Welcome to the Website of the Centre for Medieval Studies!

The Centre for Medieval Studies (CMS), which counts 16 founding members and 11 ordinary members, teachers, researchers, and Ph.D. students specializing in philosophy, history, and philology, was officially accredited by the decision of the Senate of the University of Bucharest on July 16th 2006.

CMS stems from an initial nucleus of young M.A. students from the Faculties of Philosophy, History, and Foreign Languages and Literatures grouped in a seminar on Medieval Thought led by Prof. Ioan Pânzaru beginning with 2002. During the next three years the group held regular public debates and hosted talks given by well-known foreign medievalists such as Michel Zink (Collège de France), Michel Stanesco (University of Strasbourg), Roger Friedlein (Freie Universität - Berlin), Ana Cornagliotti (University of Turin), Claudio Galderisi (University of Poitiers), Keith Busby (University of Wisconsin) etc.

CMS developed several interdisciplinary research programs and published several collective volumes, complemented by colloquia and published papers. In October 2006, CMS organized an international symposium on Medieval Dream and Its Metamorphoses, whose papers were published by the University of Bucharest Press (UBP) in 2007. In October 2008 CMS hosted the colloquium Worlds and Spaces in the Middle Ages, which had a wide international participation and whose papers were published at UBP in 2009. In May 2010, together with the Romanian Branch of the International Arthurian Society, CMS hosted a colloquium on Temps et mémoire dans la littérature arthurienne (Time and Memory in Arthurian Literature) which brought to Bucharest forty participants, including some of the best known experts in the field such as Christine Ferlampin-Acher, Peter Field, Maria Colombo-Timelli, J. J. Vincensini, Francesco Zambon, Françoise Le Saux etc. In October 2010, together with the University “Charles de Gaulle” III (Lille) and New Europe College (Bucharest), CMS organized another interdisciplinary colloquium, L'Église visible et invisible au Moyen Âge (The Visible and the Invisible Church in the Middle Ages), in which more than half of the nearly fifty participants were foreigners. Notable guests included Eric Palazzo, Miriam Bedos-Rezac, Nicolas Reveyron, Catherine Vincent, and Anca Vasiliu. The papers of both colloquia will be subject to several volumes, the first of which was prepared and discussed during the meeting of the French Department in March 2011. Beginning with the academic year 2008-2009, together with the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures and the Faculty of History, CMS has set up a Master's Degree in Medieval Studies.

During the present academic year (2010-2011) CMS has had a very rich activity, in which well-known researchers such as Violeta Barbu, Anca Manolescu, Ştefan Colceriu, Cătălina Velculescu, Ileana Stănculescu, Mihaela Pop, but also young postgraduate or M.A. students such as Ana-Maria Luţuc, Robert Mirică offered significant monthly talks on medieval subjects.