Go Back to School with TEAMS, Volume 2

As August comes to a close, many students in the United States are already back at school or scheduled to start in the next few weeks—and that means it's time for another annual feature on the series of classroom texts published by Medieval Institute Publications and the Teaching Association for Medieval Studies (TEAMS). Each year we'll check in with TEAMS and tell you all about exciting new initiatives, publications and developments to look forward to.

This year we have an update from Gale Sigal, President of TEAMS, as well as exciting information about our three newest TEAMS series from their series editors: David Raybin for French of Medieval England Bilingual Editions, Andrew Hicks for Medieval Music in Context and Julia Verkholantsev for Medieval Textual Cultures of Central and Southeast Europe.

And don't forget to check out our new and forthcoming TEAMS titles!

Greetings from Gale Sigal, President of TEAMS

TEAMS is made up of a group of medievalists from a diversity of fields and educational institutions. Our mission is to spread the love of the medieval throughout academia and to promote the teaching and studying of the field. TEAMS is an independent nonprofit educational corporation supporting medieval studies at the undergraduate, secondary and elementary school levels through the provision of resources and the sharing and circulating pedagogical innovations and techniques.  We welcome teachers at all ranks into our association.

We publish a variety of affordable TEAMS classroom texts in cooperation with Medieval Institute Publications. The goal of our TEAMS publications is to make available to teachers and students texts which have not been available in student editions as a supplement to texts normally in print. The editions are scholarly, maintaining the linguistic integrity of the original works but remain within the parameters of modern reading conventions.

We also sponsor sessions of papers at the annual International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University and other conferences. For May 2023, we are sponsoring/ co-sponsoring the five sessions listed below. Submit your abstracts through the paper proposal portal by Sept. 15!

TEAMS also publishes a peer-reviewed electronic journal, "The Once and Future Classroom," and sponsors an annual teaching prize to recognize excellence in teaching medieval studies in the K-12 classroom.

"The Once and Future Classroom" encourages and facilitates medieval studies at the K-12 and college levels. This journal is open source and dedicated to teachers of subjects related to the Middle Ages. We publish various types of work, including:

• accounts for teachers of emerging work in fields of research related to medieval studies
• lesson plans
• critical reviews of web resources, audiovisual materials, and other secondary works suitable for classroom use
• reports on promising new classroom techniques, educational programs, curricula, digital innovations, and methods of evaluating instructional effectiveness
• annotated bibliographies on medieval studies themes
• responses to previous articles
• reviews of literature and films related to medieval studies and directed at children, young adults, and college level adults

Manuscripts and any additional inquiries should be submitted to Gale Sigal, Managing Editor of "The Once and Future Classroom."

Become a member of TEAMS for free, send us an abstract for one of our sessions at the upcoming ICMS, or submit an essay to the "Once and Future Classroom" – it’s very easy!

French of Medieval England Bilingual Editions

By David Raybin, Professor Emeritus, Eastern Illinois University

To judge from the syllabi of typical courses in medieval English literature, late-medieval Britain was largely monolingual. When French (and Latin, Scots, Irish, or Welsh) texts are included as supplements, they are solely in translation. The peer-reviewed French of Medieval England Bilingual Editions series is designed to convey the multilingual character of late-medieval Britain by encouraging the editing and translation of significant Anglo-French texts that will be made available in accessible texts and translations. The volumes are designed for classroom use in courses in Medieval English, Medieval French and Anglo-Norman, and Comparative Medieval Studies, and they will also be valuable to advanced scholars in related fields such as history and philosophy. Publications will feature edited texts and facing-page modern English translations.
 
Our particular interest is in neglected works and authors, including previously inedited or hard-to-access texts. Proposals or completed manuscripts to be considered for publication by Medieval Institute Publications should be sent to series editor David Raybin or to Tyler Cloherty, acquisitions editor for the series.

Medieval Music in Context

By Andrew Hicks, Associate Professor of Music and Medieval Studies, Cornell University

MIP has a rich tradition of publishing significant works in the history of medieval music. Over the past decade (and change), they have published Guy of Saint-Denis’ Tractatus de tonis (2017), Aribo’s De musica and Sententiae (2015), and Johannes de Grocheio’s Ars musice (2011), among others. The new, peer-reviewed TEAMS series Medieval Music in Context seeks to consolidate and extend this tradition by celebrating and elucidating medieval musical cultures in their many and varied contexts, encompassing a wide range of languages and cultural expressions: Latin and European vernaculars, Byzantine Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, and more. Above all, the series seeks to put accessible and affordable editions, translations, and studies in the hands of students and teachers, who, should they seek to expand beyond readily available textbooks and anthologies in medieval musical thought and theory, are too often left with only specialized and expensive publications.

But medieval music did not (then) and should not (now) belong only to the recondite world of specialists. To encourage wide-ranging submissions, we interpret “medieval music” as broadly as possible, including literatures about musics, secular and sacred songs traditions (notated or unnotated), liturgical practices, theoretical treatises, philosophical reflections on musical theory or practice, debate literature about the propriety and power of musical expression, and more!

Proposals or complete manuscripts to be considered for publication should be sent to series editor Andrew Hicks or Tyler Cloherty, acquisitions editor for the series.

Medieval Textual Cultures of Central and Southeast Europe

By Julia Verkholantsev, University of Pennsylvania

The Medieval Textual Cultures of Central and Southeast Europe series is a peer-reviewed series that publishes modern English translations of medieval texts of diverse genres and content that focus on central and southeastern European lands in order to promote and make teaching and research of this region accessible to wider audiences. By making primary sources available and properly contextualized in contemporary academic discourse for use in the classroom and in research for medievalists working in a range of disciplines and linguistic traditions, the series strives to fill an important gap in the cohesive study of medieval European Latinity and related Slavonic traditions of Central and Southeast Europe.

In addition to an annotated English translation of a primary source, each volume of the series contains a critical introduction that provides relevant cultural and historical background, a balanced and inclusive overview of the state of scholarship about the published text, and select bibliography for further reading. In most cases, annotated English translations are accompanied by parallel original texts copied from a manuscript or a published edition, usually without full scholarly apparatus.

Proposals for new volumes should include samples of introductory material and annotated translation. Proposals or completed manuscripts to be considered for publication should be sent to series editor Julia Verkholantsev or Tyler Cloherty, acquisitions editor for the series.