Dalhousie University

Abstract

There are only a handful of scholars who have their primary appointments in Dalhousie departments and a primary interest in medieval fields. In French, we have Hans Runte, best known among medievalists for his work on the Seven Sages of Rome, but his more recent publications have been in the field of Acadian letters. In English, we have Hubert Morgan, who works in Middle English, Old Norse, and Old English (romance, saga, and epic are particular interests), and Melissa Furrow, who has finally completed a long labour on reception of romances in medieval England (Expectations of Romance: Drasty Rymyng or Noble Tales, currently under review) and is now returning to an earlier editorial project (Ten Fifteenth-Century Comic Poems) to revise for a new edition with TEAMS. In History, we have Cynthia Neville, well known personally to members of CSM for her extensive work 011 the national and international scene on prize, review, and adjudication committees, and more broadly known through her scholarship on late medieval English legal history and on Scottish social, political, and cultural history. She is the author of Violence, Custom, and Law: The Anglo-Scottish Border Lands in the Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh UP, 1998) and the forthcoming Native Lordship in Anglo-Norman Scotland: The Earldoms of Stratheam and Lennox, 1170-1350 (Four Courts Press). A recent and exciting addition is Jennifer Bain in Music, a music theorist who works on Hildegard of Bingen, and on fourteenth-century music. This tiny number and the clearcut disciplinary boundaries proclaimed by departmental organisation might suggest that medieval study at Dalhousie has fallen off steeply from the days when we had a formally recognised honours degree in Medieval Studies and a bigger pool of faculty. It is true, a bigger pool would be helpful, and the priority within English for the next appointment is for a medievalist. But in various ways medieval studies at Dalhousie does better than it looks as if it should.