Jan Ziolkowski, born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1956. Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Medieval Latin at Harvard University, Cambridge.
Fellow (1 September 2005 – 30 June 2006)
WORDS OF OLD WOMEN IN WESTERN TRADITION
I have never had ten months even half so prolific as my stint at NIAS has been. Two pre-NIAS commitments required some attention. The copyediting of The Virgilian Tradition to 1500, in collaboration with Michael C. J. Putnam, to be published by Yale University Press, required recurrent attention as did Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies; forthcoming from University of Michigan Press, which took a few weeks in January.
Mainly this year I have worked on three new books. First I concentrated what is to be a book entitled Letters of Peter Abelard, Beyond the Personal, accepted for publication by the Catholic University of America Press. Then I turned to producing a translation, with detailed commentary, of The Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf. The manuscript is complete, although it needs a few weeks of revision. My final major commitment was to examine the reception of a medieval tale from 1873 to the present day, the basis for an eventual book, Juggling the Middle Ages: The Reception of the “Jongleur de Notre-Dame.”
Because the conditions for research and writing at NIAS have been so marvelous, I have also been able to convert a few past lectures into articles: “Blood, Sweat, and Tears in the Poem of Walter”; “Of Arms and the (Ger)man: Literary and Material Culture in the Waltharius”; “Vergil, Peter Abelard, and the End of Neumes”; and “Cultures of Authority in the Long Twelfth Century.” Two small items were an encyclopedia entry on the “Middle Ages” for an encyclopedia of folktales and fairy tales and a book review. One final cooperative venture has been an edition, with translations and commentaries, of a group of early twelfth-century Latin poems from France, provisionally entitled (uncharismatically) “Houghton MS Lat 300: Groups 1 and 5-6.”