 |
      |
 |
|
||
Former Director Paul Hyams reflects (in the third person) on his year of leave as he prepares to resume his duties in 2006/07: Paul Hyams’ year on leave has been quite packed. He taught in a summer school on “Conflict in the Middle Ages” for our new partners of the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, spent the Fall as a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and then researched and taught at our other partner institution, the École des chartes in Paris. He presented papers to learned audiences in England and Paris, as well as several U.S. universities. The text of a French lecture at the Sorbonne, Paris, on “La joie de la liberté et le prix de la respectabilité: Autour des chartes d’affranchissement anglaises (v. 1160-1307)”, is available at http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/document321.html, and a fuller version will appear in the Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes. This and several of the other presentations derives from the year’s main project, to assemble a comprehensive dossier of medieval English manumission charters toward a book provisionally entitled The Joy of Liberty and the Price of Respectability. Other talks presented parts of a second project, currently on the back burner, concerning legal argument and proof in the age before the legal revolution of the twelfth century, and more generally on the social history of truth in the period. Yet a third project under way is to co-edit a book Settling the Hash: Vengeance in the Middle Ages, with a former Cornell student, Susanna Throop, who has provided the initiative and (in all honesty) done most of the work. He is to contribute both a chapter (“Was there such a thing as Feud in the High Middle Ages?”) and a final brief summation jointly with Dr. Throop. During the year, he was also commissioned to organize within the program a high-profile international conference on Medieval Poverty for a Cornell initiative on “Poverty, Inequality, and Development”. This will capitalize on the program’s administrative experience from 6 years of successful Haskins Society meetings. We shall make every effort to ensure, not just a really top-level conference leading to an important volume, but also that our own students are equipped to gain the maximum benefit from the experience. The hope is to confront medieval notions and practices with current development theories on the subject of poverty, and thereby, perhaps, to adjust both. The meeting is scheduled for Spring 2008.
|
       |