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Current Newsletter: Vol. XXXIIII Issue 3 ~ December 2023
The newsletter includes:
- Sherry L. Reames Graduate Student Travel Award Winners Prize Winners
- Updates on upcoming elections
- Guest Column by Samantha K. Herrick
- CFPs and new books
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Guest Columns
December 2023
Samantha K. Herrick, Syracuse University, N.Y.
After several years of pursuing Saint Fronto of Périgueux, I started seeing him everywhere. Or, at least, I began finding references to him in unexpected places, such as texts and artworks honoring other saints. He turned up, for instance, in the vita of Martha of Bethany, whom he purportedly accompanied from Judea to Gaul (along with her supposed sister, Mary Magdalen, and about a dozen other saints).
August 2023
Barbara Newman, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
What penance, what payment, could possibly compensate for the horrors of slavery—or of
colonialism, or the Holocaust? Clearly none. Yet few public issues of our time arouse more controversy than this matter of reparations. The recent firestorm over the fall of affirmative action is a case in point. Even when the original wrong seems beyond repair, we feel a profound moral need to do something, to perform some kind of public penance.
December 2022
Michael Hahn, Sarum College, Salisbury
In collaboration with Franciscan friars, the little-known Angela of Foligno – an Umbrian laywoman who died in 1309 but was only canonized very recently in 2013 – produced 37 mystical-theological texts. The originals, however, are not known to us.
August 2022
The Power of the Locale and the Revisitation of Late Medieval Sainthood
Carmen Florea, Babeş-Bolyai University, Romania
A paradoxical image emerges from a comparison of parochial patron saints with mendicant saints in late medieval Transylvania. Neither the Dominicans nor Franciscans—the great modernizers of sanctity—chose to promote saints of their own orders by making them the patrons of local churches.
April 2022
Imagining “Childhood” in Cistercian Hagiography
Jacob W. Doss, jacobwdoss@utexas.edu University of Texas at Austin
In my research on twelfth-century Cistercian understandings of masculinity, Cistercian notions of childhood and youth constantly appeared alongside both articulations of femininity and masculinity. Authors like Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167), and the eventual Cistercian, William of Saint-Thierry (d. 1148), to name just a few, consistently imagined childhood…..
December 2021
Translating to Resist Betrayals
Amy Ogden, Department of French, University of Virginia
How would modern ideas of the Middle Ages shift if every member of the Hagiography Society,
alone or working in groups, published a translation of a hagiographic text? . . .
December 2020
Remembering our Members
Tom Head: Head obituary by Steve Kruger
Jacques LeGoff: Le Goff obituary by Gabor Klaniczay
Maureen A. Tilley: Tilley obituary by J. Patrick Hornbeck II