Retirements

Two giants of the Medieval Studies Program at UW-Madison have retired during the past two years, leaving the rest of us torn between celebrating their accomplishments and anxiously wondering how we will ever get along without them.

Chris Kleinhenz stepped down at the end of the spring semester 2007, an event marked in September 2007 when dozens of his former students and colleagues gathered for a festive symposium and dinner in his honor. Since his retirement, the Medieval Academy of America, the City of Florence, and the Italian Dante Society (among others) have paid additional tributes to Chris's long and amazingly productive career as a scholar and teacher of Dante, resourceful organizer and administrator, and tireless promoter of medieval Italian literature and medieval studies more generally; for details on some of these awards, see the Faculty Honors, Awards and Milestones page.

Bill Courtenay retired in May 2008, leaving a large gap in both the History Department and the Medieval Studies Program. As the History Department noted in their own newsletter, Bill earned virtually every honor offered by UW-Madison and by his field of scholarship during his forty-two-year teaching career at this university. These honors recognize an exceptionally distinguished career as a scholar, a teacher, a trainer of generations of historians (thirty students have received their doctorates under his direction), and an exemplary citizen of his university and his profession.

Bill joined the Department of History as an assistant professor in 1966, rose to full professor just five years later, and later earned both a WARF endowed chair and a Hilldale professorship. His national and international awards include an honorary doctorate from the University of the South and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, NEH, ACLS, Institute for Advanced Study, University of Tübingen, and Herzog August Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the American Academy in Rome, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Medieval Academy of America.

Bill has been a mainstay of the Medieval Studies curriculum for many years, regularly teaching such central courses as Schools and Learning in the Medieval World, The Medieval Church, Medieval Monasticism, Latin Paleography, and Medieval Social and Intellectual History 400-1200, and Medieval Social and Intellectual History 1200-1450, as well as more specialized courses and graduate seminars on medieval universities and intellectual history. His retirement last May was appropriately celebrated with a major conference called "Crossing Boundaries at Medieval Universities: Intellectual Moments, Academic Disciplines, and Societal Conflict," which brought together a distinguished group of medieval scholars from all over the western world. The program for this conference is posted on the Events 2007-2008 page of the Medieval Studies Program website.

When he was awarded a WARF chaired professorship in 1988, Bill named it after the distinguished Wisconsin professor and medievalist Charles Homer Haskins. As he recently explained, "The study of medieval history at Wisconsin has a long and distinguished record, from Charles Homer Haskins, his student Robert Reynolds, Gaines Post, David Herlihy, to my colleagues Maureen Mazzaoui and Karl Shoemaker. I do hope the university will continue to support this rich legacy of teaching and scholarship." Bill is doing his part to ensure this legacy through the establishment of a graduate fellowship to support students studying medieval history in future years and by helping to fund the purchase of research collections for UW Libraries.