Stanford Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (CMEMS)

Check out the newly updated schedule for CMEMS' 1st Annual Primary Source Symposium, this Thursday-Saturday. We hope to see you there!

Announcing "Making Publics: The Past, Present & Future of Publication," An Interdisciplinary Conference at the Stanford Humanities Center, Levinthal Hall, Friday, October 24th, 2014, 9am-6pm

Renaissance Society of America Announces Grant Opportunity for Members

http://www.rsa.org/?Grants

Research Grants - Renaissance Society of America Each year the Renaissance Society of America awards a number of grants supporting research projects and publications that aim to advance scholarly knowledge about the Renaissance. In 2015 RSA will award thirty-three grants thanks to the generous support of The Kress Foundation, our donors, and our m…

Meet your colleagues in the CMEMS community and learn about this year's upcoming speaker series, workshops, and events at our CMEMS Meet, Greet and Eat Lunch this Wednesday, September 24. Light refreshments will be served from 12:00-1:30 pm in the Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall (Building 460).

We are very excited to welcome Fiona Griffiths, new Visiting Professor of History, to the CMEMS community! For a list of courses Fiona will be teaching this year, visit: http://explorecourses.stanford.edu/instructor/fgriffit

Fiona Griffiths

CMEMS faculty Elaine Treharne, Marisa Galvez, Ron Egan, and PhD students head off to Beijing for Medieval Text Technologies in China and Europe Conference this week.

What the first day of school feels like for a medievalist in Cairo, 2013. http://cmems.stanford.edu/blog/back-school-cairo-2013-return-politics-fear

Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies It’s the last Thursday in August. Monday is the first day of classes. I don’t know what to expect. I can’t imagine what kind of group will there come Monday morning. Will they be happy to be back at university after the roller-coaster summer? Will they be happy Egypt has a “strong leader” again? Wil...

Turns out Hannah Horvath, like Montaigne, is a self-involved person. http://cmems.stanford.edu/blog/trifling-matters-montaigne-and-girls-0

Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies Near the beginning of Season 2 of Girls, the new boyfriend of Hannah Horvath, the aspiring writer played by Lena Dunham, reluctantly reviews one of her essays: “I just didn’t feel like anything happened … ultimately it just felt like waiting in line and all the nonsense that goes through your brain…

Locavore pedagogy was going strong this summer in Iowa. http://cmems.stanford.edu/blog/amazonedu

Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies In my first real job, I was a journalist, writing for Time magazine in London, and each Monday we'd eagerly check out the news stands on the Strand so we could see how our cover stacked up against our chief competitor, Newsweek.

New blogger Anita Guerrini on the long history of science experiments in the kitchen. http://cmems.stanford.edu/blog/ghastly-kitchen-animals-cooking-and-birth-experimental-science

Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies Editor's note: This post was originally published at the International Congress of History of Science, Technology and Medicine Blog. The ICHSTM Congress is taking place this week in Manchester. You can watch a live stream from the Congress here.

This exciting project in the Northern Baltic might be of interest to students who would like to study in the UK

Ecology of Crusading: Contact The following student projects have been linked to the research programme:Ph.D: Eve Rannamäe; animal bones from Viljandi & Karksi, Estonia.MSc: Amanda Wynne; Multi-proxy analysis of the lake core from Radzyń Chełmiński, Poland.MSc: Jenny Austin; multi-proxy analysis of the lake core from Trikata, La...

Lucretius at the airport? The Swerve forum continues with guest blogger Reid Barbour. http://cmems.stanford.edu/blog/lucretius-airport-part-iii-forum-swerve

Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies Greenblatt’s The Swerve is both personal and tendentious. It begins with the author’s loving but fearful mother and it ends with Thomas Jefferson. Despite the differences between Greenblatt’s approach to the reception of Epicureanism and my own (as manifested in my English Epicures and Stoics but al...

Here's guest blogger Stephanie Elsky with part two of the CMEMS forum on The Swerve. http://cmems.stanford.edu/blog/novelty-%E2%80%93-it-aint-what-it-used-be-part-ii-forum-swerve

Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies This post by Stephanie Elsky is the second installment in a series of responses to The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt's award-winning, controversial book. (You can read the first installment here).

Seeta Chaganti gets the CMEMS blog forum on The Swerve going. Follow along with us! http://cmems.stanford.edu/blog/past-motion-part-i-forum-swerve

Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies This post by Seeta Chaganti is the first installment in a series of responses to the The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt's award-winning, controversial book. More responses will be posted on the CMEMS blog in the coming weeks.

A (CMEMS) blog about crayfish, bacon, and wine, that has nothing to do with food. http://cmems.stanford.edu/blog/blog-about-crayfish-bacon-and-wine-has-nothing-do-food

Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies I hate the name "locavore," perhaps because its so often used by foodies -- who generally seem to me like slimmed down versions of Ben Jonson's Sir Epicure Mammon. But in principle, as another character in Jonson's play notes, "the motion's good, and of the spirit." And if locally sourced food is a…

New blogger Carla Nappi starts a "serial essay" at CMEMS: "Berenice's Hair." Here's episode I: http://cmems.stanford.edu/blog/berenices-hair-episode-i-hairs

Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies The Queen missed her husband. Berenice sat at home in Egypt while her husband Ptolemy was off in Syria fighting. (Berenice was a second, and we know her as Berenice II; Ptolemy was a third, for us Ptolemy III.) This third was in fact her second husband, and she was both a second in terms of Berenice...

The French Culture Workshop invites you to a discussion of the recent work of Mark Greengrass (Emeritus Professor of History, University of Sheffield) this Thursday.

Painting Power: Antoine Caron's Massacres of the Triumvirate Join the French Culture Workshop for a discussion with Professor Mark Greengrass (University of Sheffield, Medieval and Modern History). We will be talking about a recently published paper by him and Professor Neil Cox (University of Essex), entitled Painting Power: Antoine Caron's Massacres of the…

CFP for an interdisciplinary one-day symposium in Brown University, February 21, 2014

Prisons of Stone, Word, and Flesh: Medieval and Early Modern Captivity We invite submissions for a one-day interdisciplinary symposium to take place at Brown University on February 21, 2014, hosted by the Cogut Center for the Humanities and sponsored by the Department of French Studies, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Medieval Studies Program, and the Dep...

Caroline Winterer, history professor with a courtesy appointment in Classics, and a CMEMS member has been named director of the Stanford Humanities Center.

History Professor Caroline Winterer named director of Stanford Humanities Center Winterer, a scholar of the early Americas with a joint appointment in Classics, will lead the Stanford Humanities Center starting next fall.

Join the German Department and CMEMS this Thursday in a discussion of Professor Sara Poor's new work on late medieval devotional literature

Margery Kempe's German Sisters: Anna Eybin and the Late Medieval Devotional Book Abstract: As part of a project that explores the roles of literate women in the production and circulation of devotional literature in late medieval Germany, this paper focuses on the book production of one female scribe who, unlike many male and female scribes of her day, signs her name repeatedly…

A new project dedicated to Ptolemy's astronomical and astrological texts and related material announces two calls for applications

Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus We are delighted to announce the commencement of Ptolemaeus Arabus et Latinus, a project dedicated to the edition and study of the Arabic and Latin versions of Ptolemy's astronomical and astrological texts and related material. The project is funded by the Union der deutschen Akademien der Wissensch...

Mediterranean Topographies, the University of Michigan’s Interdisciplinary Workshop on Mediterranean Studies, is pleased to announce its second conference for graduate students and young faculty

CFP: Mapping the Mediterranean: Space, Memory, and the Long Road to Modernity The Mediterranean served as a site of transit, exchange, and interaction for well over two millennia, demonstrating tendencies towards both unification and dispersion. With the onset of modernity, however, linguistic, ethnic, and national boundaries solidified across the region. Language, history, m...

Blaine Greteman's latest blog post: Why the Humanities Must Go Local in a Global Age, or "The Bard of the Cornfields." http://cmems.stanford.edu/blog/why-humanities-must-go-local-global-age-or-bard-cornfields

Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies Why, in the age of MOOCS and the Internet, should students continue to enroll in my courses and others like them? Why pay tuition for a Shakespeare class at Iowa when professor from a shiny Ivy league school will teach it to you for free? These were some of the questions I tried to answer this weeke...

Open access in academia? Blogger Katie Kadue on JSTOR, Aaron Swartz, and Renaissance libraries. http://cmems.stanford.edu/node/1645

Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies Following Aaron Swartz’s tragic death earlier this year, the internet erupted in attacks on what Swartz called, in a 2008 manifesto, the “private theft of public culture.” Swartz charged that “the world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage” -- including the scholarly articles stored on sites li...

An exciting workshop on Medieval European and Islamic art will take place at UC Davis this Friday!

Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies UC Davis is happy to announce a workshop, entitled "New Directions in Medieval European & Islamic Art" which will take place Friday, March 8th, 2013

Thomas Kaiser (History, U of Arkansas - Little Rock) will speak tomorrow, March 7 at the French Culture Workshop, 4pm-5:30pm

Making War to Make Peace The French Culture Workshop is pleased to invite you to our event on Thursday, March 7 when our guest will be Thomas Kaiser (History, University of Arkansas – Little Rock). We will be discussing his paper, entitled Making War to Make Peace: Diplomacy, ‘Patriotism,’ and Public Opinion in Choiseul’s G...

Ricardo Bucardo; Or, the sad story of the king and the ibex, exhumed from their medieval pasts. http://cmems.stanford.edu/node/1637

Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies There are so many ways that a medievalist writing in the current critical climate could approach the news that bones excavated last year from underneath a parking lot in Leicester belong to Richard III, the last Plantagenet king. The story really has it all: a challenge to Tudor constructions of the...

This Thursday, Ph.D. Candidate in History Katie McDonough will present her research on road construction in 18th century France

Building with Authority: Real and Imagined Roads in Early Modern France The French Culture Workshop invites you to their next event: a discussion of a dissertation chapter by Katherine McDonough, Ph.D. Candidate in History. To RSVP and to get a copy of the chapter, entitled Building with Authority: Real and Imagined Roads in Early Modern France, email workshop coordinat...

yet another early modern summer course! Learn more about the Reformation this coming May, in Geneva

Intensive summer course at the Institute of the history of the Reformation The aim of the course is to deepen students’ knowledge of a particular topic and to enable them to consider its wider implications via access to primary sources and working tools that are less readily available elsewhere. Particular attention will be paid to methods of studying intellectual history....

"Today on NPR, Stanford's Roland Greene will offer a literary perspective on the discovery of King Richard III's remains. Listen live now!"

King Richard III's Remains Found | KQED Five-hundred years after he died in battle, scientists have discovered the skeleton of King Richard III under a British parking lot. The short-reigned monarch is known as a Machiavellian hunchback who purportedly committed atrocious murders on his journey to the throne. But the king has modern day s...