On Friday of this week, the history department will celebrate the many books recently published by members of our department, and their authors. Members of the UVM community and the general public are cordially invited to join us at 4 PM on January 29 at Billings Library Apse for free food and brief remarks by several of the authors.
As part of our celebration, this week on our blog we will be featuring short commentaries by the authors on their books, and the research and writing that went into producing them.
In this first installment, we hear from Professors Sean Field and Mark Stoler.
Professor Sean Field specializes in the history of medieval Europe, and has published three books since 2014:
Field, Sean L., The Rules of Isabelle of France: An English Translation with Introductory Study (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2014).
_______. Isabelle de France, soeur de Saint Louis. Une princesse mineure (Paris: Éditions franciscaines, 2014), with Jacques Dalarun, Jean-Baptiste Lebigue, and Anne-Françoise Leurquin-Labie.
_______. Marguerite Porete et le Miroir des simples âmes: Perspectives historiques, philosophiques et littéraires (Paris: Vrin, 2014), edited with Sylvain Piron and Robert E. Lerner.
From Professor Field:
“Of the several books I have published in the last few years, I am particularly proud of having collaborated on Isabelle de France, soeur de Saint Louis. Une princesse mineure, which was published in Paris by Éditions franciscaines at the end of 2014. I was in Rouen to chair a panel at a conference in 2013 when I was approached by a smiling Jacques Dalarun (one of France’s greatest living medieval historians; I mean we’re talking Membre de l’Académie for goodness sake). Among other things, Jacques is editor of a series dedicated to publishing French translations of all the primary sources for the lives of crucial figures from the medieval Franciscan Order, such as Claire of Assisi and of course St. Francis himself. Jacques wanted to devote a volume in the series to Isabelle of France (1225-1270), and he knew that I had written several books already about her–in fact he had been really generous and helpful to me back when I was a graduate student doing research in Paris in the 1990s. But I was still really pleased when he asked me to collaborate on the project, because I’m sure it would have been simpler for him to just stick with an all-French team. Of course I jumped at the chance to be part of the project. I wrote up a 60-page historical introduction to Isabelle’s life, which Jacques translated into French. He also translated all of the Latin sources for the volume, but brought in a real expert on Old/Middle French, Anne-Françoise Leurquin-Labie, to translate the medieval French sources, and specialist on liturgies, Jean-Baptiste Lebigue, to do those translations. Then we all worked together, to different degrees, on introductions and notes to the sources, various appendices, etc. It was really inspiring to see how Jacques was able to assemble such a crack team, and to be part of a group working at such a high level. The volume is obviously intended more for a French reading public than an American one, but still its publication is one of my proudest moments to date as a historian. You can read more (if you read French) here.”
Professor Mark Stoler (Emeritus) specializes in US diplomatic and military history.
Stoler, Mark, The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, vol. 6 (Johns Hopkins, 2013), also vol. 7 (March 2016).
From Professor Stoler:
“George Catlett Marshall ranks as one of the greatest soldiers and statesmen in all of U.S. history, serving between 1939 and 1951 as World War II army chief of staff and after the war as special presidential emissary to China, then secretary of state, then head of the Red Cross, and finally as secretary of defense. Under the editorship of Larry I. Bland and the auspices of the Marshall Foundation in Lexington, VA,, five out of seven planned volumes of The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, covering his life through 1946, were published between 1981 and 2003. When Bland unexpectedly died in 2007, the president of the Marshall Foundation asked me, as a former Marshall biographer recently retired from UVM, to become the new editor and complete volumes six and seven. I agreed in 2008. Volume 6 focusing on Marshall’s 1947-49 tenure as secretary of state, arguably two of the most eventful years in the history of U.S. foreign relations, was published in 2013. It has won two national awards for documentary editing and was presented to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just before her retirement from that position. The final volume covering Marshall’s last ten years, which my staff and I completed last summer, will be published this spring. I have enormously enjoyed working on these volumes.”
Professor Stoler and Secretary Clinton at the Marshall Library in Lexington, VA, in April of 2012. Professor Stoler is showing Clinton Marshall’s original June 1947 speech at Harvard offering Europe economic aid that led to the Marshall Plan.
