Editor’s Note

This issue marks Mediaevalia’s fiftieth year of publication, and the milestone of a golden anniversary seems like a good moment to review the history of the journal. Mediaevalia is a publication of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CEMERS) at Binghamton University (SUNY). CEMERS was cofounded by professors Aldo Bernardo and Bernard Huppé in 1966 and held its first of many conferences in 1967. (There have been nearly fifty of them to date.) CEMERS was only the third research center of its kind in the United States, following closely on the heels of the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University in 1962 and the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Center at UCLA in 1964. CEMERS’s 1967 conference was on the topic of “The Meaning of Courtly Love,” and the speakers included such luminaries as D. W. Robertson of Princeton University and Charles Singleton of Johns Hopkins. Several subsequent conferences addressed academic topics that were groundbreaking in academia at the time, including “The Role of Women in the Middle Ages” in 1972 and “Islam and the Medieval West” in 1975, as well as, much more recently, “Medieval Unfreedoms: Slavery, Servitude, and Trafficking in Humans before the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade,” organized by Elizabeth Casteen in 2018, and our 2025 conference, “Always Here: Non-Binary Gender, Trans Identities, and Queerness in the Global Middle Ages,” organized by Bridget Whearty.CEMERS began annual publication of Mediaevalia in 1975 and launched the series Mediaeval and Renaissance Texts and Studies (MRTS, currently housed at Arizona State University) in 1978. The journal has had a number of different editors over the years, including Sandro Sticca, Bernard S. Levy, and Paul E. Szarmach. In 2009, Dana E. Stewart began editing Mediaevalia and completely revamped it, with a new cover and format, and moved its publication to SUNY Press, efforts that were rewarded by the journal’s winning the Phoenix Award of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals in 2012. In 2016, in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of CEMERS’s foundation, Marilynn Desmond guest-edited a special double issue of the journal on “Medieval Futures,” which includes articles by a number of scholars who were CEMERS fellows over the years, and she also organized a large international conference on “The Premodern Book in a Global Context.” CEMERS continues to sponsor regular colloquia and symposia, along with an annual lecture endowed by the Aldo and Reta Bernardo Fund—our thirty-third annual Bernardo Lecture by Holly Flora is included in this volume—in addition to hosting approximately biannual conferences, a selection of papers from which are also developed into articles for the journal. Indeed, in recent years we have published special issues on “Boccaccio at 700: Tales and Afterlives” (2013), “Authority and Materiality in the Italian Songbook” (2018), “Medieval Unfreedoms in a Global Context” (2022), and “Medieval Cultural Heritage, Then and Now” (2024). We are preparing an issue on “Pliny the Elder and Traditions of Natural History” for next year.This anniversary also marks my own ninth year as editor-in-chief, as well as Mediaevalia’s move to a new publisher, Penn State University Press, with whom we are excited to collaborate and who promises to keep us both in print and online as a vibrant forum for original, interdisciplinary scholarship on medieval and early modern topics for many years to come.