DESERT HARVEST—Spring 2009
Vol. 17, No. 1

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

   It takes a community of scholars. In the mid-1990s, Hillary Rodham Clinton popularized an African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.” I would like to adapt this for my own purposes: It takes a community of scholars to produce outstanding Ph.D.s. I have been so busy raising money toward the Heiko A. Oberman Chair (we’re at $1.66 million; please contribute!) that I have delayed overlong in saluting the many colleagues across North America and Europe who have lent their expertise and their patronage to Division graduate students as these progressed toward dissertation topics, applied for grants, and required references for the job market. Whereas by tradition, each doctoral candidate is associated with one supervisor—in Germany referred to as the Doktorvater, and in the past nearly always, as indicated, male—on assuming the role of overseer I have come to the view that the interests of each senior student ought to be encouraged whether or not they fall within my own specialty.
   From the 1999 beginning of my supervision of doctoral students at Arizona, I have solicited the aid of colleagues across the geographic and topical spectrums. They have freely given. My pointed, insistent thanks go to Irena Backus (Geneva), Peter Blickle (Berne), Thomas A. Brady, Jr. (UC Berkeley); Barbara Diefendorf (Boston University), Irena Dingel (Mainz), James Estes (Toronto), Amanda Eurich (Western Washington), Kaspar von Greyerz (Basel), Berndt Hamm (Erlangen-Nuremberg), Karin Maag (Meeter Center, Calvin College), Guido Marnef (Antwerp), Richard A. Muller (Calvin Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids), Graeme Murdock (Trinity, Dublin), Catherine Richardson (Kent), Bernard Roussel (the Sorbonne, Paris), Erika Rummel (Toronto), Anne Jacobson Schutte (Virginia), James D. Tracy (Minnesota), the late Günther Wartenberg (Leipzig), and Merry Wiesner-Hanks (Wisconsin-Milwaukee). A great many more individuals have lent their aid and expressed their willingness to do so, including Division alumni like Robert Bast (Tennessee) and Andrew Gow (Alberta). Alumni  continue to form a cohort of mutual advice that seamlessly incorporates each newly baked doctor (neugebackener Doktor, as they say in German!). I am confident that when established, each recipient of such magnanimity will pass it on to the next generation of emerging scholars.

Susan C. Karant-Nunn appointed Regents' Professor of History
by Ute Lotz-Heumann, Heiko A. Oberman Professor

   Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Director of the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies, has been appointed as a UA Regents’ Professor of History. The formal inauguration will take place this coming fall. All members of the Division join me in congratulating her on this prestigious honor!
   The title “Regents’ Professor” represents the highest of faculty ranks and is conferred on only three percent of the tenured faculty, whose exceptional scholarship and outstanding achievements have earned them national and international recognition. Each nominee faces a rigorous nomination process and is expected to exemplify the highest academic merit in scholarship, research, and teaching.
   Susan Karant-Nunn became director of the Division in 2001 upon the death of Regents’ Professor Heiko A. Oberman, the founder of the Division. Until 1999 she had been a professor of history at Portland State University. At the UA not only has she written books and articles, taught and supervised undergraduate and graduate students, but also, with the help of Luise Betterton and Sandra Kimball, raised nearly $1.7 million toward the endowment of the Heiko A. Oberman Chair in Late Medieval and Reformation History. Since 2001, seven Ph.D. students have successfully defended their theses under her direction. She currently supervises 11 M.A. and Ph.D. students, who were attracted by her reputation as a Reformation scholar.
   Susan Karant-Nunn's work has been most influential in Reformation History.  Her first two books, “Luther's Pastors: The Reformation in the Ernestine Countryside” (1979) and “Zwickau in Transition, 1500-1547: The Reformation as an Agent of Change” (1987) were focused on Saxony, the heartland of the Reformation. These two books are exemplary works of social history. Karant-Nunn has gone on to write two works of cultural history that examine the German Reformation from innovative viewpoints:  “The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany,” which was published in 1997 and won the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize in History and Theology; and her soon-to-appear latest work, entitled “The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany,” which will be published by Oxford University Press. We already look forward to the fruits of her new project on Martin Luther's body.
   Susan Karant-Nunn has edited and co-edited five volumes. She has published innumerable articles and book chapters, ranging from the emergence of the pastoral family in Reformation Germany to ghost stories and their rejection in the later sixteenth century, covering a fascinating breadth of topics. Her invited guest lectureships and professorships have taken her to many universities in twelve countries. Since 1998 she has been, together with Anne Jacobson Schutte, the North American managing editor of the “Archive for Reformation History,” the leading journal in Reformation history. This editorship reflects her standing in the field of Reformation history. Among her numerous honors, she held a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2003-2004; and most recently, in October 2008, she was named one of the three first Earl H. Carroll Fellows of the UA College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, its highest award for scholarly distinction.
   In Susan Karant-Nunn, the UA has gained a Regents' Professor with an outstanding international reputation. Her books have deeply influenced the field of Reformation history—so much so that a leading French early modernist, Professor Bernard Roussel of the Sorbonne, in 1997 entitled a plenary lecture: "A la manière de Susan Karant-Nunn: réflexions sur la réforme du rituel dans l'espace francophone" (In the Manner of Susan Karant-Nunn: Reflections on the Reformation of Ritual in the Francophone Lands).

Inaugural lecture of Ute Lotz-Heumann
First Heiko A. Oberman Professor of Late Medieval and Reformation History

photos

   Special thanks to all who joined us in November for the Banquet and Inaugural Lecture of the first Heiko A. Oberman Professor of Late Medieval and Reformation History, Ute Lotz-Heumann.
   After opening remarks made by UA Executive Vice President and Provost Meredith Hay, Lotz-Heumann, clad in an Irish shawl, delivered her inaugural lecture, “’They obey her Majesty’s capital enemy, the Antichrist of Rome’: Why the Reformation Failed in Ireland” to warm applause.

Annual Town and Gown Lecture
Londa Schiebinger and the gender politics of plants

   On February 18, the Division had the great honor of welcoming Professor Londa Schiebinger to Tucson as the 23rd annual Town and Gown lecturer. The Group for Early Modern Studies (GEMS) co-sponsored the event this year, attracting an even more diverse audience to glean from Professor Schiebinger’s unique research. Another precedent was set this year in that Professor Schiebinger’s lecture focused not on religion, but on plants and abortifacients. Her lecture drew attention to the fact that the Division is not focused only on the religious history of the Reformation era, but on all aspects of the early modern period in Europe and its colonies.
   Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of the History of Science and Director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. Her books include “Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World” (Harvard, 2004); “Has Feminism Changed Science?” (Harvard, 1999); “The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science” (Harvard, 1999); and “Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science” (Beacon Press, 1993). Together with Robert N. Proctor, she is credited with inventing the term “agnotology,” which refers to the reality that our culture, like every culture, deliberately suppresses certain areas of knowledge.
   Schiebinger’s talk was titled “The Gender Politics of Plants in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.” She addressed the participation of women in science, issues relating to sex in scientific institutions, and how scientific knowledge was influenced by gender at the dawn of modernity. Breaking from the trend established by previous Town and Gown lecturers, her talk focused not on theologians, church councils, or popular reform movements, but rather on the exotic plants that some eighteenth-century female slaves used to terminate their pregnancies.
   Schiebinger explained that these women aborted in order to sabotage their masters’ plans to grow their empires of slavery. Not all slave resistance took the form of armed insurrections by males. Rather, many female slaves intentionally miscarried instead of subjecting a new generation to their owners’ dominion. In this respect, the refusal to procreate was a profoundly political act.
   Professor Schiebinger revealed that the “peacock flower” (known today as the Poinciana pulcherrima or Mexican Bird of Paradise) was often the abortifacient of choice for Amerindian slave women. The plant was transported to the Old World and could be found in the finest European gardens. But the knowledge of the peacock flower’s ability to induce abortions did not accompany the plant to Europe. European women and their midwives had their own botanical abortifacients. As male obstetricians began to replace female midwives, abortions were less likely to be induced through herbal stimulants, but rather through instruments.
   But abortion was not only a means of political resistance in the early modern period.  Authorities would severely punish women who were known to have aborted their unborn. Of course, magistrates could not prosecute women until after the “quickening” (about four and a half months into pregnancy).  However, this was not due to any inherent belief in the freedom of the woman to choose before this time, but rather because church and secular authorities could not be certain that the woman was indeed pregnant. Such issues have clearly survived into our own day.
   We would like to thank all of our guests for participating in the lecture, as well as Professor Schiebinger for making the evening so memorable.
   On the following evening, Schiebinger met with students at the home of GEMS Director, Professor Kari Boyd McBride.   

Introducing master's candidate
Daniel Jones, B.A., Weber State University
by Paul Buehler, doctoral student

   This semester the Division welcomed a new master’s student, Daniel Jones. Daniel, who is a native of Canada, attended Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, where he earned his B.A. in history with a minor in philosophy in May 2008. While at Weber State University, Daniel was recognized as student of the year for both the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the History Department, and he was selected as publicist for the campus chapter of Phi Alpha Theta. Although he is committed to keeping his options open, Daniel’s current research interest is in the emergence and development of the cult of saints in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. His senior thesis, titled “St. Sebastian Escapes the Pagans,” contested the notion that aspects of St. Sebastian’s character prominent in cultic worship represented a fusion of pagan elements with traditionally Christian themes. He argued on the basis of evidence derived from liturgical sources that elements of St. Sebastian’s character were expressions of Christian themes which remained largely unchanged in the first millennium of Christianity.
   Daniel plans to pursue his doctorate after completing the master’s degree program in the Division and the History Department. His goal is to teach someday at the university level. Prior teaching experience has confirmed that this is, in fact, his passion. He was a supplemental instructor for a discussion-based course in U.S. history at Weber State University. Daniel was also a substitute teacher for a local school district in Utah, where he taught special education classes to students ranging from those in pre-school to high school seniors. Daniel admits, “I’ve found that regardless of the age level, teaching can be an exciting and thought-provoking experience.”
   So far, Daniel has enjoyed his time at the UA. Although the transition from undergraduate to graduate study has required him to adapt quickly to a greater volume of weekly reading and to different expectations for preparedness that come with participating in graduate seminars, he finds the experience rewarding. Welcome to the Division, Daniel!

First impressions
by Ute Lotz-Heumann, Heiko A. Oberman Professor

   It seems almost a bit late to entitle this contribution to the “Desert Harvest” “First impressions”: I have already been in Tucson for six months. I am well into my second semester of teaching at the UA. I have given an inaugural lecture at a wonderful inaugural banquet. My husband and I have bought a house and moved in. Every morning we enjoy our view of the Catalina mountains. I have a new daily and a new weekly routine after moving my work and life from Germany to Tucson. When I think back on the last six months and even the weeks before I came to Tucson, after I had signed my letter of offer and applied for my visa, three themes dominate my first impressions:
   First of all, the friendliness and helpfulness of faculty and staff in the Division and in the Department of History. I was given a warm welcome, felt integrated from Day One, and received every help I could possibly ask for. Even before I came, a spacious office was prepared for me with an interim computer and many bookcases in it. Susan Karant-Nunn, Luise Betterton, Sandra Kimball, and the graduate students made me feel right at home in the Division. It is thanks to them that after only a few days in Tucson, it seemed as though I had climbed those narrow stairs to the Division offices for a long time. The warm welcome they and all my new colleagues in the History Department extended to me will be the most enduring memory of my first weeks and months in Tucson.
   Second, the high quality and dedication of the graduate students, who are every bit as fine as the students I have encountered across Europe.  When their new Oberman Professor announced the subject of “Early Modern Ireland in Comparative Perspective” for her first “Division seminar” (History 696f), they rose to the challenge of working their way into the history of Ireland as well as finding comparative cases in British or continental European history. The seminar had a wonderfully productive atmosphere and was a great pleasure to teach. It made me think back to what a colleague once said to me about a graduate seminar he had enjoyed teaching: “It almost felt as if you should pay to teach them and not be paid.” (But don’t take that too seriously, please!) Therefore, the second enduring memory of my first semester at the UA will be the passion and achievements of the graduate students.
   The third theme of my first six months in Tucson is of a different nature: It is the fundamental realization that universities, those time-honored institutions, are still—even though a national culture of universities is often stressed—very similar all over the western world. In the early modern period, universities functioned in much the same way all over Europe—and Latin was, of course, the lingua franca of all scholars. It was therefore not difficult to move from one university to another. My personal experience of universities as a student, both undergraduate and doctoral, had already taken me to Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States. But as a faculty member I had so far experienced only German universities. I wondered how different it would be. But universities are age-old institutions, and I found that they still work in very similar ways—and are beset by the same problems. Of course, the international economic crisis also affects the UA, and massive budget cuts are imminent. Unfortunately, it is not enough to turn off the fountains on campus. The university has resorted to more drastic measures to save money, among them cuts to the university library. It is therefore all the more important that the Oberman Collection become a part of the holdings of the UA Libraries. The third enduring memory of my first six months in Tucson, then, is the realization that I have taken a wonderful post at an excellent institution. I have no doubt that the “Division spirit” that has made me feel so welcome will prevail in these difficult times.

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