A Brief History of ACMRS

In deserto vita: The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS)

by Robert E. Bjork, Director

Someone not particularly enamored of the American Southwest once described Arizona as being thousands and thousands of square miles of kitty litter. It is a strange and arid place for many things, including kitties, this individual thought. But he thought it an especially strange habitat for a center devoted to the study of the Middle Ages and Renaissance yet far, far removed climatically and geographically from Europe and the East Coast of the United States. How could this have happened? From whence did this flower of intellectual life and scholarly endeavor in deserto spring?

It sprang from the vision, tenacity, and drive of its founding Director, Jean R. Brink of the English Department at Arizona State University (ASU). She marshaled her own considerable personal forces as well as those of a host of professors around the state and of Fredi Chiappelli, then Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA. Together they persuaded the Arizona Board of Regents to establish an organized research unit dedicated to stimulating the multi- and interdisciplinary exploration of medieval and Renaissance culture from roughly AD 400 to AD 1700. The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) was officially born in 1981, and since then, it has coordinated programs at ASU, Northern Arizona University (NAU) in Flagstaff, and the University of Arizona (UA) in Tucson. This tri-university structure has both served as an instrument for enhancing cooperation among the three state universities and distinguished ACMRS among other such centers in North America.

Some other of ACMRS's activities and programs distinguish it as well. When I became Director of ACMRS in July, 1994, I had a myriad of plans in mind for augmenting and improving what ACMRS had been doing for years. I thought we needed more of an international presence, a constant flow of publications, consistent public outreach, a web page, a bi-annual newsletter, and cobalt blue coffee mugs inscribed with ACMRS's initials that we could peddle to friends and passersby. And, I thought, we needed an annual, international conference.

Now, nothing is particularly unusual or distinguishing about holding annual conferences. They are legion. In fact when I proudly announced my plan to a colleague at another university, he remarked disapprovingly that at his institution, they had made a philosophical decision that there are too many such conferences and they would therefore not contribute to the chaos by having another. I responded that at my institution, I had made a practical decision that if you hold a conference in February in the premier resort area in North America, people will come. Gladly, I was right. People have come, and they have departed happy. Since February 1995, when we held our first conference, scholars from all over North America and Europe as well as Australia, Japan, and Korea have joined in the festivities, intellectual and otherwise.

From our conferences, other flowers have sprung as well. For example, we held our meeting jointly with that of the MAA in 2001 and with that of the Renaissance Society of America in 2002. We will return to our normal medieval and Renaissance format 13-15 February 2003 with the theme of "Multi-Cultural Europe and Cultural Exchange."

The conference has also occasioned two of ACMRS's several publication ventures, the range of which distinguishes ACMRS from most other centers. In 1995, Brepols Publishers invited ACMRS to develop a book series, the result of which is "Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance." To date, each volume has been shaped by an editor from one of Arizona's three universities, and each is a collection of essays based on selected, substantially enlarged and revised essays from ACMRS's annual conferences and supplemented by other invited essays. Six volumes are in print, the ACMRS/MAA conference volume is nearing completion, and the ACMRS/RSA tome is being developed. Likewise in 1995, two journal editors who attended the first ACMRS conference saw the possibility of a fruitful collaboration and approached me with a proposal. ACMRS thus became co-sponsor, along with the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and the University of Kansas, of Mediterranean Studies, the official interdisciplinary journal of the Mediterranean Studies Association and published annually by Ashgate.

Our annual conference, then, has been good to us and also helped bring us to the attention of Binghamton University and Oxford University Press. In 1995, ACMRS was approached to become the publisher of "Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies" (MRTS), a prestigious series of editions, translations, and major reference works that originated at SUNY Binghamton in 1978. Once at ACMRS, MRTS gained an expanded Editorial Board that includes scholars from ASU, UA, NAU, Binghamton, UCLA, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of London, and a broader range of titles that includes, for example, Old Irish and Old Norse; MRTS also now includes two new sub-series: "Neo-Latin Texts and Translations," co-published by Van Gorcum Publishers in the Netherlands, and "Mediterranean Studies Monographs and Texts," co-published by the Mediterranean Studies Association. Since becoming ACMRS's major publishing program, MRTS has produced 60 new volumes, seven co-published volumes, fourteen reprints of earlier MRTS books, and five reprints of books acquired from other presses. One of our books, Michael Rudick's The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: A Historical Edition (1999), won the 1999-2000 Distinguished Scholarly Edition Prize from the Modern Language Association of America.

Then in 1998, Oxford University Press contacted me about the possibility of my developing a major reference book on the Middle Ages. The result will be The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages (ODMA), a single-volume resource of first resort constructed on the general model of The Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed., 1996) for all key aspects of European history, society, religion, and culture, c.500 to c.1500. The ODMA will be 1,200,000 words long, consisting of approximately 7,000 entries alphabetically arranged; it has an international advisory board of five and an editorial board of twenty-six; and the volume's projected contributors will be close to 300. The book is planned for publication in 2005.

One final fruit at least partially deriving from our annual conference is a new book series we will launch soon entitled "ACMRS Occasional Publications." This series will include books that touch in some way on the study and teaching of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, books such as historical novels and memoirs. The first volume is by the plenary speaker at our first annual conference in 1995, Norman F. Cantor. It's the sequel to his Inventing the Middle Ages, now in its fifteenth printing, and is titled Inventing Norman Cantor: Confessions of a Medievalist. Look for it this fall.

In closing this excursion through ACMRS, I must mention two other programs that make us unique. The first is the online database of the MAA's standing committee on Centers and Regional Associations (CARA). In October 1995, ACMRS was made the official site of the detailed register of the activities of all medieval centers, programs, committees, and regional associations in North America, a register that we update annually.

The second is Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Conceived of in 1995, Iter (http://www.IterGateway.org) is a not-for-profit entity created by a partnership of the Renaissance Society of America; the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies and the Faculty of Information Studies and the John P. Robarts Library at the University of Toronto; and ACMRS. The Sixteenth Century Studies Conference joined Iter as an affiliate society in January, 2001, and the MAA in September, 2001. Iter's online bibliography of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (400-1700) presents data on articles and reviews drawn from the complete runs of 712 medieval and renaissance journals. It is updated daily and adds more journals and about 60,000 new records annually. Iter provides other online resources as well. It is developing, for example, directories of scholars, a bibliography of monographs, and access to conference proceedings, dissertations, and works of art and music.

ACMRS has a plenitude of other programs–from certificate programs to a summer program at the University of Cambridge to Visiting Professorships–to interest you, too. They are described on our home page (http://www.asu.edu/clas/acmrs), which I hope you will visit and then actually visit us in Arizona. The state does contain some desert, I admit, but according to my anecdotal sources, it is also graced with every possible kind of climate in the world except that of a tropical rain forest. If you visit Tempe for our annual conference in February, you can see for yourself. You will find it amazingly compatible with your temperament (whatever it may be) and distinctly unlike the East Coast in February. Bring your sun glasses and speedos.

Printed in "Medieval Academy News" Number 143, Fall 2002

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