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Medievalist and cartographic historian John Greenlee ’00 was working on a project involving 17th-century London when he noticed something odd. On several maps, there were two ships anchored in the Thames. These ships had been marked as civic landmarks and labeled “Eel Ships.” Interest piqued, he began researching the history behind these vessels and the history of eels in England in general.

Professor of History John Eldevik was recently invited by the program for Late Antique and Medieval Studies at the Claremont Colleges in California to present his recent research on the origins of the legend of Prester John and met with current students and faculty in the program.

During his Hamilton years, Michael Lang ’67 was a habitue, maybe the only habitue, of the Rare Book Room (then known as the Treasure Room), which saw little use by students. That seemed a shame to Lang.

The day after her finals ended, Kim Lifton ’20 did what any college student would want to do and boarded a plane to Europe. She visited places like London, England, and Angers, France, observing the remnants of medieval Western history. Unlike the typical college student, however, Lifton spent the majority of her time examining medieval manuscripts in renowned archives and traversing the region in search of depictions of Edward the Black Prince.

“Saints, Pagans, and the Wonders of the East: The Medieval Imaginary and its Manuscript Contexts,” a research article by Associate Professor of History John Eldevik, appears in the 2016 volume of Traditio.

Associate Professor of History John Eldevik recently published a review of Keagan Brewer's Prester John: The Legend and its Sources in The Medieval Review. Brewer's volume is a collection of translated texts related to the figure of "Prester John," a legendary Christian ruler believed in the Middle Ages to possess a realm of fabulous wealth and power somewhere in the East beyond the lands of Islam.

Assistant Professor of History John Eldevik recently attended the California Medieval History Seminar, held Oct. 26 at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif, where participants discussed his draft article, "Saints, Pagans, and the Wonders of the East: The Medieval Imaginary and its Manuscript Contexts."

Assistant Professor of History John Eldevik attended the annual International Medieval Congress held at the University of Leeds, England, July 1-4, where he presented a paper titled "Communities of Violence: Saracens and Saints in Medieval Bavaria."

Patrick Geary, a leading historian of the middle ages from Princeton University, will present a lecture titled “The Dilemma of Translation: Sacred Scripture and Sacred Power in the Early Middle Ages,” on Thursday, Feb. 21, at 4:10 p.m., in the Taylor Science Center’s Kennedy Auditorium at Hamilton College.  His lecture is sponsored by Hamilton College’s Humanities Forum and is free and open to the public.

A book review by Assistant Professor of History John Eldevik has appeared in the latest issue of Speculum, the leading North American journal of medieval studies.