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From Chequered Board to Medievalist Commons: The Medieval Studies Research Blog Turns Ten!

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the University of Notre Dame‘s Medieval Institute‘s Medieval Studies Research Blog—a benchmark and milestone—which warrants both celebration and reflection on the evolution of the project, especially certain important actors and pivotal moments that have shaped the academic blog into an accessible resource for so many scholars and medievalist as well as general and public audiences.

Image from the Medieval Studies Research Blog. Header Image: John Mandeville writing his travelogue. This image comes from a unique, Bohemian picture book version of the Voyage d’outer mer. London, British Library MS Additional 24189, fol. 4. Screen shot by Richard Fahey (2024).

The project was conceived by Dr. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, now an Professor Emerita of English and Medieval Studies at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in the study of Middle English manuscript studies. Kerby-Fulton intuited that an academic blog could become an asset to the medieval institute, and so she brought together a team of graduate students to whom she pitched her academic blog project. Kerby-Fulton, in her wisdom and generosity, leaned on the next generation of scholars to get her project off the ground. Although she was the founder, the project, then called the Chequered Board, has always endeavored to support and lift up students and junior scholars. She envisioned the academic blog as both a forum for public medievalism, a space for academics engaging directly with general readers and a public audience, but also as a serious online, open-access resource for specialists in the field.

Dr. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Emerita Professor of Middle English and Manuscript Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Photo by Matt Cashore (2006).

Many of the earliest blogs in fact, came from assignments in her graduate classes, asking students to reflect and analyze aspects of Middle English manuscripts and their intricacies and peculiarities. Dr. Kerby-Fulton had long recognized certain parallels between modern websites and medieval manuscripts, characteristics that print culture often passed by, including marginalia and visual formatting, as well as their respective function as multimedia objects, especially the interplay between aesthetic (whether illustrations or illuminations) and textual elements in both websites and manuscripts. Just as websites frequently feature a combination of texts, images and paratexts, so too do medieval manuscripts, and this affinity is at the heart of Kerby-Fulton’s vision for the project.

Indeed, my first-ever blog “Bobbing for Answer” discusses the Bob and Wheel in the manuscript containing Gawain and the Green Knight, and builds on Kerby-Fulton’s own work in her foundational text, Opening Up Medieval Manuscripts. My blog explores possible ways in which this poetic feature could offer semantic options and performative opportunities for readers of the poem in its manuscript context. These graduate student blogs, however, were just the beginning of the project.

Images of Arthur, Guinevere, Gawain & the decapitated Green Knight in British Library, Cotton Nero MS a.x f.94v.

Dr. Kerby-Fulton then organized a team of medievalist graduate students to conceive of possible directions and special series, as well as to help her run the blog project (then known as the Chequered Board). From project’s inception, she encouraged students take the reins and shape what would become the University of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute’s Medieval Studies Research Blog into the active resource that it is today, open to academics of all levels from graduate students to senior scholars.

In order for the project to run efficiently, a blog manager was selected from the team, Dr. Nicole Eddy, who had previously worked for the British Library and had headed up their medieval manuscript blog, so she was familiar with the online genre and brought a wealth of knowledge and experience to the project. After her foundational role in establishing the blog and getting the project off the ground, blog management passed to Dr. Andrew Klein who continued the work. Once Dr. Klein left for his current position, the role of blog manager was handed off to Dr. Karrie Fuller. It was around this time that the project shifted from Dr. Kerby-Fulton’s personal research initiative to a project funded and overseen by the University of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute, which came with rebranding and the new name for the project, the Medieval Studies Research Blog, which remains its title today.

Dr. Nicole Eddy (left) and Dr. Andrew Klein (right). Dr. Eddy is currently Managing Editor at Dumbarton Oakes (image from Facebook post) and Klein is currently Associate Professor at St. Thomas University (image from faculty page).

All projects need funding and institutional support to survive, and without the steadfast championing of the Medieval Studies Research Blog by Dr. Kerby-Fulton and both the Medieval Institute Director, Dr. Thomas Burman, and the Associate Director of the Medieval Institute (and fellow contributor), Dr. Megan Hall, our beloved Medieval Studies Research Blog may not have endured. Instead, it thrived and continued evolving into the valuable open access online academic resource it is today.

Dr. Megan Hall (left) and Dr. Thomas Burman, Associate Director and Director of the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame. Images taken from faculty page.

After a few years of managing the blog, Dr. Fuller passed the role to me, and it was at long last my turn to take the helm of the project  Although I had been a contributor and partner throughout the entirety of the project, I have served as blog manager has for the past five years, in which we’ve seen the project continue to expand and transform to meet the diverse and ever-changing needs of the field. 

Dr. Karrie Fuller, currently Blog Manager at AptAmigo (image from LinkedIn) and Dr. Richard Fahey, currently Blog Manager at the Medieval Studies Research Blog, in addition to other academic and editorial positions (image from faculty page).

At the Medieval Studies Research Blog, we are blessed to have our regular contributors (currently including Dr. Linnet Heald, Dr. Nick Kamas, and Dr. Charles Yost, all graduates of the Medieval Institute) in addition to guest and alumni contributors. The work of many junior scholars affiliated with the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame has fostered the growth of our project, which has since received attention from departments of education, scholars, enthusiasts, fellow bloggers and even the occasional author of fiction. 

I would like also to cast a spotlight on some of the projects and special series, which in addition to the many excellent blog posts featured on the Medieval Studies Research Blog, have helped shape the project. Some of these projects include: The Medieval Poetry Project and A Scientific Analysis of the Pearl-Gawain Manuscript. New projects are rolling out in force this year, such as the Medieval Homily Project and Medieval Fable Project, while older special series, such as Working in the Archives, continue to prove a resource for young scholars in the field. And now, the MSRB now also features transcripts and reflections on its sister-project, the Meeting in the Middle Ages podcast spearheaded by William Beattie and Ben Pykare. Having a somewhat unique perspective—a kind of bird’s eye view—serving in various roles at the Medieval Studies Research Blog, I’ve had the privilege of advancing the project and watching as it has continued to gain traction and momentum in the field, and I am so excited to see where the next ten years take us, and what is in store for the MSRB.

Most of all, on this 10th anniversary of the Medieval Studies Research Blog, we at Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute want to thank you—our readers—for being so interested and invested in this public medievalism project, and for helping us sustain our viewership. Here’s to another successful year and continued growth and expansion of the Medieval Studies Research Blog.

Stay tuned for a forthcoming Meeting in the Middle Ages podcast interviewing the four blog managers of the Medieval Studies Research Blog, coming this spring!

Richard Fahey, Ph.D.
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

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“Dressing Up”: Medieval Fables, Fashion, and Social Instability

Woodcut of The Ass and the Lion Skin, from a 1479 incunabulum of Heinrich Steinhöwel’s Fables of Aesop

The tradition of dressing in costumes for Halloween is relatively recent, and regionally limited as well. Such costumes are not intended to convince anyone that they are genuine—no one is supposed to think the person dressing up is really a witch, a superhero, etc.—nor are they meant to be worn for more than an evening. No doubt much of the appeal of Halloween costumes is in how they allow us to playfully assume and express a new, temporary identity. In honor of Halloween, I’d like to consider medieval fables about animals who assume a new identity by “dressing up” as another species. These fables all attempt to promulgate the message that one’s identity cannot be changed, and that trying only leads to disaster. Read against the grain, however, such stories in fact reveal that human identity is unlike species difference—that our identities are mutable and contextual, and that this is a source of anxiety for those invested in social hierarchies.

I can think of at least four fables where an animal uses another animal’s skin (or feathers) to represent themselves as a different species. These fables include The Ass and the Lion’s Skin (Perry Index 188/358); The Dog, the Wolf and the Ram (Perry Index 705); The Rook among the Peacocks (Perry Index 472); and The Wolf that Dressed in a Sheepskin (Perry Index 451). The animals’ motivations differ, but in attempting to take up their new role, they start to behave differently than before as well. In the first three fables mentioned, the disguised animal aims to represent themselves as “better” than they really are—stronger, more intimidating, more beautiful—and begins to not only look but act the part. By “dressing up” they are trying to move up as well, in a sense.

Woodcut of The Rook and the Peacock, from Steinhöwel’s Aesop (1479).

The donkey in The Ass and the Lion Skin runs around frightening other livestock in his lion pelt; the sheep in The Dog, the Wolf and the Ram dons the skin of his master’s deceased sheepdog and aggressively pursues the wolf who would harm his flockmates; and the rook adorns himself with peacock feathers and joins the peacocks, strutting around proudly. In The Wolf that Dressed in a Sheepskin (known in proverb form as the “wolf in sheep’s clothing”), the wolf’s intentions are more sinister, as he feigns harmlessness in order to insinuate himself amongst his would-be victims, before he is slaughtered for dinner by the unwitting shepherd. The other three fables conclude with the animals being recognized for what they “really” are, and then hurt or killed as a consequence.

The morals of these medieval fables often draw comparisons between species and social position, particularly class—you shouldn’t aim at too much upward mobility, or wish for what others have, lest it backfire, with you ending up in a worse position than before. For example, the moral to late medieval Scottish poet Robert Henryson’s version of The Dog, the Wolf and the Ram (The Wolf and the Wether) asserts:

Heir may thow se that riches of array
Will cause pure men presumpteous for to be;
Thay think thay hald of nane, be thay als gay,
Bot counterfute ane lord in all degre.
Out of thair cais in pryde thay clym sa hie
That thay forbeir thair better in na steid
Quhill sum man tit thair heillis ouer thair heid… (lines 2595–2601)

Thairfoir I counsell men of everilk stait
To knaw thame self and quhome thay suld forbeir,
And fall not with thair better in debait,
Suppois thay be als galland in thair geir:
It settis na seruand for to vphald weir,
Nor clym sa hie quhill he fall off the ledder:
Bot think vpon the wolf and on the wedder. (lines 2609–2616)1

Here you can see that rich attire will cause poor men to be arrogant; they think they have no superior, if they are dressed as fine, but they imitate a lord in every way. Out of their condition, in pride, they climb so high that they don’t refrain anywhere from injuring their superiors, until someone tips their heels over their heads…

Therefore, I advise men of every rank to know themselves and whom they should refrain from injuring, and fall not into contention with their superior, even if they are as stylish in their dress: it suits no servant to keep up strife, nor to climb so high that he falls off the ladder: just think of the wolf and of the wether.

Woodcut of The Wolf and the Wether, from Steinhöwel’s Aesop (1479).

The narrator’s “counsell” did not just reflect a private opinion. From 1429/30, James I had imposed sumptuary legislation in Scotland, which limited expensive textiles such as silks and some kinds of furs to upper social strata.2 Such legislation was not exclusive to late medieval Scotland, but could be found in many regions across the world, through the eighteenth century.3 “In the case of medieval and early modern Europe,” says historian Lorraine Daston, “over a period of five hundred years (c. 1200–1800), these regulations not only failed to stamp out excess (or what might now be called conspicuous consumption), they arguably exacerbated the very ills they were meant to remedy.” In other words, not only did people not abide by these regulations, the regulations themselves could spur a sort of sartorial “arms race,” inspiring clothesmakers to come up with novel extravagances that were not yet forbidden,4 and consumers to keep up with the newest fashions.

Clothing can visually signify so many aspects of identity (such as class, gender, occupation, religion, and political affiliations), yet the details are inconstant over time and from one place to the next, and clothing can easily be taken on and off. The abovementioned fables, admonitory as they are, express unease with the instability of human social categories as expressed through clothing. Fables often map social hierarchy onto species, and in doing so, they suggest that there is something “natural,” something immutable, about these hierarchies—that a poor man and a lord are as distinct from one another as a sheep and a dog, or a rook and a peacock. But if these hierarchies were really so natural and immutable, the fables wouldn’t have cautionary morals that tell people not to “forget their place.” There would be no need for the admonition, just as there would be no impetus to create (and update) sumptuary regulations, were it not for people constantly breaking boundaries in their fashion choices.

Linnet Heald
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

  1. Denton Fox, ed., The Poems of Robert Henryson (Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 96–7. Modern English translations are my own. ↩︎
  2. Maria Hayward, “‘Outlandish Superfluities’: Luxury and Clothing in Scottish and English Sumptuary Law from the Fourteenth through the Seventeenth Century,” in The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800, ed. Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack (Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 97. ↩︎
  3. For a global history of sumptuary legislation, see The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800, ed. Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack. ↩︎
  4. Lorraine Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton University Press, 2022), p. 156. ↩︎

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Ivo of Chartes, De adventu Domini (On the Advent of the Lord)

Born around 1040, Ivo of Chartres is primarily known to modern scholarship as a canonist, and he is occasionally recognized as a prolific writer of letters, but relatively little regard has been given  to his surviving collection of homilies [1]. This scholarly neglect has been most keenly demonstrated by the absence of critical editions of the sermons, despite the call of Roger Reynolds over thirty years ago, with the overall effect of reducing the quality of academic discourse on one of the more prominent liturgists of the period of the Investiture Controversy [2].

Cambridge, Corpus Christi, Parker Library 289. Ivo of Chartres, Sermo de sacramentis neophitorum, here ascribed to Hugh of St. Victor. Images courtesy of The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. 

The text most commonly cited in scholarly literature, and the one used in my translation of this homily, is that published by Jacques Paul Migne in Patrologia Latina vol. 162, which is in turn based on previous editions by Fronteau and Hittorp. Although I was not able to consult them within the scope of this project, more than seventy manuscripts survive that contain some or all of the homilies included in the Migne edition. The most important would be Chartres, Bibliothèque Municipal 138, which formerly belonged to Chartres Cathedral, but it was heavily damaged in the Allied bombing of the city during the Second World War and is now largely unreadable. The remaining manuscripts are distributed broadly across Western Europe, with large concentrations in the British Museum, various colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the Vatican. A surprising number of the extant witnesses date to the twelfth century, suggesting that this collection became popular shortly after its creation. The collection as a whole, to the best of my knowledge, has never been translated into a modern language. This specific sermon, however, was partially translated in the late 1940s as part of a broader gathering of works from across the Patristic and Medieval homiletic tradition [3].

The homilies in Ivo’s collection fall broadly into two categories. The first, encompassing numbers 1–6 and 22–24, are essentially liturgical commentaries, offering detailed allegorical explorations of various rites (e.g., Sermo I, De sacramentis neophytorum), other incidental features (e.g., Sermo III, De significationibus indumentorum sacerdotium), or specific prayers (e.g., Sermo XXII, De Oratione Dominica) of the Church. The balance of the homilies are on the feasts of the church, beginning with Advent and working through the feasts of the Nativity, Circumcision, Epiphany,  Purification (Candlemas), and the Lenten and Paschal cycles. The audience for some or all of these homilies appears to have been an assembly of the local clergy of Chartres: many of the manuscripts add the phrase “in synodo habitus” (something like “considered in synod”) to the titles of some of the texts, and even in the text below Ivo addresses his audience as “Your Fraternity,” strongly suggesting, at least to me, that he was speaking to other clerics [4].

The text presented below is the first of the festal homilies and discusses Advent, or, as Ivo insists, both Advents of Christ. The entirety of the work maintains a parallel structure, contrasting the first Advent, i.e., the earthly ministry of Christ, with the second, during which Christ will return as judge. Throughout, an emphasis is placed on the redemptive and restorative work that has already been accomplished during the “hidden” Advent, which prepares his audience for the completion of salvation in the second, “manifest,” coming.

Nick Kamas
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

  1. The most comprehensive study of Ivo of Chartres is by Rolf Sprandel, Ivo von Chartres und seine Stellung in der Kirchengeschichte (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1962). His life is also occasionally discussed in other secondary literature, especially on Ivo as a canonist, e.g., Christof Rolker, Canon Law and the Letters of Ivo of Chartres (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
  2. Roger Reynolds, “Liturgical Scholarship at the Time of the Investiture Controversy: Past Research and Future Opportunities,” The Harvard Theological Review, 71 (1978): 109–124).
  3. Ray C. Petry, ed., No Uncertain Sound, Sermons that Shaped the Pulpit Tradition, (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1948), 140–142.
  4. Credit belongs to Margot Fassler for suggesting the setting for these homilies, The Virgin of Chartres (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 136.