“Reading Archival Latin”
Mediterranean Studies Summer Skills Seminar
23—26 May 2022 • Remote
Welcome!
Welcome to the 2022 Summer Skills “Reading Archival Laitn” Seminar.
Below you will find a directory of participants, a link to the program schedule and to the resource page.
This course is meant to be very much a collective, collaborative effort, and I hope that not only will you gain some proficiency with reading medieval latin archival documents, and some familiarity with the ACA and archival research, but that you will also meet fellow scholars who share similar interests and may be future collaborators.
Therefore, I would encourage you to visit the participant pages and reach out to anyone whose work piques your interest.
In the interests of confidentiality and privacy, these pages are accessible only by password; please do not share your password or distribute or share the contents of these pages.
Program
The course will be held via ZOOM. the meeting code will be emailed to you on Monday, 23 May. Each session will combine lecture and reading practice. The first day will consist mostly of lectures and we will move progressively to more sight reading as the Seminar progresses. As we will be using various media simultaneously (camera, powerpoint, screen captures) while browsing the archive’s digital collection, please plan on using a laptop or desktop — the larger the screen, the better. Each day will consist of two sessions: the first, 10am-noon and the second, 1—3pm. All times are Mountain Time.
Monday, 23 May 2022
10am-noon; 1:00-3:00pm
1. The History & Structure of the Archive of the Crown of Aragon
2. Pergaminos/Pergamins
Tuesday, 24 May 2022
10am-noon; 1:00-3:00pm
1. The Royal Chancery: The Registers
2. Reading the Registers
Wednesday, 25 May 2022
10am-noon; 1:00-3:00pm
1. Royal Letters
2. Using Royal Letters
Thursday, 26 May 2022
10am-noon; 1:00-3:00pm
1. Beyond the Chancery
2. Research techniques
Test your Latin!
Take Toronto’s Center for Mediaeval Studies Latin tests: two hours, no dictionary. No more than 10 mistakes to pass: 1992 MA Latin exam, 1993 PhD Latin exam. More practice examinations here.
Faculty
The course will be conducted by Prof. Brian A. Catlos (Religious Studies, CU Boulder). A graduate of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies (Phd, 2000) and now a historian of pre-Modern Spain and the Mediterranean, Catlos has been using the collections of the ACA since 1995, primarily for research into the social and economic history of the Crown of Aragon and Muslim-Christian-Jewish relations.
Participants
Sherif Abdelkarim (English: Grinnell College)
Sherif Abdelkarim researches the languages and literatures of the premodern world. He received his PhD in Medieval Studies (Old English; Middle English; Classical Arabic) from the University of Virginia. His book project, Hypocrisy: Private Laws, Literary Publics, 500-1500, examines medieval conceptions and representations of hypocrisy through poetic, philosophical, legal, and linguistic lenses.
Harry Anderson (Religious Studies: University of Colorado Boulder)
During his time as an undergraduate at St John’s College Annapolis, the present author studied the Great Books, which meant engaging with these primary sources on their own terms uninfluenced by the interpretations of them by later secondary sources. Since beginning his degree program at CU Boulder, the Harry has begun researching the Mudejar (Muslim) population of the Aragonese Kingdom of Valencia in the fourteenth century. Since they were in many cases given the same wary and occasionally hostile treatment by their Christian neighbors and seem to have had occupied similar socioeconomic niches as their Mudejar ancestors, the author plans to extend his research chronologically up to 1609, when the nominally Christian Moriscos were expelled from Valencia. He is also developing Armenian studies as a secondary field for the sake of obtaining a fuller picture of the ethno-religious history of another subaltern population at the other end of the Medieval Mediterranean.
Tracey L. Billado (History, Queens College, CUNY)
I received my PhD in medieval history from Emory. My publications include an article on “Rhetorical Strategies and Legal Arguments” (in Jaritz and Richter, eds., Oral History of the Middle Ages) and the essay collection, Feud, Violence, and Practice (Ashgate). I’m currently working on two projects: an essay on monastic strategies in conflict (C10-12) and a co-written volume on medieval violence.
Gabriela Chitwood (History of Art and Architecture: University of Oregon)
Gabriela Chitwood is a Ph.D. Student at the University of Oregon’s History of Art and Architecture department. Her work explores the use and social meaning of late medieval architecture in southern France. She has recently presented her work for the Medieval Association of the Pacific and at the International Congress of Medieval Studies. She is currently undertaking a dissertation on the Cathedral Saint-Étienne of Toulouse.
Karen Frank (History: University of the Ozarks)
I am an Associate Professor of History at the University of the Ozarks, a tiny liberal arts school in rural Arkansas. As half of our two-historian team, I teach "everything not U.S. History," including both World Civ I and II, Greek and Roman History, Medieval Europe, Renaissance and Reformation Europe, Enlightenment Europe, Modern Europe, pre-modern Islamic History, pre-modern Jewish History, Historiography, special topic study abroad courses, professional preparation courses, senior seminar and thesis, and even a course on Twentieth-Century Iran. My main areas of study, however, are Medieval and early Renaissance European society and culture, with a particular emphasis on the intersection of communal society, religious identity, and gender among the small Jewish communities of central Italy in the 13th through 15th centuries. My publications include "From Egypt to Umbria: Jewish Women and Property in the Medieval Mediterranean," in California Italian Studies Journal 1(1), 2010. [http://escholarship.org/uc/item/9249w3hr] and “Jewish Women and Property in Fifteenth-Century Umbria,” in Across the Religious Divide: Women, Property, and Law in the Wider Mediterranean (ca. 1300-1800), Jutta Gisela Sperling and Shona Kelly Wray, eds. New York: Routledge, 2010. My current projects draw on both my training at the University of California Santa Barbara (and a year in the Perugian archives supported by a Fulbright predoctoral grant) and my teaching experiences at a small liberal arts college that serves predominantly underserved populations, where I also served as a Director of our First-Year Experience. These include an article based on my dissertation and another that proposes a new model for undergraduate historical inquiry and vocational discernment in the post-Covid era.
Leslie S. Jacoby (English & Celtic Studies: UC Berkeley)
Leslie Jacoby is a native Californian who writes for a living. Her area of expertise is in the art and practice of falconry and venery, working on rare medieval falconry treatises in Middle French and Latin. She earned her PhD in comparative literature and medieval studies, focusing on transcribing, translating, and editing the fifteenth-century manuscript entitled, The Art of Falconry and Venery by Guillaume Tardif. Currently, she is teaching in the English Department and Celtic Studies Program at U. C., Berkeley.
Jane Maschue (History: The Catholic University of America)
I have just finished my third year in the Ph.D. program in medieval history at the Catholic University of America, where I received my M.A. in Medieval Studies in 2020. I study the relationship between medieval religious, intellectual, and social life, focusing on medieval saints and their cults, the transmission of memory, and interfaith relations. I am currently working on the proposal for my dissertation, under the guidance of Dr. Katherine Jansen, on the medieval memory of Boethius, the Late Antique philosopher. In the Middle Ages Boethius was memorialized as an authoritative philosopher, but sometimes also as a martyr and Christian saint; my recent research attempts to explain where and why Boethius was remembered in different and ambiguous ways. The study of manuscripts forms the centerpiece of my planned dissertation project and I look forward to the opportunity to dive deeper into paleography in this workshop. I live in Washington D.C. with my husband, a Ph.D. student in Greek & Latin at CUA, and our two children.
Katherine Pierpont (History: University of Minnesota)
Katherine Pierpont is a PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota, who studies gender, performance, and sex work in twelfth and thirteenth century France. She has a published an article on disability in medieval French literature and is co-authoring the fourth edition of Sexuality in Medieval Europe with Ruth Karras. Her dissertation is entitled “The Public Body: Sex Work in 12th and 13th Century Southern France.”
Kira Robison (History: University of Tennessee, Chattanooga)
I specialize in later medieval history, with a focus on the intersections of medicine, law, and religion in the Mediterranean. My recently published book, Healers in the Making: Students, Physicians, and Medical Education in Medieval Bologna (1250-1550) was published by Brill in early 2021. It explores medical education at the University of Bologna with an eye to both the wider intellectual milieu of the medical curriculum and the specific influence exerted on it by the civic context of the students and professors of medicine in Bologna, through the lens of practical medicine and anatomy instruction.
Other related publications are:
“For the Benefit of Students: Memory and Anatomical Learning in the Fourteenth to Early Sixteenth Centuries” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 75:2 (2020), 135–150.
“Making Right Practice? Regulating Surgery and Medicine in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Bologna,” in Medicine and Law in the Middle Ages, ed. Wendy J. Turner and Sarah M. Butler (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 177-195.
I am currently working on examining physiognomy and chiromancy as medico-magical practices.
Ryan Sheehan (History: Ohio University)
I am currently an undergraduate history student at Ohio University. My main scholarly focus is the Early Middle Ages, with a particular interest in the Franks, medieval politics, and medieval law. I just finished a tutorial class with my professor about French royal bodies, and I am currently working on Viking sagas and Roman history with two other professors. I am preparing to write a senior thesis about Ebroin, a Frankish mayor of the palace in the seventh century.
Anna Maria Wiljer (Library and Information Science, History: Catholic University of America)
Hello! I am a current library science and history student at the Catholic University of America with a background in classics.
Sam Zeigler (Classics and English Literature: University of Miami)
Sam is a senior at the University of Miami majoring in Classics and English Literature and minoring in Art History. She is currently working on her senior thesis concerning
Plato’s Timaeus and Critias.