Contact:

Barbara Newman

Professor of English

1897 Sheridan Road, Room 215

Evanston, IL 60208-2208

e-mail: bjnewman@northwestern.edu

phone: 847-491-5679

Program Description

One of the most significant legacies of the European Middle Ages is the university system itself, with an undergraduate curriculum divided into arts and sciences along with professional degrees in Medicine, Law, and Theology.  The medieval arts curriculum comprised the trivium or verbal arts (Grammar, Rhetoric, and Dialectic) and the quadrivium or mathematical arts (Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy).  But despite this structure, medieval disciplines differed significantly from modern ones.  For instance, “grammar” entailed Latin instruction, but also poetry, literary criticism, ethics, and advanced linguistic speculation.  History was not a discipline at all, but a literary genre or sometimes a branch of theology (under the guise of “salvation history”).  Music was viewed theoretically as a branch of mathematics, while composition and performance were not studied in schools but learned by apprenticeship, like the visual arts and architecture. 

The structure of medieval learning is just one of many reasons that Medieval Studies, as an interdisciplinary field, does not always fit comfortably into departmental programs.  Aside from their disciplinary knowledge in history, literature, musicology, and so forth, medievalists must learn specialized skills such as paleography, archival research methods, liturgical chant and dating, and the use of often recondite manuscript catalogues and bibliographic resources (both digital and print).  Above all, they must learn languages.  Latin is indispensable, and students must also learn appropriate medieval vernaculars, other classical languages (Greek, Hebrew, Arabic) as needed for certain fields, and modern languages such as French, German, and Italian, since access to European scholarship is vital within this international research community.

Graduate training, professional societies, and journals in the field have been interdisciplinary for almost a century.  The Medieval Academy of America (founded in 1925) covers all disciplines of medieval scholarship, and the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo (now in its forty-second year) sponsors some two thousand papers at each annual meeting in disciplines ranging from archeology to philosophy, from legal history to the construction of musical instruments.  Geographic coverage ranges from Iberia and Scandinavia to eastern Europe and central Asia, and temporal coverage from the late Roman Empire to Tudor England.  Medievalists publish much of their work in interdisciplinary, period-focused journals such as Speculum (the journal of the Medieval Academy), Viator, Traditio, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, and Frühmittelalterliche Studien. 

Taking advantage of the strong group of medievalists now at Northwestern, the Medieval Studies Cluster is designed to prepare students to succeed as scholars in this challenging interdisciplinary field. 

Students interested in pursuing a PhD in Art History, Comparative Literary Studies, English, History, Music, and Religion are encouraged to find a second intellectual “home” in this interdisciplinary cluster.

Program Faculty