Jan M. Ziolkowski


Jan Ziolkowski occupies the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professorship of Medieval Latin at Harvard University. From 2007 to 2020 he served as Director of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. His scholarship has focused on the literature, especially in Latin, of the Middle Ages.
In the United States, he was elected a Member of the Medieval Academy of America in 2008, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010, and the American Philosophical Society in 2017. Abroad, he was appointed a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2006 and of the Academia Europaea in 2015. In 2015 he was awarded an Austrian Decoration for Science and Art, the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art, First Class.
He held a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend in 1983, an American Council for Learned Societies Fellowship in 1986, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987-1988. In 2005-2006 he was a Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. Since becoming U.S. representative to the International Medieval Latin Committee in 1988, he has served as Vice President from 1993-1999 and as President from 2000.

Personal Life

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, he is the son of Theodore Ziolkowski, a Germanist and Comparativist, emeritus from Princeton University, and Yetta Ziolkowski. His elder sister is Margaret Ziolkowski, professor of Russian at Miami University, whose husband is Robert W. Thurston, professor emeritus of history at the same university; his younger brother is Eric Ziolkowski, professor of Religious Studies at Lafayette College, whose wife is Lee Upton, professor of English and writer-in-residence at Lafayette.
In 1978 Ziolkowski married Elizabeth Ann Hillenius, who graduated in the class of 1978, with which he entered. Her career has been in forensic chemistry, first with the Boston Police Department and currently with the United States Postal Inspection Service. They have three daughters. The eldest is Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski, assistant professor of Romance Studies at Duke University, who is married to Martin Eisner, associate professor of Italian Studies at Duke. The middle daughter is Ada Horlander, the youngest Yetta Joy Ziolkowski. The second and third daughters were born while their parents served as head resident tutors, from 1982 through 1987, at what was then North House, now Pforzheimer House, part of Harvard College.

Career

Like the rest of his family, Jan Ziolkowski received his primary and secondary education in public schools, the last one being Princeton High School in New Jersey, from which he graduated in 1974. He earned his A.B. summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1977 and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. His senior thesis, supervised by the Classicist Janet Martin and the Chaucerian and medievalist D. W. Robertson Jr., was published in revised form as a monograph in 1985 as Alan of Lille’s Grammar of Sex: The Meaning of Grammar to a Twelfth Century Intellectual. From 1977 through 1980 he was a Marshall Scholar at the University of Cambridge. In 1980-1981 he was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. In 1982 he received his Ph.D. in medieval Latin, under the direction of the late Peter Dronke.
Ziolkowski began teaching at Harvard University in 1981, at the age of twenty-four. In his initial year he held the rank of instructor: he had submitted his dissertation in the spring of 1981, but could not take his viva until December or have the degree confirmed until the spring of 1982. Thus he acquired formal standing as an assistant professor in 1982. In 1984 he was promoted to associate professor. In 1987 he received tenure as a full professor, at thirty. For his first two decades of service at Harvard, his appointment was split between Classics and Comparative Literature. He became involved early in the Committees on Folklore and Mythology and on Medieval Studies. In administrative service, he served three terms as chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and concurrently two as chair of the Committee on Medieval Studies. In 2006–2007 he chaired the Department of Classics for one year.
From 2007 through 2020, Ziolkowski directed the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, a Harvard institution for advanced research in Byzantine, Pre-Columbian, and Garden and Landscape studies, situated on a historic property in Georgetown. He was the seventh director in all. The first two were John S. Thacher, a Harvard PhD who held positions at the Fogg Museum of Art before becoming director, and William R. Tyler, who had an MFA from Harvard. The successive six, of whom Ziolkowski served the longest, have been drawn from the Harvard faculty: his predecessors were Giles Constable, Robert W. Thomson, Angeliki Laiou, and Edward L. Keenan, while his interim successor is Thomas B.F. Cummins.
Under Ziolkowski's tenure Dumbarton Oaks greatly expanded the scope and pace of its activities, welcoming to its campus both substantially more scholars and a much larger general public while also establishing new partnerships with universities, museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions in the Washington area as well as with embassies and churches. In innovative programming, his directorship saw the introduction of such firsts as summer internships, one-month research awards, Bliss travel awards, Tyler Fellowships, Humanities Fellowships, Early-Career Musician Residencies, and many postdoctoral positions. So as to accommodate the increased number of fellows and other visitors, Dumbarton Oaks acquired new residential facilities, including a townhouse and condominium on R Street but most notably the prize-winning Fellowship House ; renovated old ones, in particular La Quercia ; and repurposed large areas for study and work spaces. Its collections of art became integrated as a unified museum. In turn, the museum, beyond seeing its public hours doubled, expanded its program of temporary exhibitions to promote its special holdings to broader audiences, with a strong emphasis on outreach to historically underserved schoolchildren and students in the DC region.

Publications

Ziolkowski’s books include wide-ranging explorations of literary and intellectual history. The first, published in 1985 by the Medieval Academy of America, was Alan of Lille’s Grammar of Sex: The Meaning of Grammar to a Twelfth Century Intellectual. This monograph marked a first step into the scrutiny of language and literature relating to sexuality and obscenity, notably a later study of a poem about the biblical figure Jezebel and a collective volume of essays, which came out in 1998, entitled Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages. It also gave early evidence of what turned out to be an abiding interest in the history of education, especially grammar and rhetoric.
His later investigations include examinations of Medieval Latin literature associated with folk literature, such as Talking Animals: Medieval Latin Beast Poetry, in 1993, and Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies, in 2007. Both studies are notable for extensive appendixes of translations.
His second book was the editio princeps of Nigel of Canterbury, Miracles of the Virgin Mary, in Verse. Miracula sancte Dei genitricis Marie, uersifice, which appeared as Toronto Medieval Latin Texts 17 in 1986. Within a decade he brought into print, again in the first edition ever, the original Latin of additional works by the same poet in Nigel of Canterbury, The Passion of St. Lawrence, Epigrams, and Marginal Poems, Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 14, in 1994.
Ziolkowski's other critical editions of medieval Latin texts, with translations and substantial commentaries, include Jezebel: A Norman Latin Poem of the Early Eleventh Century, in 1989; A Garland of Latin Satire, Wisdom, and History: Verse from Twelfth-Century France , co-edited with Bridget Balint in 2007; and Solomon and Marcolf, in 2008.
His best-known work in the genre of edition cum translation and commentary was The Cambridge Songs , in 1994, which has been taken as the basis for the recording Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper by the Sequentia, an ensemble for medieval music directed by Benjamin Bagby, and for Cambridge Songs Suite No. 1 and No. 2 by the composer Jim Taylor of LeTourneau University.
In English-only volumes, Ziolkowski co-edited The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Words and Pictures, with Mary Carruthers in 2002, and translated Letters of Peter Abelard, Beyond the Personal, in 2008. Between these two books he edited and introduced a translation from the French of a still-classic examination of Medieval Latin metrics by the late Swedish philologist Dag Norberg.
Ziolkowski's first major involvement in the study of the Roman poet Virgil came in 2008, when he brought out with Michael C. J. Putnam, emeritus of Brown University, a stout anthology of translations, The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred Years, published by Yale University Press. In 2014 he expanded upon that resource with the three volumes of The Virgil Encyclopedia, co-edited with his colleague Richard F. Thomas of Harvard University, published by Wiley-Blackwell. He took his initial step into the classical tradition in 2007, when his Nota Bene: Reading Classics and Writing Songs in the Early Middle Ages was released in Publications of The Journal of Medieval Latin. This book explores the functions that musical notation served in the reception of Classical Latin literature in early medieval schools and education.
Among his contributions to the study of Dante Alighieri, Ziolkowski edited Dante and the Greeks, published by Dumbarton Oaks Publications in 2014, and Dante and Islam, published by Fordham University Press in 2015. Both books set the Italian poet in broader contexts, along the way helping to connect Dante studies with medieval, Byzantine, and Islamic studies.
In 2018 he brought out The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity, published with open access by Open Book Publishers. These six volumes probe a single story from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem in the early thirteenth century through its later reception from the 1870s down to the present day. Alongside the multivolume scholarship, he arranged for the reprinting of two books, Barbara Cooney, The Little Juggler, Adapted from an Old French Legend and Illustrated, from 1961, and José María Souvirón, El juglarcillo de la Virgen, illustrated by Roser Bru, from 1942. He put into English a French version of the story for two translations, Anatole France, The Juggler of Our Lady. Written out, illuminated, and historiated by Malatesta, and The Juggler of Notre Dame, illustrated by Maurice Lalau.
In addition to the standard scholarly publications and children's books, Dumbarton Oaks published a catalog booklet, written and edited by Jan M. Ziolkowski and Alona Bach, entitled Juggling the Middle Ages, and Juggling the Middle Ages: A Medieval Coloring Book. The context was a special exhibition, Juggling the Middle Ages, which was on display from October 16, 2018 through March 3, 2019.. The events included lectures and appearances by R. O. Blechman, Mark and David Shannon, Richard Utz, Michel Zink. Ziolkowski subsequently provided further perspectives in blog posts through the publisher.
Ziolkowski founded the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library and served as its general editor from 2008 through 2020. The general editorship is currently unoccupied. DOML, as it is known for short, presents medieval primary texts in Byzantine Greek, Medieval Latin, and Old English along with facing-page translations. A series published by Harvard University Press, it is a much younger sibling of the Loeb Classical Library, which began in 1912, and is also junior to The I Tatti Renaissance Library. With now more than 60 volumes in print, it celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2020: the first titles were released in the fall of 2010. He edited and co-translated the volume of Satires by Sextus Amarcius and Eupolemius, in 2011.
His interest in the history and theory of philology became apparent first in the introduction to the short collection On Philology, printed by Penn State Press in 1990, which he edited after organizing the conference on which the journal issue and book were based. His widest-ranging reprise of the topic was in a review entitled “Metaphilology." In 2008, he devoted an article to “The Role of Interpretive Studies in Medieval Latin Philology.” Most recently, he brought out “Medieval Precedents for Sceptical Philology.”
Among his contributions to the history of scholarship, Ziolkowski supplied a new foreword to Literary Language and Its Public by Erich Auerbach when reprinted by Princeton University Press in 1993. Four years later he provided a fresh introduction to Vergil in the Middle Ages by Domenico Comparetti when it was reissued in paperback by the same press in 1997. In 2003 he translated for the first time, from the original German, Auerbach's "Epilegomena to Mimesis" as an appendix to the fiftieth-anniversary reprint of. That book opened with an introduction by Edward Said.
He has written or participated in committees charged with writing memorial minutes or in memoriam notices for Albert Lord, Harry Levin, Joseph Szövérffy, Herbert Bloch, Ihor Ševčenko, Edward L. Keenan, and Peter Dronke.