College of Arts and Sciences

Medieval Studies

Fellowship Supports Medieval Manuscripts & Modern Humanities Program
Medievalist faculty from UVM will use a Lattie F. Coor Collaborative Fellowship from the UVM Humanities Center to support an exciting new project “Medieval Manuscripts and the Modern Humanities” in Fall, 2019.
Remembering Phoebe: The Forgotten Deacon in Paul’s Letter to Romans
How can you learn about women's religious life in the Middle Ages? Bit by bit, as Professor Anne Clark in the religion department demonstrates in a recent article published in the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures.
Extraordinary Medieval Manuscript Arrives at UVM Special Collections
UVM Special Collections recently purchased a stunning late-medieval manuscript that will be available to students and faculty for teaching and research.

Medieval Studies at UVM

The College of Arts and Sciences at UVM has a strong core of faculty whose teaching and research centers on Europe in the millennium between 500 and 1500 CE. Students interested in medieval Europe can take regularly offered classes such as “Medieval Mystics and Heretics,” “Doubt and Knowledge,” “The Emotions of Everyday Life in Medieval Poetry,” “Books and Readers in Europe, 1250-1650,” and “Beowulf,” in the departments of history, English, religion, and romance languages and cultures, with related content often offered in classics, art history, German and Russian, philosophy and sociology.

Courses focused on medieval Europe allow you to explore the complexity of another world, hone your analytic and communication skills, to better grasp relationships between different ways of creating new knowledge, to explore continuity and change between past and present, and to gain a new depth of diverse cultural understanding. See links at the right to meet some of our outstanding medievalist faculty, and for examples of their recent research.

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Perspectives from across the nation and around the world

The College of Arts and Sciences also sponsors an annual Medieval Studies Lecture Series, which brings world-class scholars from Europe, North America, and across the globe to the UVM campus. See the sidebar at right for upcoming events.

Medieval manuscript illustration

Rare manuscripts support original scholarship

The Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts Collection contains images of 21 unbound manuscript items and 10 bound manuscript items from the University of Vermont, Silver Special Collections Library. These manuscripts were written in various locations across Europe and the Middle East, from early in the 12th century to the 17th century C.E. These beautiful books are often heavily illustrated or decorated, and provide examples of a wide range of scripts, both Gothic and later varieties. The scope of the collection will facilitate studies of book history, codicology, paleography, and Medieval and Renaissance history.

The past made relevant for today

Every year medievalist scholars from the UVM College of Arts and Sciences publish numerous books, articles, chapters, and reviews, providing contemporary perspectives on age-old challenges confronting human society.