Johannes Michael Junge Ruhland

Ruhland's book project investigates what counted as “good” history in the French Middle Ages. By situating French histories in their multimedia, performative, and sociocultural contexts, this research revises modern assessments decrying them as “bad.” Drawing on Nancy Partner’s notion of “serious entertainments,” it argues that enjoyment of these histories in performance enhanced rather than undermined their seriousness. This book embeds the Récits d’un ménestrel de Reims (1260), a particularly contentious text, in practices of preaching, material culture—tapestries, murals, etc.—and contexts of public performance to interrogate how audiences recognized it as instructive despite factual inaccuracies. For the duration of the Fellowship, his focus will be on the culture of preaching to laypeople that expanded greatly throughout the thirteenth century and that provided models, reference points, and context for audiences eager to learn from history—all while enjoying “a good story.” A scholarly monograph and a reconstructed performance will help reevaluate the criteria that singled out “good” histories and propose mixed methodologies, including an emphasis on performance studies, for the study of medieval historiography in vernacular languages.