with notated antiphons and an added communal document. The photograph is by Alexander Karnachov © Sankt-Peterburg, BRAN.

HD: After finally being introduced to the manuscript, how long was the process and its different stages?

RG: Very long! In preparing that dissertation, I noted which parts of the manuscript had music, but did not study them, an omission typical of liturgical editions then and now. At the defense, Andrew Hughes, a distinguished musicologist, noted this lack and stressed how important the music was for understanding the composition and use of the book. Of course, he was correct, so before continuing work on the present book, I edited a missal from Dubrovnik in which music was a major component. After that book came out, I worked on other similar manuscripts associated with a long-term grant-funded project, the Monumenta Liturgica Beneventana, of which I was a member with the late Virginia Brown and Roger Reynolds. I picked up the present manuscript again in the mid-1990s and have been working on it off and on since over several research leaves.

 

HD: This manuscript seems like a regular in your research. Where does the book and this research fit in to your broader research questions?

RG: It’s a liturgical manuscript in Beneventan script. Such manuscripts are the principal topic of the Monumenta Liturgica Beneventan project, so it’s been a key part of the team project.

 

HD: Did your research on this book lead you into any immediate upcoming projects? If so, would you care to share what those are?

RG: I have continued to work on Beneventan manuscripts from Italy and Dalmatia, and thanks to the comparisons needed for the edition, also on liturgical manuscripts in other scripts from the region. So, it has led to several projects:

(1) a partial edition and study of a Beneventan manuscript containing Breviary and Ritual, which is priest’s manual. This manuscript is extraordinary because it was written in the fourteenth century, late for Beneventan, for use in Albania, which was outside the Beneventan zone, and the manuscript contains a Franciscan liturgy, rare in Beneventan, which is usually Benedictine and monastic. This study was begun and almost completed by my late colleague Virginia Brown, and I am finishing it at her request.

(2) a study of the relationships between Benevetan manuscripts with similar contents (i.e., the services proper to a bishop) and several related non-Beneventan manuscripts from Norman-Sicily, Bari in southern Italy, and Dubrovnik and Trogir in Dalmatia.

(3) the cataloguing of liturgical and other fragments at Montecassino

 

Thanks to Professor Gyug for taking the time to talk with us, and congratulations on this handsome book!

 

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Filed under Faculty News, Faculty Profiles, Publications

Postcard: A Seminar in Stirling

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Louisa Foroughi confers with Professor Bruce Campbell

From July 8th to 11th Fordham Professor Maryanne Kowaleski and graduate student Louisa Foroughi attended the XIIth Annual Anglo-American Seminar on the Medieval Economy and Society, held this year in Stirling, Scotland. The Anglo-American Seminar is a long-standing gathering of some of the most distinguished economic and social historians in England and America. This year’s presentations drew attention to new directions in research, while its panel discussion featured lively debate about the relationship between government policy and England’s economy in the late middle ages. Professor Kowaleski closed the conference with a fascinating paper on the political participation and consciousness of mariners in late medieval England, part of her larger work on England’s seamen and coastal communities. A highlight of this year’s Seminar was a (rainy!) walking tour of the town of Stirling, all the way from the castle at the top of the hill to the fish stews at its base, led by Professor Richard Oram, who also opened the conference with an excellent talk on the environmental history of Scotland and its neglected relationship to political history. Louisa especially benefited from the opportunity to meet and talk over her thesis with experts in their field, such as Prof. Bruce Campbell, who was also honored with the presentation of a festschrift at the conference.

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For Passover and Easter: Teter Organizes Events and Exhibits Related to Christian-Jewish Relations

The St. Louis Bible from the Leach Collection. To learn more about this collection read about it on here on the Medieval Studies blog

The St. Louis Bible from the Leach Collection. To learn more about this collection read about it here on the Medieval Studies blog

 

“Passover and Easter: A Polemical Encounter” is an exhibit currently open at Walsh Library in the O’Hare Special Collection room, mounted by Dr. Magda Teter Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies and Professor of History. This exhibit explores the history of Easter and Passover through manuscripts, books, and ephemera, with a particular emphasis on the biblical texts related to the holidays and several Haggadot, the sacred text read during the Passover Seder.  Among the items on display are engravings from two editions of the famous 15th century world chronicle that portray the bleeding of a child, with images of Jews as grotesque characters, the Easter issue of an Italian magazine, La difesa della razza (The Defense of Race), from 1940 that once again return to the theme of blood libel; German currency from 1922 that celebrates burning Jews, and an 1884 parody of the Haggadah by German artist Carl Maria Seyppel.  Tom Stoelker wrote an in depth article about the exhibit which can be read by following this link to the Center of Medieval Studies Venerable Blog. 

 

 

 

Dr. Magda Teter

Dr. Magda Teter

A Dramatic Reading of  Burning Words: A History Play by Peter Wortsman 

Dr. Magda Teter will be involved in Burning Words: A History Play, offering scholarly commentary during the multimedia reading. The play is about about zealotry, censorship, and religious tolerance, and recounts the moment in history when  “Johannes Reuchlin, a humanist Christian jurist, clashed with Johannes Pfefferkorn, a Jewish butcher converted to Christianity and a willing tool of the Dominican Order in their quest to burn Jewish books. ” Dr. Teter recently gave a lecture entitled “From Friendship to Hatred: The Catholic Church and the Jews” at the University of New Mexico as part of  the AJS Distinguished Lecture Series.

The play will take place on April 3, 2016 at 2:30 pm at The Center for Jewish History (15 West 16th Street New York, New York 10011)

Ticket Info: $15 general; $10 Leo Baeck Institute / Center for Jewish History members

We encourage members of the Fordham community to attend and support Dr. Teter  during this exciting innovative performance. More information about The Center for Jewish History and the play can be found on the center’s website. 

 Both of these events are excellent opportunities for students studying Christian-Jewish relations, like those currently taking Dr. Alex Novikoff’s Medieval Interfaith Relations graduate seminar.

 

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Filed under Events, Faculty News, Faculty Profiles

The Dynamics of Pligrimage: Lecture by Dee Dyas (York) 2/23 5-7PM

Considering  our many undergraduate and graduate courses related to pilgrimage (including our current team-taught course “Medieval Pilgrimage” and the annual study tour of the Camino de Santiago in Spain) Fordham is a great place to study pilgrimage. We are particularly excited, therefore, to announce this upcoming lecture by Dr. Dee Dyas director of the Center for the Study of Christian Culture at the University of York.

The Dynamics of Pilgrimage

About the presenter: Dee Dyas obtained her BA in literature from the University of London, and completed her PhD, as well as an MA in theology, at the University of Nottingham. She has written several books including Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, 700-1500 which was published in 2001.

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Fordham Undergraduates Attend Undergraduate Conference in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Moravian College

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On Saturday, December 5th, Professor Alex Novikoff took four Fordham Students to  the 10th Annual Undergraduate Conference in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Moravian College. The four students, all History majors, each presented a paper. Erin Collier presented, “The Role of Menstruation and Impurity in the Characterization of Jews as ‘The Other’ in Medieval Soceity,” Arthur Mezzo presented, “God and Kind: Biographies of Medieval Frankish Kings,” Rita Orazi presented, “The Emperor as Classical Hero in Ana Komnene’s Alexiad,” and Kyle Stelzer presented, “The Tibyan: One Ruler’s Account of Christian-Muslim Relations in Eleventh Century Iberia.”
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 Nice work, Fordham historians!

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Filed under Essays in History, Undergrad News, Undergraduate Research