Giles Constable (October 24-25)

In late October, the Department welcomes Professor Giles Constable.  Professor Constable started his illustrious teaching career fifty years ago at the University of Iowa.  Soon being called back to Harvard, where he had received his degrees, he proceeded to publish a series of important books and studies and to establish himself as a hard-working and eminent and scholar, and as mentor for many young medievalists. Certainly both Connie Berman and Katherine Tachau see themselves among those whose careers he helped foster.

His undergraduate and graduate students at Harvard include a long list of leading contributors to the discipline, the late Jon Boswell who went to Yale, Sharon Farmer at UC - Santa Barbara, Kathryn Reyerson at University of Minnesota, and Caroline Bynum, his successor at the Institute for Advanced Study.  Among them you will notice an inordinate number of women accepted and supported in the years when history departments were far from open to women scholars.  To these could be added the many students whom he advised at Dumbarton Oaks, when a visitor at Catholic and Georgetown Universities in Washington, DC, and those (including Connie Berman)  who worked on Matrix, the medieval religious women and communities dictionary project directed by Mary Martin McLaughlin and Suzanne Wemple.

He was a good friend of the late Ms. James Bruce Ross, whose translation of Galbert of Bruges, The Murder of Charles the Good so many of our students have read. Connie Berman recounts that he was a regular attendee at the medieval history study group that met in her home in the years when they both lived in DC.  So he is a very approachable individual and he will speak on topics that will interest everyone. 

On Monday the 24th, Professor Constable will speak on the famous Carolingian “plan of Saint Gall,” an idealized sketch of a monastic enclave discovered inside the binding of a medieval manuscript which includes names of vegetables in the kitchen garden and the arrangement of beds in the monastic dormitory. On Tuesday the 25th, the lecture will be on the Crusades, a topic on which he published his first articles in 1953.

While he can be described as a very approachable and friendly guest, his curriculum vitae is also that of an amazingly prolific scholar.  His books include Monastic Tithes: From their Origins to the Twelfth Century (1964); The Letters of Peter the Venerable, 2 vols. (1967); Medieval Monasticism: A Select Bibliography (1976); Cluniac Studies (1980); Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. with Robert Benson et al. (1982); People and Power in Byzantium, with Alexander P. Kazhdan (1982);  Monks, Hermits, and Crusaders in Medieval Europe (1988); Three Studies in Medieval Religion and Society Thought (1995); The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (1996); Culture and Spirituality in Medieval Europe (1996); Religious Life and Thought (Eleventh - Twelfth Centuries (1979); “Love and Do what you Will:” The Medieval History of an Augustinian Precept (1999); Cluny from the Tenth to the Twelfth Centuries: Further Studies (2000); ed. with Bernard Smith, Libellus de diversis ordinibus et professionibus qui sunt in aecclesia (rev. ed. 2003); ed. Consuetudines benedictinae variae (1975); ed. with Theodore Evergates, The Cartulary and Charters of Notre-Dame of Homblières (1990), The Letters between Bernard Berenson and Charles Henry Costes (1993).  In addition there are essays, reviews and articles for every year from 1953 through 2005 – in this last year among other items is the republication of a part of his book on “Monastic Orders” in Connie Berman’s new collection on Medieval Religion.