Medieval Studies - Development

Development

The term 'medieval studies' began to be adopted by academics in the opening decades of the twentieth century, initially in the titles of books like G. G. Coulton's Ten Medieval Studies (1906), to emphasize a greater interdisciplinary approach to a historical subject. In American and European universities the term provided a coherent identity to centres composed of academics from a variety of disciplines including archaeology, art history, architecture, history, literature and linguistics. The Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the St. Michael's College of the University of Toronto became the first centre of this type in 1929; it is now the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (PIMS) and is part of the University of Toronto. With university expansion in the late 1960s and early 1970s encouraging interdisciplinary cooperation, similar centres were established in England at University of Reading (1965), at University of Leeds (1967) and the University of York (1968), and in the United States at Fordham University (1971). A more recent wave of foundations, perhaps helped by the rise of interest in things medieval associated with neo-medievalism, include centres at the University of Bristol (1994), the University of Sydney (1997) and Bangor University (2005).

Medieval studies is buoyed by a number of annual international conferences which bring together thousands of professional medievalists, including the International Congress on Medieval Studies, at Kalamazoo MI, U.S., and the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds. There are a number of journals devoted to medieval studies, including: Mediaevalia, Comitatus, Viator, Traditio, Journal of Medieval History, Journal of Medieval Military History, and Speculum, an organ of the Medieval Academy of America founded in 1925 and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.