DESERT HARVEST—Fall 2008
Vol. 16, No. 2

The view through the round window
by Professor Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Director

   DARK HORSES AND BRIGHT FUTURES! The Heiko A. Oberman Chair in Late Medieval and Reformation History is brilliantly occupied! In a time of drastic budget cuts, the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies and the Department of History have had the privilege, owing to your faithful generosity over the last eight years (as well as to a state-created interest-matching fund in the Provost’s office), of carrying out one of only a handful of faculty “hires” in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. The search committee (Susan Crane, Alison Futrell, David Graizbord from Judaic Studies, Douglass Weiner, student member Sean Clark, and I) read through a mass of impressive books and articles, weighed and thought, listened to and interviewed on campus an expanded group of very distinguished finalists, sought our colleagues’ reactions, weighed and thought some more—and finally voted.
   The decision favored Dr. Ute Lotz-Heumann, a young German scholar who took the doctorate at Humboldt University, Berlin, on aspects of the Irish Reformation under the direction of the renowned Reformation specialist, Professor Heinz Schilling. She subsequently taught at Humboldt for six years as she prepared the Habilitations-schrift, the “second dissertation” that remains almost obligatory for anyone hoping to take up an academic career in Germany. Most of us on the search committee could not have predicted that our choice would fall upon Lotz-Heumann, for she was only nine years past the doctorate. Yet what she has accomplished during those nine years has made her a personage to reckon with in early modern history, and its qualities and volume bowled us over. (See page 3.) Her performance under pressure during her visit to the University of Arizona last April left no doubt that she should occupy the Oberman Chair.
   Since her arrival in Tucson on August 31, Lotz-Heumann has shown her mettle in unanticipated arenas. Savvy and courageous, she has leapt with other UA faculty into discussions with President Shelton and Provost Hay about what the university ought to be in an underfunded future.
   The qualities of the first Oberman Professor will continue to draw the nation’s finest graduate students in this field to our midst. Please come to our celebratory banquet and her inaugural lecture on November 19. Lotz-Heumann’s presence is a cause for rejoicing.

Introducing the First Heiko A. Oberman Professor
Professor Ute Lotz-Heumann, Humboldt University
by Professor Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Director

 

   Heiko A. Oberman Professor Ute Lotz-Heumann has achieved more since receiving her Ph.D. than many academics do in an entire career. She speaks nearly flawless, unaccented English because her undergraduate major was English language and literature. Then, too, she has spent several years doing research in the Anglophone world: chiefly in Dundee and St. Andrews, in New York City, and in Dublin.
   Lotz-Heumann stems from the vicinity of Frankfurt am Main. After completing the German equivalent of an M.A. at Justus Liebig University in Giessen, with distinction, she began work on the Ph.D. at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her supervisor was the renowned early modernist and Reformation specialist, Professor Heinz Schilling. She completed the doctorate summa cum laude in 1999, on the subject of the Reformation in Ireland. She published her dissertation in 2000 and is translating it into English. From 2000 to 2007 she served as an assistant professor, a rank which in German universities does not come with hope of tenure, at Humboldt University. In that capacity, she taught undergraduate and graduate students alike, and designed courses that ranged in subject from the Reformation to early modern princes and governments, holy waters, women's history, the body, theories of cultural history, the Enlightenment, Samuel Pepys's diary, Jane Austen's novels as historical sources, the early modern bourgeoisie, and much more. She comes to us as a veteran and highly popular university instructor.
   With Stefan Ehrenpreis, she wrote a second book, "Reformation and the Confessional Age,” which appeared in 2002. She has coedited four additional volumes. She is on the brink of completing the requisite German "second dissertation," the Habilitationsschrift, entitled in English “The German Spa: A Heterotopia of the Long Eighteenth Century.” The concept of 'heterotopia' is drawn from the thought of Michel Foucault.  Lotz-Heumann will show how, in the spa environment, both the nobility and upwardly striving, prosperous members of the bourgeoisie were able to suspend at least some of the class barriers that normally separated them and to advance their mutual interests through their interaction.
   Lotz-Heumann is the author of 42 articles and chapters. She has given 58 lectures, learned papers, and research presentations. She has served as editorial assistant to the European Managing Coeditor of the “Archive for Reformation History,” and as book review editor to the on-line journal “Sehepunkte.” In 2007, she was named to the governing board of the Verein für Reformationsgeschichte, the German equivalent of the North American Society for Reformation Research. She will retain this position when resident in America.
   The professional promise of this colleague is outstanding. She has also shown herself in a brief time to be canny and courageous in the face of pressure from the president and the provost to reinvent the UA.
   Her husband, Dr. Dirk Heumann (which Americans often pronounce ‘human’), has just arrived. He is a theoretical physicist employed by Vacuumschmelze GmbH & Co. and is transferring to their American offices.

Introducing doctoral candidate
Rebecca Mueller, M.A., University of Cambridge
by Sean Clark, doctoral student

   Along with welcoming Professor Ute Lotz-Heumann to the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies this semester, we are also very pleased to have Rebecca Mueller as a new student joining us around the seminar table.
   Rebecca was born and raised near Bern, Switzerland.  From quite early on she knew that she wanted to spend some time studying in the United States and, after leaving high school and receiving training as a dental hygienist, she got the opportunity to attend Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. Her first plan was to study psychology. However, it was history that fascinated her. Taking several US and world history classes from inspiring instructors changed her mind and her major. She was an involved student, and became president of Weber State’s chapter of Phi Alpha Theta. In 2006, Rebecca graduated magna cum laude, being named an outstanding student in the social sciences.
   Rebecca’s next academic journey took her to the University of Cambridge, in England. Studying under Dr. Ulinka Rublack, she completed a master’s degree in philosophy in the astonishingly short time of only nine months! Her thesis dealt with the life and thought of the famous Swiss reformer, Heinrich Bullinger.
   While at Cambridge, Rebecca was casting about for likely places to take the Ph.D. Professor Rublack’s immediate suggestion was the Division and Professor Susan C. Karant-Nunn.  On visiting Tucson last spring, Rebecca was drawn by the sense of community in the Division and History Department, the academic rigor and focus, and the outstanding faculty and staff.  Though she does not yet have a precise topic for her dissertation, her research interests include the history of emotions, and parent/child relations in correspondence. Herzlich Willkommen, Rebecca! 

Won: three research fellowships

   Julie Kang, M.A., California State University, Los Angeles, has won a Fulbright Fellowship to France. The compelling dissertation topic she has chosen is the conversion/ reconversion of Huguenot women and girls beginning in Paris in the 1630s, long before the official revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The device was a group of institutions called the Nouvelles Catholiques, begun under the influence of Bishop François Fénelon. Kang’s preliminary foray into French libraries and one archive (Avignon), plus her exploitation of the internet, have indicated that only one scholar has studied these houses for females. Kang will pursue not merely the factual course of events—the establishment of houses, the formulation of courses, the methods of indoctrination—but also the matter of identity-change.

   Mary Kovel, M.A., Boise State University, has won an Institute of Historical Research Mellon Fellowship for Dissertation Research in the Humanities in addition to a Historical Society of the Episcopal Church Grant. Her dissertation project is certain to contribute to what used to be called “new knowledge” about sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English history. It is provisionally entitled “The Significance of Hair and Head Coverings in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England.” She intends to demonstrate that hair styles, veiling, and head coverings were more than indicators of status in society or of moral uprightness. Representatives of church and state debated such matters as love-locks in energetic treatises that sometimes reached the level of polemics.

   Samantha Kuhn, M.A., University of Chicago, has won an Institut für europäische Geschichte Research Fellowship to carry out research on the social context and attitudes of German humanist-knight, Ulrich von Hutten. His life was short but highly colorful—as Kuhn says, “a poet laureate of the Holy Roman Empire, a mercenary in the Italian wars, a scathing critic of the scholastics, the papacy and the clergy.” He was a champion of German cultural and moral equality with the Italian intellectuals. The existing scholarship on Hutten is slender. Kuhn will examine this man’s social ideals and place him within his class of the lesser imperial knights and reassess the assertion that the knights were sinking in importance and viability in the early sixteenth century.

Deciphering Sir Thomas More's hand
by Elizabeth Ellis-Marino, master's student

   Until I got to St. Louis, I never thought Thomas More would have the potential to ruin my weekend. In high school I had read “A Man For All Seasons,” and as an undergraduate I had giggled my way through his scatological correspondence with Martin Luther. And Thomas More always seemed to me one of the more accessible of the figures of the Catholic Reform. He was, in my mind, a great thinker and family man who did the admirable thing when the time came. This all changed when I was presented with a photocopy of a letter in his handwriting on a Friday afternoon. After a week of working with the relatively easy humanist and scholastic hands, I made my first acquaintance with English Chancery handwriting.
   With fellow Division student, Samantha Kuhn, I attended the Society for Reformation Research’s paleography seminar which was held this summer on the campus of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. Besides affording us an opportunity to meet graduate students in early modern history working at other institutions, the seminar was our first introduction to the vagaries of the handwriting styles of the late medieval and Reformation era.
   The class started out slowly, first introducing us to the common abbreviations of the time through late medieval printed texts. With my trusty “Cappelli’s Dictionary of Latin and Italian Abbreviations,” I was able to navigate through Jean Gerson and several medieval sermons, all in print. Soon handwritten texts were introduced, and Samantha and I read papal bulls, letters by such luminaries as Erasmus and Edward VI of England, and a Latin copy of the Wittenberg Concord of 1536, complete with the signatures of Martin Luther, Martin Bucer, and Philipp Melanchthon. Then, over the weekend, we were given assignments designed to introduce us to handwriting used for non-Latin documents. I was assigned Thomas More, and I spent the better part of my weekend trying to make head or tail of a letter he wrote to Thomas Cranmer.
   Thanks to this two-week course, I feel far better prepared to tackle the documents that I will encounter in the archives during my dissertation research. I now have a much better understanding of the handwriting styles of the late medieval and Reformation eras. I now know how to handle blots on the page, insertions into the text, the idiosyncratic spelling of the era, and the seemingly endless obscure abbreviations people employed to save space, ink, paper, and their hands.
   That we graduate students were able to learn paleography by studying such famous texts is due to the SRR’s excellent collections. The society boasts a microfilm library that contains images of archival documents from all over the German-speaking world, as well as some Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and French documents. It was from these microfilms that our copies of these documents came. I am grateful to all the society’s members, who must have spent countless hours photographing and cataloging these documents for the benefit of future scholars. Without them, I would never have been able to triumph over the handwriting of such a saint and martyr as Sir Thomas More. In the end, I myself did not become a martyr!

Among the Sisters of the Visitation
by Thomas Donlan, doctoral student

   In the fall semester of 2007, when I first began to study religious communities in early modern France, I came across a striking passage in the founding documents of the Sisters of the Visitation of Saint Mary. The charter for this new order, founded in 1610 by François de Sales and Jeanne de Chantal, respectfully acknowledged the “heroic practices and striking virtues” of the other orders in France, but asserted that “this little Institute of the Visitation” would be “like a humble dovecote of innocent doves” neither “seen nor understood by the world.” This brief assertion provoked numerous questions: What did de Sales and de Chantal mean by the “heroic practices and striking virtues” of the other orders and why wouldn’t they want their order to emulate them? Why were Visitation nuns not to be seen or understood?
   Before long I found some leads to build on. As it turned out, de Sales had been promoting “douceur,” that is, gentleness or kindness, in Catholic piety for nearly two decades before the creation of the Visitation order. Furthermore, gentleness figured centrally in the spiritual advice that de Sales had been giving to de Chantal since they first met in 1603. Troubled by the intensity of de Chantal’s penitential practices (which included self-mutilation) in the wake of her husband’s death, de Sales insisted that the widow give them up. He taught her that the spiritual progress she so deeply desired required easing, and perhaps abandoning altogether, corporal penitence. Needless to say, these discoveries prompted new questions and hypotheses for me. But it was at least becoming clear that the origins of the Visitation order could not be understood independently of the personal histories of de Sales and de Chantal and their spiritual friendship.
   As I delved deeper into my topic over the course of the semester, another discovery presented itself to me: Moulins, a small town in central France, had a museum devoted to the history of the Visitation order. The Musée de la Visitation held thousands of material items (vestments, relics, religious objects) from seventeenth-century Visitation convents and a rich variety of primary sources dealing with the birth and early development of the order in France and Savoy. Fantastic! I thought and immediately emailed Gérard Picaud, curator of the museum, about a visit. Within days Monsieur Picaud replied, agreeing to host me at the Musée and arrange for me to stay in the guest quarters of the local Visitation convent where I could interview some of the nuns. Double fantastic! I thought and after sharing the exciting news with my dissertation director, Professor Susan C. Karant-Nunn, I began to prepare for the trip which would take place over the winter break.
   My experience in Moulins, while brief, proved invaluable to my research on de Sales, de Chantal, and the Visitation order, which have now become my dissertation topic. Over the course of my stay I studied correspondence of the founders, early Visitation community bulletins, and biographical accounts of the order’s first nuns. These sources, which I continue to work on, have much to say about “heroic practices and striking virtues” of the other monastic houses of the day and the alternative piety offered in Visitation “dovecotes.” In addition to the archival materials, numerous conversations with the Visitation nuns of Moulins proved stimulating. I asked them their thoughts on the founders of their order to which they had much to say. One marveled at the poetic imagery of de Sales’ writings; another admired de Chantal’s efforts to be reconciled with the man who accidentally killed her husband in a hunting incident. In short, each nun had a particular bit of Visitation history they wished to highlight and share. It was striking just how present the past was to them.
   As I work on fellowship applications to fund my dissertation research next year, I am very much looking forward to returning to France to study this topic further. Through conversations both with the Visitation nuns and the historical records of their order I hope to make better sense of the douceur that emerged in an otherwise militant, non-gentle early modern France.

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