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Word, good to know -- I literally only started considering them today, but I'll keep examining the program(s). Lawton looks good, though I'm not familiar with his work. To be honest, I'd be hard pressed to find an English department without at least one Chaucerian though. Even my tiny liberal arts college did (who, as it happens, was my advisor). Which isn't to disparage that fact -- I love Chaucer . It gets tough trying to mediate which Comp Lit programs and which English programs to apply to when one is interested in medieval studies, at least it has been for me. English departments tend to have more medievalists, if they have any, but sometimes (not always) lack the linguistic diversity I crave. Also Wyatt's Torch, I'm super jealous that you're already done with all your applications. I've been so busy that I haven't even completed one! So congrats with that and good luck with acceptances!

Yeah, the remoteness worries me. I grew up in a big city and have now lived in a relatively small town for four years, so I'm not sure how I feel about spending another 5 or 6 years living in a place even more remote than where I currently live. Good to know about their tardy responses though, I hadn't heard about that. On the other hand, it looks like both departments seem to have good placement rates and several people who I'd just love to take classes with. I'm applying to both English and Comp Lit, with a preference toward Comp Lit. I also do work in poetics -- medieval, but also some modern and modernist (I'm a comparatist at heart -- I delight in singling out some select elements and looking at them through different times, places, authors, and languages). I see that you're also applying/applied to WashU -- I recently started looking at their Comp Lit/English program b/c my SO is applying to their law program. It seems great but I've yet to find many signs of life for premodernists....

Thanks, proflorax! I've been looking at UMD since I saw your post and actually might apply there - they have quite a few professors in the English department doing Medieval and Renaissance studies - normally I approach this with caution because at some schools that means mostly Renaissance/Early Modern with one or two medievalists, but there's actually a few medievalists in their English department. I'm probably going to email someone in the department, but do you know off hand of any Anglo-Saxonists who teach there? It looks like most of the medievalists that I've checked out there work with Middle English, though there are some great people there (as you mentioned, Coletti, but also people like Thomas Moser and Kellie Robertson). I wish I could have gone to that "Knowing Nature" conference... Jerome Jeffrey Cohen is kind of a bad-ass and I would have loved to see Robert Stanton's talk on "Isidore of Seville's Biopolitical Order".... among others... did you end up going? I live in the midwest, so there wasn't a chance of me being able to make it anyway... For other medieval literature (or renaissance/early modern for that matter) applicants, is anyone else applying to Penn State? Both their English and Comp Lit departments (which work pretty closely) have some cool medievalists working there and in general seem pretty well-rounded. They offer a graduate minor in Medieval Studies and the MS program has quite a few profs from all over the humanities.

Origins and Development of the English Language by John Algeo (and Carmen Butcher in the latest edition) is a pretty standard textbook/reference I think. I read it in a class I took a while ago on the history of the English language. It's a pretty good reference book to keep on the shelf too. Older editions (the newest being the 7th) are cheaper.

Yeah, basically . and no worries, I think everyone's pretty busy right now. I'm focusing on MS programs, mostly because I like doing more comparative work. Maybe I just don't feel like memorizing the friggin Norton Anthology to take the English subject test too... Totally unprepared for the GRE that I'm taking next week, but I'll hopefully have a nice little WS finished on a strange little 10th century Latin poem and some solid refs.... I'll be honest and say I haven't even started my SOPs, but I work two jobs (one of which is academic and involves some DH nightmares right now) and am taking a couple classes in Latin and OE lit right now, so I've been a little swamped.... Applying to Yale, ND, Cornell, Fordham for MS; Princeton and Penn State for Comp Lit (maybe Duke for Literature?). In the end though, I'd love to just be a professional paleographer and work in some fancy library, so I figure MS is my main grad school focus, with plenty of DH and philology/manuscript studies thrown in for good measure. As for ND, the program is fantastic, but it sure as hell ain't the only one. Looks like you got some good schools to apply to and I'm sure you'll do fine. I was going to apply for Berkeley, but now I'm not so sure. I'm worried about funding and how long it's been taking people to get their PhDs from UCs recently... Money is, unfortunately, a big constraint for me, which is why I'm not even bothering to apply to a lot of MA/foreign programs like Toronto (where I would SO love to go - if i do the Fordham MA I would definitely try to transfer there for the PhD).

Oddly enough, as I was investigating this the exact same thing occurred to me. I have about four people I can get references from for MS programs and I still haven't completely figured out which combinations of three to use (the fourth, who I've taken the least courses with, was my medieval Latin lit/paleography prof too) I thought I had seem somewhere that some program explicitly say it wanted 3-4 refs... maybe it was ND after all.... Anyway, I'm under the impression that you're two primary references will be most crucial, and that any beyond that are just supports (and thus don't necessarily have to align with your specific interests so much as speak to your general scholarly abilities). I don't think it'll make or break you're application, but again I don't see how it could hurt either! Good luck getting in! I'm getting more and more nervous, especially about "reach" schools like ND... where else are you applying?

Okay, so I was curious about this too and started an account for the application (which I admittedly haven't started yet). The preliminary instructions for the general application say three, and the FAQ at the Medieval Institute website says "no more than four," as you mentioned. When you're actually in the application, you create a list of recommenders with their emails so ND can send them an email for them to upload their letters. The actual online application reads, "Please list the identities and contact information for at least three people who will be submitting letters of recommendation on your behalf." (my emphasis) If you have four profs lined up to give you solid recommendations, I would say go ahead and put them all. I don't see how it could hurt.

That's nice to hear. I know the CMS site does say that the WS doesn't necessarily have to be a medieval topic, and to be fair, the paper does discuss medieval poetics at least as much as it does mathematics and more contemporary lit. My formal training in Old Occitan is nonexistent, but I could definitely add some more linguistic analysis based on my research and knowledge of Latin/French. Blech. One more thing to do... Noone ever said it's easy to work a couple jobs, take a couple classes, AND apply to Ph.D. programs I guess. where else are you applying to, unraed? (like the name by the way, even if I feel it uncomfortably reflects much of how I've approached this application season...) I wrote a paper on Northanger Abbey for a class on Austen last fall! Tilney rules. My paper was on the dialectic of Henry and Catherine's courtship and how it reflected/complicated 18th century philosophical debates. What a fun novel. I assume you're applying to English programs?

I'm thinking of using an excerpt from a senior thesis as well, which was also pretty long (~43 pages), on Beckett's The Unnameable and surrealist theory. It's probably my most impressive piece of writing, at least for it's use of critical theory, and I'll be using it for Lit/Comp Lit programs like Duke and maybe Berkeley. I might just excerpt the first chapter, which just focuses on Beckett, with heaps of Blanchot and Deleuze. I don't know about you, but I wrote my senior thesis in chunks and ended up having three pretty distinct chapters plus an introduction, so it won't be too bad to take out a chapter to size and trim it so it seems more self-contained. Obviously a project like that entails enough work for that process to be kind of painful... I'm also applying to medieval studies programs, but to be honest I'm at a loss as to what to use for a WS, since most of my really good medieval studies writing worked largely with things in translation (oops), and then most of my studies became more focused on language mastery and paleography (as well as finishing my English thesis - I did English and medieval studies in undergrad). I have a paper on the poetics of an Old Occitan troubadour sestina which then goes into the mathematics of the form culminating in a discussion of the OuLiPo and an architectonic analysis of a rather structurally complicated variation of the form by a contemporary German poet. I wrote it for an "ethnomathematics" course and the professor has shown interest in publishing it for some sort of project on mathematics and poetry (I'm waiting for details). It's 27 pages, but I figure I could cut out a lot of stuff pretty easily since a lot of the cultural context I used was simply put in because it wasn't written for a medievalist audience. I still worry it's a little too unorthodox to use for a place like Notre Dame's Center for Medieval Studies, but it's one of my stronger papers in terms of displaying comfort in a couple different languages (not to mention the structural analyses of the poems). I have to admit that when a place like Berkeley (for comp lit, at least) says the WS should be no longer than 10 pages, it's kind of a slap in the face.

Hello everyone, glad to see some medievalists here! Regarding theory, I echo poliscar's and cloudofunknowing's recommendations wholeheartedly. Holsinger has done some really great work and points to some modernist theorists who I think would be potentially interesting to medievalists (and non-medievalists!) interested in the roots of contemporary critical theory - I'm a Georges Bataille nut, and he was one of the writers who got me interested in medieval studies in the first place, which is why I found it strange that Holsinger is one of the few to talk about that aspect of his work. Caroline Walker Bynum is, of course, worth checking out too (Holsinger was one of her students) because she's been so influential in the field when it comes to making more room for women's studies and more theoretical approaches to medieval culture (Holy Feast and Holy Fast, from '88, is a good place to start with her - it's a spectacular book). If you're interested in the relationship between print history and theory, I just started reading Virtually Anglo-Saxon by Martin K. Foys, which I'm really enjoying so far. There's also a group called MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: the experimental association for the research of cryptozoology through scholarly theory and practical application) which has a lot of medievalists whose work I've yet to really delve into, but seems really cool. Asa Mittman is one of their ringleaders. In general, knowing some about modern/contemporary philosophy would help with what is done in a lot of more theory-interested MS work. Foucault is obviously used a lot in readings I've done on asceticism/mysticism and women's studies/queer theoretical approaches to that. I found Pierre Hadot's (though he's not really a medievalist) work on Neoplatonism very useful for some work I was doing a couple years ago on Late Antique asceticism too.