Medieval Humanism

C. Stephen Jaeger grew up in the San Francisco Bay area of California. He studied at Berkeley, Tübingen, and Vienna. He has taught at University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Bryn Mawr College, the University of Washington, the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign, and as a visitor at the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, and the Central European University. He has specialized in Germanics and Comparative Literature, among other fields. Prof. Jaeger is the author or editor of over a dozen books and over sixty articles. His interest in the humanism of the Middle Ages extends from his first book, "Medieval Humanism in Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan and Isold" (1977) to the present. "The Origins of Courtliness" (1985) is a study of the Latin language of courtesy, showing the connections between ancient Roman social and ethical ideals and medieval courtliness.The structures and ideals on which humanist learning was founded are the subject of "The Envy of Angels: Cathedrals Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950-1200" (1994). The cultivation of an idealized form of aristocratic love that extended from antiquity to the twentieth century was the object of "Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility" (1999).Jaeger's research has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Humboldt Foundations. He has been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and the Getty Center (Los Angeles). He has lectured widely in the US, Europe, Japan, and Taiwan. His Envy of Angels was co-winner of the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History of the American Philosophical Society (1995). In 2002 he was elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.More recently his interests have turned to the aesthetics of the Middle Ages. He edited a collection of essays from various contributors in "Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics" (2012) and has published a study of "The Sense of the Sublime in the Middle Ages" (2022). He lives in New York City with his wife and two dogs.