Johannes Junge Ruhland

Biography

I am a scholar of medieval French literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. My research sits at the intersection of manuscript studies and book history, literature, and historiography and explores the literacies that enabled authors, manuscript makers, and audiences to make sense of the world through books. I am a proud member of the Medieval French in the Midwest research group, and at Notre Dame, I am affiliated with the Medieval Institute, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, and the Center for Italian Studies.

For the last five years, I have been focusing on manuscripts containing historical narratives, primarily in prose, with the goal of understanding how the medium of the book enabled authors, manuscript makers, and audiences to make sense of history. My first monograph, titled French Prose Histories in Their Books, 1200-1350, explores this topic with a corpus of over 200 manuscripts consulted, primarily drawing on the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, the Grandes Chroniques de France, and the Bible historiale, three important historical texts of universal, French, and biblical history. In seven chapters, it foregrounds the bookishness of French prose histories, demonstrates that the writing of history happened in manuscript workshops as well as in historians’ studies, and explores the implications of reading history from history-books.

You can read on this topic in “Sequence and Simultaneity in the Grandes Chroniques de France: ‘Incidences’ as a Historiographical Category” (Medium Ævum), in “Bookish Regimes of Historicity in Bible historiale Manuscripts” (Romanic Review), and in Mediaevalia. That is also the topic of Making History with Manuscripts in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (De Gruyter), where contributors ask how manuscripts shape historical narratives and conceptions of history across several languages and periods, and of Through Hartog’s Lens: Regimes of Historicity in French History Books (ca. 1240-ca. 1560), a special issue of Romanic Review co-edited with Antoine Brix, where contributors explore how past, present and future relate to each other in manuscripts and early printed books.

I also have an active research program on medieval French theorizations of textuality. Most recently, I have published “Speech, Plants, and Precious Objects: Tropes of Interpolation in Medieval French and Occitan Literature” (JMEMS) on this topic, and other published work includes “The Practice of Debate in French Literature before Machaut” (French Studies), with a companion edition: “Bernier de Chartres’ Vraie Medecine d’amours and His Lady’s Response (Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. 2609)” (Romania).

My next monograph, which I am preparing as a 2026-2027 Franco Humanities Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, explores the lived experience of history by thirteenth-century audiences, for which I am working with performers to create video and audio recordings of medieval narratives read out loud.

When I teach literature, I like to draw on topics that have long accompanied me, such as animality and human-animal relations, Bible translations, courtly love, debate and debating techniques, literature as a form with which to think, and, of course, manuscripts. I am an advocate for making all learning about skills, and I try to help students improve on writing and speaking while they discover medieval texts and manuscripts.

Before joining Notre Dame, I was a PhD candidate at Stanford University, where I was also the Assistant Director of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies in 2022–2023. In Fall 2022, I held an appointment as lecturer in medieval French literature at UC Berkeley.

I am available to supervise Honors and Master’s theses. Students interested in pursuing doctoral studies with me should consider applying to the Medieval Institute’s PhD program. If you don’t yet know what to work on, that’s not a problem, we’ll find something together.