AHA report 3

The other session I attended was a really delightful one titled "Women and Community in the Middle Ages." I made a special point of going as it promised discussion of nuns. As it turned out, all three of the papers were very good, and all three posed some worthwhile challenges to common tropes of discussion medieval women.

Fiona Griffiths, in the midst of some interesting work on relations between male and female religious in the twelfth century, argued that we need to pay more attention to money. She suggested that financial issues underlie a number of criticisms of nuns, and that financial considerations contributed to concerns about purity on questions of separating male and female religious. While this was definitely a work-in-progress kind of paper, the general point seems potentially very important.

Anne Lester discussed how, in northern France, women following informal religious lives tended to be organized into Cistercian nunneries rather than Franciscan or Dominican ones. According to her, bishops in this region took an active role in encouraging/requiring such women's communities to adopt Cistercian customs, including lobbying the Cistercian General Chapter for inclusion; such houses, however, continued to be visited by bishops rather than Cistercian abbots, and modified their customs somewhat to allow practices of apostolic poverty. Overall Lester indicates that we shouldn't assume older orders like the Cistercians have nothing to do with the apostolic poverty movements of the twelfth century.

Katherine French finished up, building on her work on medieval English parishes to situate Margery Kempe in her parish. French pointed out that Margery is often discussed as an anomaly, eccentric, utterly unique, and that in fact she was very active in her parish church and shared similar concerns with many other women and men of her parish. This was also a really interesting paper.

The following discussion was good, although most of it blurs together for me; but I found all of the papers to be quite thought-provoking, potentially having ramifications for my own research.

AHA report 2

As I reported yesterday, I attended just two sessions.

The first session I attended, on Friday afternoon, was on "Old and New Classics." It was a continuation of similarly-themed sessions at previous AHAs. I had attended the one last year, I think it was, which had a huge crowd. By comparison, attendance at this one seemed a little sparse. Still, the conversation was fairly lively. Each member of the panel proposed a classic work of medieval history (admittedly two of them dealt with a classic theme, instead). Daniel Bornstein's classic was Robert Brentano's Two Churches, and he raised the possibility that a classic may forestall rather than inspire imitation. Ruth Mazo Karras discussed classics of medieval women's history, focusing on the essay collection Women in Medieval Society edited by Susan Mosher Stuard. Carol Lansing instead talked about integrating heresy into broader histories, discussing Herbert Grundmann and Lester Little's work, among others; John Van Engen focused on Haskins's Renaissance of the Twelfth Century and how the idea has become a fairly standard part of most medievalists' thinking. Session chair Dan Smail--making a last-minute entrance--said he'd like to see a future session focusing on classic articles rather than monographs, which seems a worthy idea.

The discussion was wide-ranging enough that I won't attempt to convey my sketchy notes: it included specific responses to all of the speakers, as well as a broader conversation about undergraduate and graduate teaching. I hope this series of sessions continues; I think it has sparked some very interesting conversations, especially useful for younger medievalists. Since I work on neither England nor Italy, I wasn't familiar with Brentano's book, for example, but it sounds well worth a look.

AHA report 1

Fresh year, fresh post.

I am back from AHA. I succeeded in my plan of abandoning the conference for significant periods to see some of the city, with the able assistance of Dr. Notorious and others. I had two job interviews, both of which seemed to go well (at least from my point of view). I had useful conversations with a number of people and was able to catch up with some friends.

I also managed to see some sessions--just two, but both good. More on those later after I've had a little time to process my thoughts.

Medieval history at the AHA

I just got the AHA annual meeting schedule in the mail today. Usually there's something of a dearth of medieval sessions at the AHA--actually, even if you put together the ancient, medieval, and early modern sessions, they are probably still outnumbered by sessions on, say, the U.S. since the 1960s.  

This year appears different, though; so thanks to the Program Committee and the session organizers for having a diverse lot of medieval sessions.  Some of them do come from the affiliated societies--the American Society of Church History and the American Catholic Historical Association can usually be relied on for a few medieval topics, and societies focused on regions like Spain or Italy often have a few as well.  Although I still observe the scheduling problem of sticking several of the medieval sessions in the same time slot, at least this year we are not in the position of seeing the only 3 or 4 medieval sessions all in the same slot.  

Here's what I noticed on a quick spin through the catalog (apologies to any sessions I've missed):

• Reform and Clerical Culture in the Eleventh Century (Fri. 1pm)
• Identities: Forms and Functions in the Middle Ages (Fri. 3:30pm)
• Medieval History: Old and New Classics III (Fri. 3:30pm)
• Late Medieval and Early Modern Catholic Responses to Heretical "saints" (Fri. 3:30pm)
• New Directions in Morisco Studies (Fri. 3:30pm)
• Greek History and Its Islamic Fate, 630-930CE (Sat. 9:30am)
• Problematic Passions: Case Studies in the History of Emotion in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Sat. 9:30am)
• Women and Community in the Middle Ages (Sat. 9:30am) (this looks particularly nunnish, so I will do my best to attend)
• Christianity, the Religious Other, and Demonic Language in Medieval and Early Modern France (Sat. 9:30am)
• Cultural and Intellectual Responses to the Crusades (Sat. 2:30pm)
• New Trends in Medieval Spanish History (Sat. 2:30pm) 
• Locating Jews in Medieval Iberia (Sun. 9am)
• Reassessing Reform: Medieval Models of Change (Sun. 9am)
• National History in an Age of Globalization: The Case of Medieval France (Sun. 2:30pm)--especially notable for the participation of Dominique Iogna-Prat)
• Bound Feet, Corseted Waists, and Veiled Heads; Chastity Belts and the Tropes of Contained Femininity (Sun. 2:30pm)--ok, this one is only sort of medieval; it does feature Albrecht Classen on chastity belts and looks potentially quite interesting
• The Other Middle Ages: New Developments in Byzantine Studies (Mon. 8:30am)
• The Papacy: Its Friends and Foes in the Later Middle Ages (Mon. 8:30am)

Having written all that up, I'm pretty impressed with the collection: a good variety of topics and regions. There is certainly some medieval stuff hiding in some of the thematic sessions, and there are also a good number of early modern sessions (and a few ancient ones) that I haven't listed here.  The concentrations at Friday 3:30 and Saturday 9:30 are unfortunate, but the AHA only schedules two sessions a day, so some kind of logjam was inevitable with this many sessions.  Medievalists attending the AHA should have plenty to interest them.