Medieval Studies

Secondary PhD Field in Medieval Studies

Medieval Studies is a general term given to the study of European and sometimes Near Eastern culture and history during approximately the millennium between 300 and 1500. It is also the name of one of the best-established interdisciplinary fields in the modern university. There are medievalists teaching and studying at Harvard in History, History of Art and Architecture, the Classics, at least six language and literature departments, Music, Philosophy, and the Study of Religion; in the Schools of Design, Divinity, Law, and Government; at the Houghton and Widener libraries; and elsewhere.

Although these medievalists generally teach and research within given disciplines, most of them share an awareness of themselves as medievalists, whose work has a common historical basis and requires the mastery of a common set of scholarly tools, especially linguistic and paleographic. Indeed, several other major research universities treat the field as a discipline and group students and faculties in medieval studies centers, institutes, or programs: for example, Yale, UCLA, Notre Dame, Arizona, and Fordham in the US, Toronto in Canada, and York and Leeds in the UK.

Harvard has preferred a different structure, establishing a Program Committee in Medieval Studies during the early 1980s which runs certain interdisciplinary courses of its own and informally coordinates others taught in departments, as well as administering from time to time an Ad Hoc PhD in medieval studies. The committee also mounts a highly successful seminar run through the Humanities Center (which meets some 16 times a year, with an attendance that rarely falls below twenty and rises on occasion to seventy or more faculty and students from both inside and outside Harvard), and cosponsors or, more occasionally, runs two conferences a year in different aspects of the field.

It also seeks to liaise between medieval faculty and students in different departments, by hosting twice-yearly receptions and an annual lunch; and by maintaining a website (currently being upgraded), as well as distributing a weekly list of medieval seminars and lectures in the Boston area. In all these activities, it recognizes a fact about medieval studies also acknowledged by the interdisciplinary nature of the field's major professional organization, the Medieval Academy of America, that there is an important sense in which medievalists, despite their differing disciplinary orientations, belong to a common intellectual community.

Medievalist graduate students seldom have the opportunity to apply for jobs in medieval centers, while students from those centers historically perform somewhat unevenly on the job market, depending on the primary discipline in which they are working; many American literature departments, for example, have become resistant to hiring students whose sole or primary formal affiliation is with medieval studies.

Yet the interdisciplinary nature of the field is widely recognized by hiring committees, while department promotion committees sometimes make publication in the field's premier journal, Speculum, published by the Medieval Academy, a condition of tenure. In short, there is every reason to think that medieval faculty at Harvard would encourage their students to undertake a medieval studies qualification if one were available in such a form that it did not interfere with their disciplinary training; and that medieval students at Harvard would want to avail themselves of such a qualification. In sum, Medieval Studies makes an ideal candidate for a secondary field.

For more information

Contact committee chair Professor Nicholas Watson ( This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ) or committee administrator Wendy Lurie ( This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ).

Structure

The secondary field in medieval studies requires four graduate courses, one of which must be in paleography, plus the fulfillment of one language requirement in Medieval Latin, Greek, Hebrew, or Arabic.
The paleography requirement can be fulfilled by taking Medieval Studies 201 (renumbered version of the current Medieval Studies 101, to be offered triennially), Medieval Studies 202 (renumbered version of the current Medieval Studies 102, to be offered biennially), Classics 277, or another approved course.*
The language requirement will be fulfilled by examination, administered by the committee.
The requirement of three further courses can be fulfilled by taking any 200-level course in a medieval subject (from a list updated annually by the committee), with the provisos that each course must be in a different department, one of which may be the student's home department.

Viability

At least eight departments: English and American Literature and Language, Comparative Literature, Romance Languages and Literatures, Celtic Languages and Literatures, Music, History of Art and Architecture, History, Study of Religion as well as the Divinity School, offer one or more graduate seminars in a medieval topic each year. Medieval Studies itself administers a paleography course that we are prepared to support biennially.

* Medieval Studies 101 and 102 have always been run as graduate courses with substantial graduate and very limited undergraduate enrolment: 101 has ten graduates and one undergraduate this semester; in 2003 it had eleven graduates and one undergraduate; in 2000 it had seven graduates (six in FAS) and no undergraduates; 102 is cross-listed at Harvard Divinity School (HDS), and has had only one undergraduate during its last two reiterations (2007 and 2001): this year there are 15 graduate students, the great majority from HDS. Our renumbering clarifies the status of these courses as graduate courses but does not imply that the courses will be offered at any more advanced a level than before. With this in mind, we would hope to be able to bestow accreditation for the Secondary Field in Medieval Studies to students already in the program who have taken or are taking the required courses but have taken Medieval Studies 101 and 102 under their present course numberings. Obviously, it makes no sense to have students retake a course they have already taken, while it makes a great deal of sense for the success of the new Secondary Field that students now in the program be able to avail themselves of it, perhaps by adding one further course in an advanced G year and by sitting a Latin or other language exam.