Jan Ziolkowski

At Harvard he has chaired the Committee on Medieval Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature. He founded the Medieval Studies Seminar, which holds regular meetings in the Barker Center that are open to the public. In his teaching he offers courses in Classics and in Comparative Literature, as well as in the Core Curriculum (Literature and Arts C-22 "European Culture in the Latin Middle Ages").

Publications
He has written nearly a hundred articles and books as well as more than fifty book reviews. The books encompass critical editions of Medieval Latin texts (such as The Cambridge Songs; Jezebel: A Norman Latin Poem of the Early Eleventh Century; and two of poetry by Nigel of Canterbury), a book on intellectual history (Alan of Lille's Grammar of Sex: The Meaning of Grammar to a Twelfth-Century Intellectual), a book on literary history (Talking Animals: Medieval Latin Beast Poetry), and collections of essays written by himself and others (On Philology and Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages).

His side interest in the history of scholarship is evidenced in the introductions he has written for the 1993 Princeton University Press reprint of Erich Auerbach's Literary Language and its Public and the 1998 reprint of Domenico Comparetti's Vergil in the Middle Ages. He also translated an essay by Auerbach that was included as an appendix to the 2003 (fiftieth-anniversary) edition of Mimesis.

In recent years he has been happily involved in collaborative translation projects. The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, coedited by Mary Carruthers, was published in hardcover in 2002 and came into paperback in 2004. He edited an English translation of Dag Norberg's Introduction to the Study of Medieval Latin Versification, which was published in cloth and paper by Catholic University of America Press in 2004. A very large anthology of Latin texts and English translations on The Vergilian Tradition to 1500, coedited with Michael Putnam, has been accepted by Yale University Press.

Other large projects in progress include a book entitled Nota Bene: Reading Classics and Writing Songs in the Early Middle Ages, which will appear among the Publications of the Journal of Medieval Latin, and another on Fairy Tales From Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Past of Wonderful Lies, which is to be published by University of Michigan Press.

Medieval Latin at Harvard
Undergraduates in Classics may specialize in Medieval Latin as a degree option. Concentrators in History and Literature, Literature, and Folklore and Mythology sometimes make Medieval Latin a formal component in their degrees. Of course, pursuing a degree in Medieval Latin is by no means required of students who are interested in the field. After two terms of college Latin or the equivalent, students may take Latin 3m "Introduction to Medieval Latin Prose." Other courses are open to students who have studied more Latin.

At one time or another there have been graduate students in almost all the different humanities departments and programs at Harvard who have incorporated Medieval Latin into their general examinations and/or their dissertations. Although Medieval Studies at Harvard is decentralized, the community is strong at all levels (undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and librarians). Links between the Committee on Medieval Studies and the Department of the Classics have been particularly numerous and strong in both Latin and Greek. Since the time of Herbert Bloch (emeritus since the early 1980s), Classics has had a Ph.D. program in Medieval Latin philology. Graduates in the past decade have included Marc Laureys, who heads the seminar for Medieval Latin and Neo-Latin philology at the University of Bonn in Germany, and Bridget Balint, assistant professor at Indiana University. Comparative Literature, although it does not have an explicitly labeled "medieval track," has attracted and accepted a number of medievalists who have included Medieval Latin as either their major literature or one of their minors.

Resources for Research
Jan Ziolkowski is very enthusiastic not just about the people in the Harvard community but also about the Harvard College Library, with its marvelous resources in printed materials and electronic databases. For a sense of the Library's holdings in general, conduct a sample search or two in the electronic catalog HOLLIS. For information on research materials in Medieval Latin (such as dictionaries), consult "Inter Libros: Gateway to Classics and Medieval Studies Research at Harvard." For a sampling of the manuscript holdings in Houghton Library, visit the relevant section of the course website for Literature and Arts C-22 "European Culture in the Latin Middle Ages."

(Photo by Jeffry Pike)

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