Medieval Seminar

The Medieval Seminar was started in the late sixties as a joint venture between History, French, and English (leading lights of the early days were Jack Lander and John Rowe of the Department of History), although it quickly expanded to include members from many other departments and from the affiliate colleges. For its first twenty years, the Seminar focused on very well-attended papers by major scholars in fields of medieval and Renaissance studies, and papers by members of the Seminar.

In the late eighties, the Seminar expanded its focus to conferences of various kinds, using its funding (jointly from the Faculties of Arts and of Social Sciences) as seed money to bring in larger conference grants. For the next ten years or so the Seminar sponsored at least one major conference each year, and sometimes a symposium, series of papers, or smaller-scale conference as well. These included conferences on the fantastic in medieval texts, Milton, witchcraft, representation, material culture, the Bible, and a sequence of two major conferences on current medieval book projects and articles respectively, New Medievalisms I (2004) and New Medievalisms II (2005).

For more information, please contact Professor Anne Schuurman.