If you googled the MI during the last few weeks, you arrived at our crisp, glorious new website with its beautiful photos of our spaces, books, and people, and its invitation to “Meet us in the Middle Ages: The Crossroads of Everything.” It’s a huge job to launch a new site these days—not least because they are read on everything from desktops to cellphones—and I am especially grateful to Megan J. Hall at the MI and Kate Gerry and Steve Koich in the A&L Communications office for more than a year of hard labor on it. I hope you’ll take time to navigate through its main pages.

For one thing, you’ll see that it isn’t just the website that is new around here. If you tap “Research” on the main menu, you’ll find a link to our research blog called “Meet us at the Crossroads of Everything.” This is the former “Chequered Board” blog integrated now directly into our site and waiting for all of our faculty and students to use, whether as part of a class assignment (there’s a great post right now on how to do this), or to contribute to one of the on-going series, such as “Working in the Archives,” or to foreground some aspect of your current research. Also under “Research,” you can connect to the “Working Groups” page to learn about two new (“Jewish and Christian Books in the First Millennium,” “Emotions”) and two recurring MI-funded faculty/grad-student research groups.  

Over at “People” on the main menu I hope you’ll take time to meet the whole MI community through the brief bios and photos of all our fifty fellows and twenty-three Ph.D. students (from Abulsater to Wawrykow and Arenas Pacheco to Zhao respectively). But also take note of some new titles on the “Staff” page. Megan J. Hall, who has been our outstanding guru of communications, outreach, and events, is now Assistant Director of the MI, in which position she’ll continue many of her former duties but also take over day-to-day oversight of our finances and work closely with me on development. Linda Major, long our undergraduate director, has moved from three-quarter to full-time with the title of Director of Undergraduate Studies and Community Engagement. Linda’s amazing creativity in that second role is already paying off: keep your eyes open for this Fall’s new MI home-football events, including our first ever MI tailgate (September 15, on the lawn just west of Hesburgh Library by First Down Moses—you’re all invited!). You won’t see it yet on the website, but the good news for Neil Chase, our administrative coordinator, and the bad news for us is that he’ll be putting his information-science degree to work in a new job working for Special Collections and Archives in Hodges Library. We’ll be running a search to replace him immediately, and we wish him all the best.

But make sure, though, that you also scroll to the end of the “Home” and “Study” pages, where you’ll find a recurring series of reminders—in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic—of why we do what we do at the MI, including Hugh of St. Victor’s famous admonition to “Omnia disce. Videbis postea nihil esse superfluum. (Learn everything, and you will see afterward that nothing is superfluous.)”

There is a lot that is new around here, but only in service of the MI’s now seventy-year long mission: the interdisciplinary study of medieval civilization in all its linguistic complexity, social multiformity, manuscript variety, intellectual richness, and literary imaginativeness. Thanks to all faculty, students, and friends who have joined us at this vast, unexplored crossroads, and best wishes for the coming semester!

In Fall 2016 we brought you a video and story about how honors medieval studies major Karen Neis (B.A. '16) crafted an impressive senior honors project, her illustrated children's book Abul-Abbas, The Elephant, drawing inspiration from medieval manuscripts, illuminations, and art objects from Charlemagne's time. The book recounts the journey of the elephant that caliph Harun al-Rashid gave as a gift to Charlemagne around the year 800. In the story, a Christian, a Jew, and a Muslim all work together to transport the elephant 3,000 miles from Baghdad to Aachen. We are delighted to announce that her book has been picked up for publication by MacLaren-Cochrane Publishing. Read the full story...

Gabriel Said Reynolds greets his students on the final day of his Introduction to the Quran course. He is in a small classroom on Notre Dame’s campus. His students are in Orlando, Colorado, Canada, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and beyond. Such arrangements are not uncommon in the world of massive open online courses (MOOCs), but this one is different. It breaks new ground in the online learning space by bringing students participating in the MOOC around the world together with undergraduate and graduate students that Reynolds teaches in a traditional course at Notre Dame. Read the full story...

One visit to the Hesburgh Library’s medieval manuscripts collection, and Luke Donahue ’17 was hooked. “I saw them and thought, ‘This is it.’ This is what I want to study,” Donahue said. “I was intrigued that there are all these manuscripts from the Middle Ages that no one has researched, and I was determined — I wanted to help fill that intellectual gap.” That experience during his first-semester German class significantly shaped his Notre Dame education. While he initially planned to study physics, Donahue decided to major in theology and German and add a minor in medieval studies. He studied abroad in Germany and received University funding to spend two more months there examining medieval manuscripts. Read the full story...

Our A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Medieval Studies for the 2018-19 academic year is Stephen Ogden. He is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America, and during his year at the Medieval Institute he will be completing his book manuscript, Receiving and Making Aristotle's Intellect: A Study on Ibn Rushd and Aquinas. Ogden received his Ph.D. in 2015 from Yale University. Read more about the fellowship...

Our Byzantine Studies Postdoctoral Fellow for the 2018-19 academic year is R. Demetrios Harper. His fellowship project seeks to study the concept of self-determination and its development in Byzantine philosophy and theology, examining it in relation to the emphasis on communality in the Byzantine Christian tradition. Harper received his Ph.D. from the University of Winchester, Department of Theology, Religion, and Philosophy, in 2015. Read more about the fellowship...

Our fall 2018 Gabriel Fellow is John Burden. During his semester at the Institute, he will be preparing the manuscript for his first book, drawing on the unparalleled resources of the Astrik L. Gabriel History of Universities Collection and the Medieval Institute. Burden received his Ph.D. in History from Yale University in May 2018.

A hearty welcome to two our incoming Ph.D. students, Will Beattie and Eileen Morgan!

Will Beattie holds an M.A. in Medieval Studies from the University of York and an M.A. (Hons.) in English Literature from the University of St Andrews. His main research interests lie in the function of eschatological literature during the medieval period, particularly in Anglo-Saxon England. He approaches this work chiefly from a sociopolitical perspective, investigating the ways in which contemporary events, such as the Scandinavian invasions of the 8th to 11th centuries, influenced the use of religious language.

Eileen Morgan holds a B.A. in History and English from Bryn Mawr College. Her research considers recipe traditions as sites of intersection between medieval medical theory and practice. While her primary research interest lies in culinary recipes, more broadly she is interested in the many ways the history of science, medicine, and technology manifests in medieval material culture. Her other interests include the body, pseudohistory and historiography, antiquity in medieval literature, citation practices, medievalism, and the digital humanities.