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Dear Friends,
This year MEMS adds a new focus on the wonderful work being done by our graduate students across the disciplines. We’re very proud of them, and as you read their descriptions of their work, I’m sure you’ll see why. Our priority now is pursing grants to support their most urgent needs: travel to visit research libraries and archives, and essential training in languages and research skills. In conjunction with UM’s new Presidential Initiative, launched to raise funds to support graduate students, I invite you to consider a gift toward the education of the next generation of teachers in medieval and early modern studies. This initiative involves a 50 percent match, so your gift for graduate student support will be even more valuable. So you can see the kind of work your gift will enable, I’ll let the students speak for themselves:
Old Tales of Older Relics Daniel Deselm, History
Researching my very first seminar paper as a Michigan graduate student, I had a chance encounter with a fascinating primary source, Einhard's early 9th century description of the translation of the relics of Marcellinus and Peter from Rome to the church at Seligenstadt in Germany. The story had everything—earnest pilgrims, double-dealing merchants, and cameos by both the pope and the Frankish emperor. It starts with a grave robbery in the crumbling ruins of Rome, followed by a dramatic chase over the Alps, then a detour through the royal palace, and finally a lavish reburial of holy relics deep in the forests of the German frontier, the furthest outpost of Christianity. THIS is what I had come here to study! I have pursued this interest in the movement of Christian relics from different angles using different sources in ever since. My dissertation project of course goes well beyond the confines of that first story and focuses on just one of the many aspects of early medieval life raised in such sources, specifically, how they can be thought of as geography texts, delineating in their own way the political, cultural, and spiritual frontiers of the era. This is a juicy topic for a number of reasons. First, it allows me to consider a clearly defined, plentiful (but still manageable) body of sources that has not been well-studied before. Second, these highly descriptive and engaging texts open up a broad view on a surprising variety of early medieval activities, from the obvious religious and ideological concerns, to trade and patronage networks, the extension of political and religious authority, to conceptions of place, geography, ethnography, and self-identity at every social level, from princes to slaves.
Embargo! Stefan Stantchev, History
In my dissertation I aim to clarify the origins and development of embargoes and assess the results of their employment. To date, economic sanctions have interested mostly political scientists and human rights activists, and the chief questions addressed have been instrumental (do they work?) and moral (do the ends justify the means?). My work is the first to study the use of embargoes in medieval and renaissance Europe. I argue that whereas secular powers made widespread use of embargoes as an economic tool of foreign policy, medieval popes used them as part of a larger policy of exclusion and segregation (of heretics, Jews, and Muslims) designed to create boundaries of an imaginary Christendom. This study of economic policies employed in the pursuit of cultural goals has been spurred by my broader interest in how economic forces and human agency shaped inter-religious interaction in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean.
On the Road Laura Ambrose, English PhD, 2008
My dissertation, “Plotting Movement: Epistemologies of Local Travel in Early Modern England, 1600-1660,” argues that local journeys provided the most frequent and substantial ways by which the English came to know, understand, and represent travel in their everyday lives. By the turn of the seventeenth century, the geographic, social, and conceptual terrain of travel—what I term England’s travelscape—had been forever altered as new technologies of transport (coaches and sedan chairs, for example) were introduced alongside developing navigational techniques, cartographic knowledge, and the rise of print. In scholarship, texts depicting travel within England, Scotland, and Wales have been overshadowed by the period’s monumental narrative accounts of oceanic voyaging in the “Age of Discovery.” My dissertation responds by assembling an archive of local travel texts (drama, domestic travel narratives, almanac diaries, travel guides, maps, and pamphlets) that represent travel as a phenomenon of movement, rather than a distant voyage or an encounter with the “other”—tropes derived from the popular foreign travel narrative. I argue that the various spatial, graphic, and narrative “plots” generated by the texts and technologies of local journeying highlight an epistemology of travel characterized by engagements with space, time, difficulty, and means of transport.
Madness and Community Aleksandra Pfau, History
My dissertation, “Madness in the Realm: Narratives of Mental Illness and Communities in France, 1350-1500,” explores the connections between madness and community. My most compelling sources are remission letters written to seek royal pardons for capital crimes; these reveal how madness was understood, not by medical or religious theorists, but by ordinary people. An example can illuminate how mad people fractured their communities, but also how those communities came together around them. Gouyn Cluchat, his wife, and three children fled a plague that hit their village in 1459. When their food supplies ran out, Gouyn turned to begging to support his sick wife and their children. But because he no longer lived in his own community, with all its support systems, his begging proved fruitless. In despair, he contemplated suicide, but his attempt to drown himself was interrupted by a woman passing by. He then went home, picked up an axe, and killed his sick wife. Gouyn, fully aware of what he had done, ran out into the street and told his neighbors that they should have him arrested. When no one was willing to act, he turned himself in to local officers, insisting that he be executed for killing his wife. The officers refused to charge him, recognizing that he was mad. His kin immediately sought remission for him, hoping to return him to his children, despite his declared desire for death. With the help of a royal notary, they composed a narrative that reconciled the crime with their knowledge of Gouyn Cluchat. Such stories involved a (re)interpretation of an individual's past in the light of his or her crime. In these texts, madness was not at all isolating: While they defined madness by actions that denied or attempted to destroy kin and community bonds, their narratives sought to reaffirm those very ties.
East and West E. Natalie Rothman, Anthropology and History PhD, 2006
When I first came to Michigan in 1999, I was vaguely interested in foreigners and the idea of foreign-ness, and wanted to know how this idea developed in the encounter between various ethnic groups in early modern contexts. I ended up studying the role of what I call trans-imperial subjects—men and women who straddled, brokered, and thus helped shape political, religious, and linguistic boundaries in the Mediterranean, particularly between the Venetian and Ottoman empires. I was captivated by the ways in which ideas about “the East” versus “the West” seem to have solidified in sixteenth- century Venice, thus contributing to notions of the radical difference of the Ottoman Empire and its peoples. I found especially fascinating the role that translators and interpreters, converts, and commercial brokers who themselves came from Ottoman lands, Istanbul and the Greek Islands in particular, played in articulating these ideas, making boundaries between societies, polities, and cultures seem more impermeable. Of course, there is no direct line between the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ideas of East and West and the damaging “clash of civilizations” formulation that seems to guide so much of the imperial policy of the US and its allies in the Middle East today. But I do see important connections between trans-imperial subjects’ claims to “know the East” and current efforts by anti-terrorism experts, counter-insurgency agents, and think-tanks in Washington and Jerusalem to “penetrate the Arab mindset” and other such monolithic formulations. A product of interstitial positions myself, I hope that my research can serve as a critical intervention in current debates.
Heresy! David Lavinsky, English
With the rise of religious fundamentalism in the United States, I have become fascinated by what people mean when they claim to believe in the literal word of scripture—and by the way such questions implicate John Wyclif and the Lollards. An Oxford theologian whose ideas scandalized church officials but quickly won adherents, known as the Lollards, John Wyclif (ca. 1330-1384) remains a vexing and complicated figure in the English historical imagination. His arguments concerning the literal truth of scripture and the authority of sacred texts were condemned in his own day but later celebrated by sixteenth-century reformers, who believed that he had hastened a more individualistic approach to religion. My dissertation, “After Wyclif: Translation, Hermeneutics, and English Devotional Culture, ca. 1350-1530,” explores the different dimensions of Wyclif’s influence. I examine how his analysis of the Bible functioned as the basis for a complex set of appropriations, both within the movement known as Lollardy and, more broadly, in the religious writing from late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England. The project looks at Wyclif’s defense of the Bible’s literal truth and then traces out the multiple determinations of this idea in the vernacular biblical translation and commentary of his followers, reconceiving the contours of heresy and reform in the process.
The Prefiguring Moment Kristina Luce, Architecture and Urban Design
“When is architecture?” I have lately borrowed this question from friends who study contemporary art, as a means of contextualizing my work. Like performance art, the creation of architecture also encompasses moments of conception, construction, and reception. When, in the course of these processes, is architecture created? In answer my project proposes that different moments are emphasized at different historical times, reconfiguring architecture’s definition along the way. The sixteenth century was a pivotal era in this regard. It was during this century that the development of plan, section, and elevation as a graphical system transformed drawing’s purpose in architecture. The use of this system established design as an act of prefigurement and created a separation between the moments of design and building. With this, the conceiving moment of architecture gained special prominence. Of course, construction and reception were still required for a building to have material and cultural presence, but the praxis of drawing prioritized the virtual time-space of the page as the new locus of architecture. Only in recent years has the reign of drawing and the dominance of the prefiguring moment been challenged. Today architects simultaneously embrace and reject their status as auteur, while historians plunge into the diverse worlds of reception, and theorists begin to make parallels between the work of medieval master builders and contemporary designers. As we contend with drawing’s legacy and attempt to understand architecture’s creative trialectic anew, it seems to me that the architectural past, and in particular its medieval and early modern past, has never felt so present.
Off the Beaten Track Danna Agmon, Anthropology and History
My research considers people and places "in-between"—those that defy the academic's urge to neatly label and catalogue. I examine early French imperialism in India (1664-1761) and attempt to uncover the different ways French traders, missionaries, and other settlers relied on their Indian employees. To what extent was the French venture in India dependent on the work of go-betweens? How did dependence on local intermediaries affect the form and practice of French imperialism? By fore-grounding the relationship between the French and their intermediaries, I expose difficulties and failures that were a crucial yet hidden aspect of early colonial expansion. I hope to demonstrate that the often-overlooked French experience in India is representative of the fractured, tense, and densely populated early stages of all colonial histories.
Spanish Enslaved Daniel Hershenzon, History
On October 7, 1571 the Habsburg Empire defeated its Ottoman rival off Lepanto, shifting Spain’s expansion away from the Mediterranean and North Africa and toward continental Europe and the New World. But the Maghrib and the Mediterranean would continue to shape Spain’s religious and political imagination in important ways: Over the next two centuries more than one million Europeans, the majority of them Spaniards, were captured and enslaved in the Ottoman Maghrib, and slavery thus became the central interface between the Habsburg and the Ottoman empires.
In my dissertation research I examine how homogenous ideas of early modern Spanish community and identity emerged from encounters between captives, renegades (Christians 'turned Turk'), and their relatives on the one hand, and crown and church magistrates on the other. Between Lepanto (1571) and the fall of Oran, Spain’s last stronghold in the Maghrib (1710), encounters between these liminal figures and officials took place in a variety of institutional discursive domains: the Spanish Inquisition; the Orders of Redemption, charged with liberating Europeans from the Maghrib; crown magistracies, which dealt with relatives of enslaved Spaniards; as well as the literary and intellectual fields. In each of these domains, the movements of enslaved Spanish across the Mediterranean fell into categories such as cautivo, esclavo, prisionero, renegado, apostate, redención, rescate, and conversión, which variously denoted social, political or religious experiences of captivity. I hope to demonstrate how this multiplicity of categories gradually gave way to a reified concept of Spanishness primarily anchored in a religious identity.
Trial by Jurors Andreea Boboc, English PhD, 2006
I am fascinated by words and their relationship to knowledge across time and cultures. One kind of knowledge I am interested in is legal knowledge. I am currently at work on a monograph, Medieval Readers as Jurors: Legal Education and the Challenges of Late Medieval English Trial Literature, in which I focus on literature as one source of legal knowledge for potential jurors. Medieval English “trial literature” poses questions about just conduct, questions that medieval audiences tried to solve in their own time and that we are still struggling with today. More broadly, however, I am interested in the relationship between the formal and the epistemological dimensions of words. In “Lay Performances of Work and Salvation in the York Cycle” (forthcoming in Comparative Drama), I investigate how words denoting various kinds of work negotiate the relationship between individual responsibility and salvation as it emerges from the lay performances of the Corpus Christi plays. In “The Function of Doubled Love Topoi in Troilus and Criseyde” (in preparation for The Chaucer Review) I explore how formal doublings of love topoi disrupt convention and tradition, and invite audiences to rethink their knowledge of courtly love and Criseyde. Most recently, I became interested in the epistemic value of the word chere, especially given its range across the cognitive and behavioral aspects of criminal intent. By showing how outward behavior and inward intention inform one another in The Tale of Beryn and The Clerk’s Tale, chere contributes to discourses about medieval interiority while addressing a broader anthropological concern: how does one tell a friend from a foe?
The Image of Charity Diana Bullen Presciutti, History of Art
My research explores the visual culture of the foundling hospital in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. Focusing on institutions in Rome, Florence, Siena, and Bologna, I examine a wide range of visual evidence—from hospital altarpieces, mural decoration, manuscript illumination, and processional banners to the sacred topography of the city, spaces in ward life, processional rituals, civic ceremonies, and devotional practice. I argue that there was a rich ‘visual culture of charity’ in Renaissance Italy and that the place of the abandoned child within it was conspicuous, significant, and highly contested. I am particularly interested in how images and ritual acts shaped perceptions of abandoned children, their patrons and supporters, and the practice of foundling care in the early modern Italian city.
Herring for Breakfast? Marjorie Rubright, English PhD, 2007
How were cultural and ethnic identities forged in early modern Europe? My dissertation, "Double Dutch: Approximate Identities in Early Modern English Culture," focuses on the ways theatrical, civic, and colonial performances shaped ideas of ethnic distinction in early modern English culture, even as such performances also exposed overlap between the English and Dutch identities. In the early modern period, minor differences mattered. Because nation-thinking was not the dominant way of understanding identity in northern Europe, an English man or woman could be mistaken for a Dutch person merely by adding a bit of salt to his or her butter, or by indulging in too many herring for breakfast. Effectively deploying the signs of identity involved a creative process, one that entailed cultural performance. During the Anglo-Dutch trade rivalry in the East Indies, for instance, the provisional and relational distinctions that differentiated English from Dutch in the context of northern Europe often failed to register. The English and the Dutch found themselves considered interchangeable by both indigenous people in the Indonesian archipelago and by other Europeans. English identity was both mistaken for Dutch and strategically usurped by the Dutch. In correspondence and travel accounts, the crisis of Anglo-Dutch interchangeability catalyzes concerns about the instability of ethnic and national categories. The English responded to this crisis by turning, on the one hand, to ceremonies of distinction enacted in the East Indies and, on the other, to tragedies such as Dryden’s Amboyna, performed in London theaters after the Restoration. Through these performances, the English attempted to distinguish their own ethnic, national, and colonial identities from that of the Dutch; but instead these efforts imperfectly suppressed the similarities that rendered the English and Dutch interchangeable in Asia and seemingly approximate back home.
To make a gift to the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, please write to:
Karla Taylor, Director
Medieval and Early Modern Studies
University of Michigan
1029 Tisch Hall, 435 South State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003
If you wish to contact a development officer for the College of Literature, Sciences, and the Arts please go to https://www.lsa.umich.edu/lsa/alumni/contact/
Information on the College’s current fundraising drive to support programs, students, and faculty may be found at https://www.lsa.umich.edu/lsa/alumni/
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