Top 10 Medievalists (Alive)

[aveceslamaga]

Other forums do these things, so I thought it would be fun. Most influential (western) medieval historians, in no particular order:

1)  Peter Brown (I am counting him as a medievalist, or at least someone whose work on the Middle Ages was fundamental)

2) Chirs Whickham

3) Rosamond McKitterick 

4) Caroline Walker Bynum

5) Michael McCormick

6) Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie

7) Giles Constable

? Robert Bartlett

9) Patrick Geary

10) Barbara Rosenwein 

[psstein]

From the history of science/medicine side:

1) Ed Grant (96 years old!)

2) Bill Newman

3) Katherine Park

4) Noel Swerdlow

5) Mike Shank

Those are about all I can think of from HoS right now, though medieval science is a pretty unpopular field and has been for the last two decades.

[dr. t]

Not going to rank but: Bynum, Constable, McKitterick, McCormick, Jordan, Wickham, Nirenberg, Moore, Vauchez, Bisson, Freedman.

A lot of men on that list...

 

Putting Brown on a list of medievalists kinda devalues his entire life's work.

Edited May 25, 2018 by telkanuru

[Imenol]

40 minutes ago, telkanuru said:

Not going to rank but: Bynum, Constable, McKitterick, McCormick, Jordan, Wickham, Nirenberg, Moore, Vauchez, Bisson, Freedman.

 A lot of men on that list...

  

 Putting Brown on a list of medievalists kinda devalues his entire life's work.

Not Le Roy Ladurie? Montaillou, pioneering attention to environmental history... 

[dr. t]

Montaillou was fairly decisively ripped apart, environmental history falls firmly at Braudel's feet, I think, and what has he done since 1980?

[Fall '19]

I'd like to include Sunil Kumar's name in this list. (The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate).

[aveceslamaga]

On 5/25/2018 at 6:10 PM, telkanuru said:

Montaillou was fairly decisively ripped apart, environmental history falls firmly at Braudel's feet, I think, and what has he done since 1980?

Methodologically, Montaillu is still important. Also, Le Roy Ladurie pioneered the history of climate, which Michael McCormick has taken up (he still assigns Ladurie in his graduate seminars).

Why Chester Jordan though? He does not seem to have done anything particularly significant. As for Peter Brown, his most significant work covers the same timespan as Chris Wickham's Framing...., so I think it is a bit arbitrary to include the latter but not the former. 

[Sigaba]

 

On 4/28/2018 at 9:41 AM, aveceslamaga said:

Any help would be appreciated!

 

8 minutes ago, aveceslamaga said:

Methodologically, Montaillu is still important. Also, Le Roy Ladurie pioneered the history of climate, which Michael McCormick has taken up (he still assigns Ladurie in his graduate seminars).

Why Chester Jordan though? He does not seem to have done anything particularly significant. As for Peter Brown, his most significant work covers the same timespan as Chris Wickham's Framing...., so I think it is a bit arbitrary to include the latter but not the former. 

Avoid these kinds of statements when talking historiography. It makes you sound like you don't know how to use Google much less how the profession works.

 https://history.princeton.edu/people/william-chester-jordan

 

[Imenol]

I think the point is fair, though. William Chester Jordan has some great publications, but he has not been as influential in the field as to be counted as one of the ten most important medievalists. Something interesting about both lists is the sheer dominance of American and British historians, with the exception of one French author on each list. It seems surprising that there is not a single German medievalist, when the impact of German scholarship on the field has been enormous... 

Edited May 26, 2018 by Imenol

[dr. t]

18 hours ago, Imenol said:

I think the point is fair, though. William Chester Jordan has some great publications, but he has not been as influential in the field as to be counted as one of the ten most important medievalists. Something interesting about both lists is the sheer dominance of American and British historians, with the exception of one French author on each list. It seems surprising that there is not a single German medievalist, when the impact of German scholarship on the field has been enormous... 

As @Sigaba suggested, I think it's a bit... shortsighted... to only look at publications as the sole criterium for what makes one a "great" medievalist. Bisson and Jordan are the last two direct Strayer students, and as such wield immense influence within the American academy. And I would, in general, caution against conflating a scholar's influence on you with their influence on the field. I think it's fair to say that if you're not particularly interested in the French court in the 13th century, Jordan's scholarship has had little direct impact on you, but that doesn't mean he himself has not. A bad (or even apathetic) book review from Jordan will tank your career in a very particular way, for example. You can see this insofar as he's the only person on my list to be Doktorvater to another on the list (Nirenberg).

As someone who often uses the presence or absence of German material as a gauge of the quality of a piece of scholarship, I agree that the lack of German scholars is troubling. I think it has a great deal to do with 1) the reluctance of American academics to learn German and 2) the particularly esoteric nature of German historiography vs. the more integrated (that is, trying to talk outside of sub-disciplines) approaches popular in the American tradition. 

 

19 hours ago, aveceslamaga said:

Methodologically, Montaillu is still important. Also, Le Roy Ladurie pioneered the history of climate, which Michael McCormick has taken up (he still assigns Ladurie in his graduate seminars).

I am well aware of what Mike assigns in his seminars, having taken all of them and having worked with the man for going on seven years now. I would nevertheless maintain that it is more than a bit simplistic to give Ladurie credit for something that was a core component of the Annaliste project from the beginning, and I would suspect that he agrees.

But there are a lot of important scholars who I've omitted from my list. Miller, Harper, J.H. Smith, Rapp, Schorr, Wood, Squatriti, Clanchy, Warren Brown, Kosto, Little, Gillett, Curta, Whittaker, Ganz, Rothman, Rustow, Barthélemy, Farmer, Tolan, Lester, Buc, Newman, MacEvitt, Ellenblum, and Malegam, to name but a few, all have written books that are vitally important for medievalists to read, but haven't made the list.

Your focus on Ladurie is curious.

Edited May 27, 2018 by telkanuru

[Imenol]

Thanks for a great response telkanuru. But didn't Teo Ruiz also study with Strayer? I was under the impression that he did, but I might be wrong.

How influential have been medievalists from other disciplines (literature, art history, philosophy) to medieval historians, overall? Some literary scholars, such as Mary Carruthers and Brian Stock, seem to have had a significant influence in the field, but not many. On the other hand, one would expect engagement with art historians given the so-called turn to materiality, but I am not sure this has been the case overall. How do those of you who have already been in graduate school for a couple of years feel about this? Do you usually read non-historian medievalists? Do you usually attend symposia / cite articles by medievalists based on departments outside history? 

 

 

[dr. t]

12 minutes ago, Imenol said:

But didn't Teo Ruiz also study with Strayer?

He did! I had forgotten he was still kicking! ?

I think non-historians have some influence, but I've actually spoken a lot in my recent work (on medieval constructions of race) about how historians have this idea of themselves as the deans of medieval studies, and how that's creating some rather large problems for the discipline.

A quick browse of my bookshelf would suggest that about a quarter to a third of the books I own are by people who hold PhDs in things other than history, but I can also tell you that my fields lists were almost exclusively works by trained historians. YMMV.