Girard J. Etzkorn (1927-2023)

At the age of 95, Jerry Etzkorn died last month. Although his PhD was from Leuven, he was born and lived for most of his career in America. His greatest contribution to the field was undoubtedly the many critical editions to which he contributed for over half a century, particularly on Franciscan authors. For twenty-two years he was part of the great team of scholars at the Franciscan Institute in upstate New York that produced, among other things, Ockham’s Opera Theologica et Philosophica. More recently he made major contributions to newly appearing editions of Henry of Ghent and Francis of Marchia, among much else.

Prizes & Databases &c.

The SIEPM has awarded its 2022 junior scholar award to Aurora Panzica (Fribourg), for her paper “Antiperistasis as Action on Contrary Qualities and Its Interpretation in the Medieval Philosophical and Medical Commentary Tradition.” Runners up for the prize were Thomas Gruber (Harvard) and Athanasios Rinotas (Leuven).

This prize will henceforth be known as the Jacqueline Hamesse Award, and the deadline to be considered for this year’s prize is June 1, 2023. Details here.

The Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy has awarded its 2022 Founders’ Award (best paper by a junior scholar) to Mohammed Saleh Zarapour (Manchester) for his paper, “Dashtaki’s Solution to the Liar Paradox.”

The SMRP’s deadline for submissions to the 2023 Founders’ Award is June 15, 2023. Details here.

Graziana Ciola (Nijmegen) is advertising two PhD positions tied to her ERC grant on late medieval semantics and mathematics and its Renaissance reception. The application deadline is May 14, 2023. Details here.

The topic of the 44th Cologne Mediaevistentagung is Constellations, understood as “a dynamic and dense network of relationships between persons, ideas, theories, problems and documents” (Cologne, September 9-13, 2024). The cfp deadline is July 31, 2023.

The Semitics department at Catholic University is offering a variety of online summer courses: Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Georgian, and Syriac. These are courses focused on reading historical texts, and so ideal for scholarly purposes. They are not cheap–the cost of the Arabic course is around $3000–but this would be an excellent way to get a start at this material. Details here.

A steadily growing resource for readers who work on Latin material is the Corpus Corporum, being developed under the guidance of Philipp Roelli (Zurich). It’s an attempt to assemble a very large corpus of Latin texts, searchable in sophisticated ways, all linked to a large number of classical and medieval Latin dictionaries.

Speaking of Latin databases, Stephen Dumont has called to my attention that Godfrey of Fontaines’s quodlibetal questions are now available in searchable form in Brepols’ Library of Latin Texts. (Do an author search for ‘Gaufridus’!) As I have mentioned previously, this is a useful source for a lot of important texts. Unfortunately, it requires a subscription.

Jacqueline Hamesse (1942-2023)

I have just learned that Jacqueline Hamesse died on February 3 of this year. She was born in Belgium, studied there, and spent much of her career there, ultimately becoming professor at the Université catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve). Her most cited work, an edition of the Auctoritates Aristotelis, grew out of her doctoral dissertation at Leuven.