Faculty Research

Pablo Ancos (Spanish) is doing research focused on the primary modes and contexts of production, dissemination and reception of thirteenth-century Castilian narrative poetry. Two articles on this topic, "Open Works, Closed Texts" and "The Narrator as a Schoolmaster", will appear in 2009 in Romance Quarterly and eHumanista, respectively.

John Barker (Emeritus, History) has just published a non-medieval book called Wagner and Venice, in the Music Monograph Series from University of Rochester Press/Boydell and Brewer. He is working on a successor volume to treat the extensive literary fictionalization of Wagner's involvement with Venice. He also has two articles forthcoming on late Byzantine history and culture.

Salvatore Calomino (German) has three current research projects. First, he has been working with several related fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts containing hagiographic as well as theological and exegetical texts. The manuscripts in question, located in a private collection, are written in both German and Latin, and share tendencies with contemporary prayer-books copied or printed in the same region. The symbiotic relation between hagiographic and theological or liturgical texts has apparently affected the narration of saints' lives (vitae) collected in these manuscripts. 
Second, Calomino is studying early printings (fifteenth- and sixteenth-century) of German adaptations of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis, examining deletions and additions to the expected corpus along with images and their placement in the German printings.  Finally, as part of a research group he is working on the hypertext project devoted to Gottfried’s Tristan, dealing most recently with questions of lead manuscript as vs. specific regional transmission. 

Lisa Cooper (English) and Andrea Denny-Brown are the co-editors of a new essay collection that re-evaluates the work of fifteenth-century poet John Lydgate in light of medieval material culture. The book, entitled Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), offers fresh perspectives on the function of poetry on the cusp of the modern age, and explores the role of the aesthetic not only in late medieval society but also in our own. 

Thomas Dale (Art History) was “Professeur invité” at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, in May and June, 2008. He gave three lectures in French related to his book project, "Romanesque Corporealities: the Body as Image and Dissimilitude in the Art of Western Europe, ca. 1050-1215."  He was awarded a sabbatical leave for the same project by UW-Madison and a Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C. during 2006-07.

Dale's recent publications include "Romanesque Sculpted Portraits: Convention, Vision and Real Presence, Gesta 46.2 (2007), 101-119 [appeared August 2008]; “Meyric Rogers, Oswald Goetz and the Rehabilitation of the Lucy Maud Buckingham Memorial Gothic Room at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1940s” in Medieval Art, Midwestern Audiences, ed. C. Nielsen (Oxford: Scholar Press, 2008), 118-130; "The Portrait as Imprinted Image and the Concept of the Individual in the Romanesque Period.,” in Le Portrait. La représentation de l’individu,  Micrologus Library, (Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007), 95-116; and “The Monstrous,” in Romanesque and Gothic, ed. Conrad Rudolph, in The Companion to Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 253-73. 

Douglas Kelly (Emeritus, French) has remained busy and productive since retirement. His most recent book, Christine de Pizan’s Changing Opinion: A Quest for Certainty in the Midst of Chaos, was published in 2007 (Cambridge: Brewer). During 2007-08 he also published five articles: "The Trojans in the Writings of Wace and Benoît de Sainte-Maure," in People and Texts: Relationships in Medieval Literature, ed. Thea Summerfield and Keith Busby (Rodopi, 2007), 123-41; "Analogie et anomalie dans la description de chevaliers: la diverse ordenance de Camel de Camois," in Façonner son personnage:  actes  du 31e colloque du CUER MA, 9, 10 et 11 mars 2006 (Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2007), 145-55; "La Conjointure de l’anomalie et du stéréotype: un modèle de l'invention dans les romans arthuriens en vers," Cahiers de recherches médiévales 14 (2007), 25-39; “Boethius as Model for Rewriting Sources in Alain Chartier’s Livre de l’Esperance,” in Chartier in Europe, ed. Emma Cayley and Ashby Kinch (Cambridge: Brewer, 2008), 15-30; and “Honor, Debate, and Translatio imperii in Cligés,” Arthuriana, 18:3 (2008), 33-47. 
Kelly's major current project is a monograph on Guillaume de Machaut. 

Scott Mellor (Scandinavian Studies) has a book coming out this year from Mellen Press called Analyzing Ten Poems from the Poetic Edda: Oral Formula and Mythic Patterns.  The book analyzes the Völsunga saga and the Volsung Cycle (i.e., poetic versions in the Poetic Edda) to show that the narrative and mythical patterning found in the saga are consistent with a general patterning found in other epics. Mellor's conclusions lend support to the theory that the written poetry may have come from an earlier oral narrative. 

Thanks to Dick Ringler (Emeritus, English), you can now listen to Beowulf  in a fine new translation, complete with sound effects. Beowulf: The Complete Story. A Drama has recently been released on CD-ROM, with Ringler as narrator and professional actors reading the other parts. More information about this lively recording can be found on-line at http://www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/books/4379.htm

Norman Roth (Emeritus, Hebrew and Semitic Studies) received the 2007 Judaica Bibliography Award of the Association of Jewish Libraries for his recent Dictionary of Iberian Jewish and Converso Authors (2008), a book which gives a catalogue of all published writings by these authors.

Jane Schulenburg (History, Women's Studies, and Liberal Studies and the Arts) has a book-length manuscript in progress called Gender and the Construction of Sacred Space in Medieval Society: From Womb to Tomb, ca. 500-1300. Her recently completed work includes three articles either published in 2008 or still forthcoming: "Women's Monasticism and Sacred Space: The Promotion of Saints' Cults and Miracles," in Professing Gender, ed. Felice Lifshitz and Lisa Bitel (University of Pennsylvania); "Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society," in Contesting Christendom: Readings in Medieval Religion and Culture, ed. James L. Halverson (Rowman and Littlefield); "Holy Women and the Needle Arts: Piety, Devotion, and Stitching the Sacred, ca. 500-1150," in Negotiating Community and Difference in Medieval Europe, ed. Scott Wells and Katherine Allen Smith (Brill).

Karl Shoemaker (History and Law) has completed a book manuscript on medieval sanctuary law that will be published by Fordham University Press. The book's title is "Sanctuary and Crime in Medieval Europe, 400-1500." In addition, Shoemaker and his History Department colleague William J. Courtenay recently co-authored a major article which you can find in the July 2008 issue of Speculum (vol. 83.3, pp. 603-628): "The Tears of Nicholas: Simony and Perjury by a Parisian Master of Theology in the Fourteenth Century."  

With the support of a Vilas award, Kirsten Wolf (Scandinavian Studies) recently completed her book, A Female Legendary from Late Medieval Iceland: Kirkjubaejarbok (Codex AM 429 12mo), which is forthcoming in the Manuscripta Nordica series. She is currently working on a series of articles on color terms in Old Norse-Icelandic and on a number of hitherto unedited hagiographic texts.