If you're interested in exploring the cultures of the past, Medieval and Early Modern Studies may be for you. On a historical journey from the fall of Rome through the eighteenth century, you will encounter vast wealth alongside extreme poverty, deep piety alongside brutal religious conflict, and intense creativity alongside the ravages of plague and warfare. You will engage with texts, architecture, and art that may seem distant from modern life but which continue to inform—for good and ill—the ways we engage with important issues ranging from religion to gender and power.

Why Medieval & early modern Studies at Sewanee?

The Medieval and Early Modern Studies program at Sewanee is designed to develop a cross-disciplinary overview of these historical periods, incorporating the study of the arts, literature, history, and philosophy, as well as to offer scope for mentored research projects in pursuit of the student's own distinctive scholarly interests.

We encourage our majors and minors to take advantage of a range of study-away opportunities, including a longstanding relationship with the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Oxford. Founded in 1975, the institute provides academic training for overseas students who wish to complete part of their education at Oxford in these areas of study.

Sewanee also offers an opportunity unique among small liberal arts colleges as host of the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, an annual academic conference. The colloquium is held each spring and draws scholars from across the country (and beyond) to campus; student attendance at all the events is welcomed, and participation by majors and minors is encouraged.

Research Spotlight: Betsy Baker C'27

In March 2026, Medieval & Early Modern Studies minor Betsy Baker presented an essay entitled "Re-Reading Medieval Reading: Approaching Psalm 132 as a Case Study for (Dis/Un)Orientation in the Psalmic Tradition" at the Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium, hosted by Johns Hopkins University. Drawing on the presence of Psalm 132 in St. Augustine's Enarrationes, the Glossa Ordinaria, and the recitation of the Psalms in the Divine Office, she argued for a new paradigm of categorization and interpretation to better understand the use and significance of reading in monastic spaces according to social need. Reflecting on Jacques Derrida's spiraling theory of discursive boundaries and referential definition, she sketched an axis of thematic and interpretive orientations (dis-orientation, un-orientation, and orientation) to systematically break down, define, and contextualize medieval reading. Betsy's work emerged from MEMS 400: Early Soundscapes in Literature, Art, and Music, taught in Easter 2025 by Prof. Stephanie Batkie. MEMS 400 is offered in the college every second spring, running in conjunction with the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium.

A Sampling of Courses

Nature, Magic, and Machines in Early Modern Europe
History

This course explores watershed changes in the strategies used to produce and circulate new knowledge in the early modern world (c. 1500 to 1800), pursuing a global and interdisciplinary approach to understanding the diverse tools, embodied practices, sociopolitical configurations, social and economic networks that contributed to the rise of modern science. Topics to be addressed may include natural magic, secrets and recipes; natural history collecting, empire and observation; human anatomy, medicine and the Galenic body; drug trials and experimentation; mechanical philosophy, androids, and the transfer of knowledge.

HIST 337
Imagining the Medieval Italian City
Art History

This course explores the ways medieval Italian city-dwellers imagined and shaped their communities and civic identities in art, architecture, and literature, with a focus on vibrant thirteenth and fourteenth century urban centers like Siena, Florence, and Padua. Medieval Italian urbanites strategically imagined and represented their civic ideals and communities in the face of factional divisions and violence. Art, architecture, and urban planning had essential roles to play, as communities, institutions, and religious orders sought to define themselves in an accessible visual language, and as organizations.

ARTH 323
Early Women's Voices
English

A study of women’s literature before 1800, this course examines how feminine voices were presented and heard in their historical contexts. Readings for the class are drawn from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century, and ask students to think through the conditions of feminine authorship and identity in the pre-modern period.

ENGL 354
Saints and Society in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages
History

This course explores the place of Christian saints in the society and culture of the late Roman and medieval worlds. It analyzes changing ideals of sanctity and their relationship to broader social, religious, and cultural developments. It also focuses on the varied functions of saints' cults as perceived by both the promoters and the followers. Emphasis throughout is on the close relationship of religious ideals, ecclesiastical and secular politics, and social and cultural change.

HIST 368
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Medieval & Early Modern Studies

Programs of Study

Requirements for the Major & Minor in Medieval & Early Modern Studies

Meet some professors

Matthew Mitchell
mdmitche@sewanee.edu

Matthew David Mitchell teaches courses on all eras of the history of Britain and Ireland, with a particular focus on the early modern period (circa 1500 to 1850) and British commercial and colonial contacts with the Atlantic World. Mitchell is the author of The Prince of Slavers, part of Palgrave Macmillan's series of Studies in the History of Finance. This is the first book ever to focus on the life and career of Humphry Morice, the largest-volume British slave trader of the first half of the eighteenth century, who bears the guilt of forcibly transporting over 30,000 enslaved Africans between 1704 and 1732.  Using Morice's papers in the Bank of England Archives, Mitchell shows how Morice's innovative methods propelled him to the first rank of slave traders, while bringing untold misery to the men, women, and children his captains imprisoned upon his ships.

Associate Professor of History
Leslie Todd
letodd@sewanee.edu

Leslie E. Todd works on early modern art history with a specialization in art of colonial Latin America. She investigates how early modern visual practice enacted and upheld the dynamic relationship between metropole and colony that defined Spanish colonialism in the Americas. Her current research focuses on wooden polychrome sculpture dating to the second half of the eighteenth century from Quito, Ecuador, a major center for sculpture-making in colonial Spanish America.

Assistant Professor of Art and Art History
Matthew Irvin
mwirvin@sewanee.edu

Matthew Irvin specializes in medieval English and Latin literature and is the author of The Poetic Voices of John Gower: Politics and Personae in the Confessio Amantis. He is currently collaborating on a translation of Gower’s Vox Clamantis. His next monograph concerns the use of pity by women in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Dr. Irvin also has an interest in late medieval English drama, and has directed two medieval plays at Sewanee.

Professor of English
Susan Ridyard
sridyard@sewanee.edu

Susan J. Ridyard's research centers on the social and cultural history of medieval Christianity, and especially on the cult of the saints in medieval Europe. Dr. Ridyard's current research focuses on the canonization of the thirteenth-century English bishop, Thomas Cantilupe. Working mainly with manuscripts from the Vatican Library, she is preparing a critical edition and English translation of Cantilupe's canonization process, the longest and most detailed such record to survive from medieval England. Her goal is to make this text, which offers extraordinarily rich insights into medieval society and devotion, available not only to other scholars but also to undergraduates for whom it has the potential to "bring the past to life" in a remarkable way.

Professor of History
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Contact

James Ross Macdonald
Professor of English

jrmacdon@sewanee.edu

Gailor Hall 129, ext. 1338

Medieval Colloquium
Medieval history, modern conversation

The Sewanee Medieval Colloquium is a conference for ideas. Medieval scholars across various disciplines converse with one another on a theme, hear lectures, share papers, and bring challenging new perspectives to the field. Surrounded by bluffs and forest coves, Sewanee’s neo-Gothic campus offers a beautiful and intimate setting for academic conversation about the past and the future.

Thither!
Humanities Program
An interdisciplinary way of looking at the world

Sewanee’s team-taught, interdisciplinary Humanities program introduces students to the cultural products and practices that have informed the development of Western cultures. Along with critical examination of “the West” and consideration of what it has meant — and means today — to be human, students refine their writing and speaking skills and participate actively in humanities seminars. Though students may enroll in individual courses within the program, those who complete the entire complement of Humanities courses will be able to conduct interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary critical inquiry, evaluate the implications of historical change over time, and approach the study of cultures — their own and others — in intellectually informed and responsible ways.

Onward!
Shakespeare Studies
Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none

Shakespeare studies is a complementary minor for many programs. There’s a reason Shakespeare’s poems and plays have endured the test of time. His colorful characters give us a glimpse into specific and universal human experiences.

Pray tell more!