New Minor in Medieval Studies programs offered at U.S. universities

Don't worry - medieval studies is a little more gender balanced!

The University of Arizona and the University of Connecticut have both added a Minor in Medieval Studies to their program offerings for undergraduate students. The Daily Wildcat that the University of Arizona approved of the minor last December, after it was proposed by professors Fabian Alfie and Albrecht Classen. They were inspired by the creation of a minor in Hip-Hop Studies at the university to go ahead with their own.

Professor Classen tells the newspaper, "“[The minor is] trying to give students a sense of a certain cultural period. [This] allows [students] to combine — in a unique way ­— philosophy, religion, art history, literature and economics. There is a lot of flexibility, yet with a concrete focus on a cultural period.”

Click here to read the article from the Daily Wildcat

Meanwhile, the University of Connecticut will offer their students to gain a minor in Medieval Studies by taking courses from over 11 departments. The Daily Campus reports that the program is designed so that students take a wide variety of subjects.

Graduate student Brandon Hawk explains, “It encourages people to take classes in music, art history and other subjects. It provides a greater spectrum of a liberal arts education.”

Professor Fiona Somerset, who is one co-head of the program, finds that it will appeal to many types of students. “For aspiring novelists, it’s a great way to get an edge,” she said. “Much of the basis of our pop culture is in the middle ages. If you read fantasy, that’s medieval based.”

Click here to read the article from the Daily Campus

Click here to see our page on Medieval Studies programs in the United States

Look who is starting Viking and Medieval Norse Studies and Medieval Icelandic Studies at the University of Iceland

Post by Viking and Medieval Norse Studies Programme.

Learning about the Middle Ages can't get you a job (so says The National Post)

As universities welcome a new batch of students this month, the media has shifted its attention to what kind of programs they should be learning. According to Robyn Urback, writing in the Canadian newspaper The National Post, you shouldn't want to attend university to learn about the Middle Ages, or anything else in the arts and humanities.

In her article What do you mean I can’t get a job with my medieval feminist studies degree?, Urback explains those students will be sorry "when the realization sets in that that medieval feminist studies* degree is not as marketable as they had anticipated."

She calls on governments and universities to make it easier to get into skilled trades or nursing and at the same time scare high school students into avoiding programs like journalism, history and teaching by telling them about the high debt levels they will achieve and the dismal job prospects they will have after graduating.

Over the last several days several news pieces have come out pointing to problems with getting an education in the liberal arts. In the article Degrees of uncertainty: Is being a university graduate losing its value? from the Vancouver Providence those students "will find university impoverished them beyond anything they could have imagined. They will graduate with staggering debt loads and lurch between low-paying jobs as they fail to find work in their field. Finally, they’ll beat a retreat to college or a trade for more job-focused training. They will belatedly understand what they should have seen from the start: the treacherous disconnect between the job market’s needs and the output of degree-granting sausage ­factories."

Similar concerns are raised in US media - see Diploma Disaster - in Australia - see Wages do not reflect degrees - and in the UK - see Students are turning their back on arts and humanities courses for more 'profitable' vocational degrees

Meanwhile, Michael Gettings, associate professor of philosophy at Hollins University, writing in The Roanoke Times, suggests "Students headed to college this fall should consider that a liberal arts education may very well be their best option for future employment, not only in the short-term, but over the course of their careers." In his article, The value of liberal arts: an education, not just a degree, Gettings adds "Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is an oft-cited example of this connection between the liberal arts and innovation. In his commencement address to Stanford University, Jobs credited his study of calligraphy at Reed College as the inspiration for the industry-changing font design on the Macintosh computer. As American students worry about their post-college jobs, Asian universities hope that they will produce the next Jobs."

If you still want to learn about the Middle Ages, please check out our section on Medieval Studies programs around the world.

* No post-secondary institution in Canada (and probably in the world) offers a degree on medieval feminist studies. Not even a minor.

Black Death, Northampton Castle find, and history-related crowd-funding projects

BoingBoing has just posted an article Shedding light on the Black Death, which offers a good overview of recent research on the plague that struck the medieval world in the 14th century. It includes an interview with Sharon DeWitte of the University of South Carolina, who is one of the leading researchers in the field. She raises some of the important questions still being asked about the Black Death, such as why it was destructive. “The Black Death killed between 30 and 50 percent of the affected population,” she notes. “Modern plague, at most, kills between 2 and 3 percent, and that’s even in areas without access to modern medicine.”

They also note that the recent find of a possible Black Death cemetery in London might be very helpful in this area of research.

The Northampton Chronicle and Echo reports that archaeologists have discovered one of the buildings that was part of Northampton Castle in the 12th century. One archaeologist comments that "we’ve had an awful lot of animal bones, including a dog’s jaw, which could have been a hunting dog from the castle, or maybe a domestic animal.”

Here is a video about the dig:


For those looking to donate some money to worthy history-related causes, please check out a couple of items on Indiegogo and Kickstarter. Tania Picard-Braun emailed us to let us know about her fundraising drive Help Me Go To Graduate School. She is hoping to raise $1000 to help her go to the University of Manchester where she will study for  a Master's degree in Medieval Studies. Tania wrote "I've known I've wanted to be a historian since I was a little kid and that the Middle Ages was my favorite historical period since I was in High School.  While still an Undergraduate, I presented my first academic paper at Plymouth St. University's Medieval and Renaissance Forum titled “The Middle Ages in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Images and Symbols".

Meanwhile, at Kickstarter you can find Ian Crowe looking to raise $9000 to create an art book featuring the 100+ stories of Ovid's masterpiece, Metamorphoses. He writes, "The fact is, despite being so pivotal, Metamorphoses is not as widely read as you'd think. Not anymore, anyway. Maybe it's the length of the book that turns people off. Maybe it's the lack of pretty pictures. Either way, I intend to do something about it."

Speaking of worthy causes, we could always use your support too! :)