Centre for Medieval Studies, Toronto

Last updated
Centre for Medieval Studies
Centre for Medieval Studies device.svg
Established1964
Focus Medieval Studies
Location
125 Queen's Park, 3rd floor
, , ,
Coordinates 43°40′6″N79°23′37″W / 43.66833°N 79.39361°W / 43.66833; -79.39361
Website medieval.utoronto.ca

The Centre for Medieval Studies (CMS) is a research centre at the University of Toronto in Canada dedicated to the history, thought, and artistic expression of the cultures that flourished during the Middle Ages.

The centre was founded in 1964, with Bertie Wilkinson as its first director. Its foundation was announced in the journal Speculum : [1]

The intention of the Center is to make available to students various approaches to the Middle Ages in programs of studies not available in existing departments. The purpose of the Center is the training of scholars who know the Middle Ages in depth as well as in breadth. The courses of study will freely cross limits of traditional disciplines and departments, but they will be limited to the Middle Ages. By concentrating on a single period, the student will be able to acquire in some depth the basic linguistic and technical skills necessary for teaching and research in mediaeval studies; these include palaeography, diplomatics, and vernacular languages, in which the Center is strong. He will also be able to read widely in the period. His research will follow the material of his subject in order to gain a better understanding of the cross currents and variations in the cultures, interests, and beliefs of the Middle Ages.

The centre had originated in a Medieval Club that met at Hart House. [2] It was inspired by the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (PIMS), which had been founded in 1929 by Étienne Gilson. In turn, it was one of the inspirations for the University of Leeds Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies. [3]

The Centre's logo was designed by Allan Fleming, while he was head of graphic design at University of Toronto Press, from 1968–1976. [4]

The Centre is now located in the Lillian Massey Building, part of Victoria University, Toronto.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dark Ages (historiography)</span> Term for the Early Middle Ages

The Dark Ages is a term for the Early Middle Ages, or occasionally the entire Middle Ages, in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which characterises it as marked by economic, intellectual, and cultural decline.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies</span>

The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (PIMS) is a research institute in the University of Toronto that is dedicated to advanced studies in the culture of the Middle Ages.

Medieval studies is the academic interdisciplinary study of the Middle Ages. A historian who studies medieval studies is called a medievalist.

The Faculty of Information (or the iSchool at the University of Toronto) is an undergraduate and graduate school that offers the following programs: a Bachelor of Information (BI), a Master of Information (MI), a Master of Museum Studies (MMSt), and a PhD in information studies, as well as diploma courses. As a member of the iSchool movement, the Faculty of Information takes an interdisciplinary approach to information studies, building on its traditional strengths in library and information science, complemented by research and teaching in archives, museum studies, user experience, information systems and design, critical information studies, culture and technology, knowledge management, digital humanities, book history, data science, and other related fields. It is located on the St. George Campus, in the Claude Bissell building at 140 St. George Street, which is attached to Robarts Library and the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bard Graduate Center</span> Graduate research institute and gallery

The Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture is a graduate research institute and gallery located in New York City. It is affiliated with Bard College, located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. The gallery occupies a six-story townhouse at 18 West 86th Street while the academic building and library are located at 38 West 86th Street.

Jewish studies is an academic discipline centered on the study of Jews and Judaism. Jewish studies is interdisciplinary and combines aspects of history, Middle Eastern studies, Asian studies, Oriental studies, religious studies, archeology, sociology, languages, political science, area studies, women's studies, and ethnic studies. Jewish studies as a distinct field is mainly present at colleges and universities in North America.

Carol Jeanne Clover is an American professor of Medieval Studies and American Film at the University of California, Berkeley.

Walter Andre Goffart is a German-born American historian who specializes in Late Antiquity and the European Middle Ages. He taught for many years in the history department and Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of Toronto (1960–1999), and is currently a senior research scholar at Yale University. He is the author of monographs on a ninth-century forgery, late Roman taxation, four "barbarian" historians, and historical atlases.

Jeffrey F. Hamburger is an American art historian specializing in medieval religious art and illuminated manuscripts. In 2000 he joined the faculty of Harvard University, where in 2008 he was appointed the Kuno Francke Professor of German Art and Culture. Hamburger received his B.A., M.A and Ph.D from Yale and has previously held professorships at Oberlin College and the University of Toronto. Elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy in 2001, he has won numerous awards for his publications, among them: the Charles Rufus Morey Prize of the College Art Association (1999), the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize in Art & Music (1999), the Otto Gründler Prize of the International Congress on Medieval Studies (1999), the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History of the American Philosophical Society (1998), the John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America (1994), and the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities of the American Council of Graduate Schools (1991). His research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2009 Hamburger was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2010, of the American Philosophical Society. In 2015 he was awarded an Anneliese Maier Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2022 he was awarded the Gutenberg Prize of the City of Mainz and the Internationale Gutenberg-Gesellschaft.

Margaret Beryl Clunies Ross is a medievalist who was until her retirement in 2009 the McCaughey Professor of English Language and Early English Literature and Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Sydney. Her main research areas are Old Norse-Icelandic Studies and the history of their study. Since 1997 she has led the project of editing a new edition of the corpus of skaldic poetry. She has also written articles on Australian Aboriginal rituals and contributed to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) was established in 1981, by the Arizona Board of Regents as a state-wide, tri-university research unit that bridges the intellectual communities at Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Arizona. Located centrally on the campus of Arizona State University, ACMRS is charged with coordinating and stimulating interdisciplinary research about medieval and early modern literature and culture.

Catherine E. Karkov is professor of History of Art and head of the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Her research centres on early medieval art, especially Anglo-Saxon art, and she has published three monographs. Her first concerns Anglo-Saxon art; the second one on the relation between text and image in Anglo-Saxon literature; and the third on how Anglo-Saxon writers imagined England as a place, how Anglo-Saxon England is understood by modern audiences, and the "fraught history of 'Anglo-Saxon' studies".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brian Stock (historian)</span>

Brian Stock is an American historian. He is a historian of modes of perception between the ancient world and the sixteenth century. He was Rouse Ball Student at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Senior Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, before joining the graduate faculty of the University of Toronto, where he taught history and literature until 2007. He is a Canadian and French citizen.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pearl Kibre</span> American historian

Pearl Kibre was an American historian. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1950 for her work on medieval science and universities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Colin Robert Chase</span> American academic (1935–1984)

Colin Robert Chase was an American academic. An associate professor of English at the University of Toronto, he was known for his contributions to the studies of Old English and Anglo-Latin literature. His best-known work, The Dating of Beowulf, challenged the accepted orthodoxy of the dating of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf—then thought to be from the latter half of the eighth century—and left behind what was described in A Beowulf Handbook as "a cautious and necessary incertitude".

Lonnie Royce Shelby was an American academic, and Professor Emeritus of Speech Communication and former Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the Southern Illinois University. He is known for his work on Mediaeval architects and design, especially on the work of Lorenz Lechler, Mathes Roriczer, Hanns Schmuttermayer, Taccola and Villard de Honnecourt. He is also known for coining the term constructive geometry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Institute for Medieval Studies</span>

The Institute for Medieval Studies (IMS‌) at the University of Leeds, founded in 1967, is a research and teaching institute in the field of medieval studies. It is home to the International Medieval Bibliography and the International Medieval Congress.

Shami Ghosh is an Indian-born historian who is Associate Professor at the Centre for Medieval Studies and Department of History at the University of Toronto. He researches Marxist history and the history of Germanic-speaking Europe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Kennard Rand</span> American classical and medieval scholar (1871–1945)

Edward Kennard RandFBA, known widely as E.K. Rand or to his peers as EKR, was an American classical scholar and medievalist. He served as the Pope Professor of Latin at Harvard University from 1901 until 1942, during which period he was also the Sather Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, for two terms. Rand is best known for his 1928 work, Founders of the Middle Ages.

Edward Aloysius Synan was a Catholic philosopher, theologian, and professor at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. In addition to authoring and editing several books, Synan published over eighty journal articles on subjects ranging from early patristics to late scholasticism.

References

  1. "Graduate Center for Mediaeval Studies: University of Toronto". Speculum. 38 (4): 678–681. October 1963. doi:10.1017/S0038713400061698. JSTOR   2851698.
  2. "History". Centre for Medieval Studies. Retrieved 8 August 2018.
  3. 'Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies: 1967-1978', 50 Years of Medieval Studies at Leeds (2017).
  4. "Centre Device". Centre for Medieval Studies. Retrieved 8 August 2018.