Introduction

Summary

This collection of essays recognizes the accomplishments of one of the pathbreaking senior women in the field of medieval French literature, Nancy Freeman Regalado, who has been on the faculty of New York University since 1968.

Nancy Regalado has distinguished herself as a specialist of the Middle Ages, with work ranging widely from literary to cultural history and, more recently, staging and performance. Her publications include such seminal studies as Poetic Patterns in Rutebeuf: A Study in Noncourtly Poetic Modes of the Thirteenth Century (Yale University Press, 1970); Le Roman de Fauvel in the Edition of Mesire Chaillou de Pesstain, in collaboration with Edward H. Roesner and François Avril (Broude Brothers, 1990); Contexts: Style and Values in Medieval Art and Literature, a special issue of Yale French Studies, co-edited by the late Daniel Poirion (1991); and Performing Medieval Narrative, with Evelyn Birge Vitz and Marilyn Lawrence (D. S. Brewer, 2005). She has given more than seventy-five invited lectures, scholarly papers, and presentations around the world, and is a regular presence at the International Congress on Medieval Studies held in Kalamazoo, Michigan. In addition, she has convened dozens of conferences, symposia, and workshops, including the ongoing Faculty Colloquium on Orality, Writing, and Culture, co-organized with Evelyn Birge Vitz at New York University since 1987, and Storytelling in Performance, co-organized with Vitz and Martha Hodes since 2004. The awards and honors she has received – in particular, the insignia of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques (1992) as well as fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies (1979 and 1988), the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1993), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (1979, 1984, and 1992) – attest to her merits as a scholar.

Her merits as a teacher have twice been formally recognized by New York University: she received the Distinguished Teaching Medal in 1996 and the Golden Dozen Teaching Award in 2003. Nancy Regalado has directed seventeen doctoral dissertations and served as primary reader for thirty more, working with students at New York University, Yale, and Columbia – in French, Spanish, Comparative Literature, History, Music, and Art History. Having Nancy Regalado as a thesis advisor is an immense privilege. Not only is she a meticulous reader, who offers copious comments, she is an unfailingly encouraging, caring, and patient guide.