Johannes Junge Ruhland

Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies

Education

Ph.D. Stanford University
MA King's College London
BA University of Geneva

Research and Teaching Interests

Medieval French Literature, Manuscript Studies, Debate Literature, Historiography

Biography

I am a scholar of medieval French literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. I currently focus on manuscripts from that period and I explore the ways in which authors, manuscript makers, readers, and audiences participated in a form of literacy that placed the material book at the center. 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 four years, I have mostly been focusing on manuscripts containing historical narratives, primarily in prose. By looking at manuscripts of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, the Grandes Chroniques de France, and the Bible historiale, I try to develop a better understanding of how the medium of the manuscript book enables readers to understand what history is and engage with historical narratives in ways that depend on the material presentation of texts. My first monograph will be on that topic; 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 93.2, 2024), in forthcoming articles with Mediaevalia and Romanic Review, and in Making History with Manuscripts in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (De Gruyter, 2025), where contributors ask how manuscripts shape historical narratives and conceptions of history across several languages and periods and with diverse methodologies. My next monograph will expand on this topic by asking how reading “bad histories” in manuscripts can help us reassess them and situate them in medieval literary culture, notably by studying (and practicing!) the performance of these works.

I am also working on an expanded conception of debates in medieval French literature. Read about it in “The Practice of Debate in French Literature before Machaut” (French Studies 78.1, 2024), with a companion edition: “Bernier de Chartres’ Vraie Medecine d’amours and His Lady’s Response (Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. 2609)” (Romania 141, 2023). This research feeds into a project about medieval French theorizations of textuality; for the latest on this subject, you will have to wait until JMEMS 56.2 comes out (“Speech, Plants, and Precious Objects: Tropes of Interpolation in Medieval French and Occitan Literature”).

When I teach literature, I like to draw on topics that have long accompanied me, such as animality and human-animal relations, 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.

Representative Publications

For a list of publications, please visit https://nd.academia.edu/JohannesJungeRuhland