ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR of Modern Languages Joan E. McRae has been working collaboratively on a three-volume series to make available to the public the story of King Arthur told in an illustrated medieval manuscript held at Yale University’s Beinecke Library. Two of the volumes, The Death of King Arthur and, The Quest of the Holy Grail, are currently in the Grail publication process at Brepols publishing house and are slated to appear late in 2007 and early 2008. A third volume containing the Lancelot portion of the legend is still in the draft stage.

McRae’s article on the same topic, “Text and Context: the Production of Images in Yale 229,” has been included in a collection of essays entitled The Illustrated Lancelot Prose of Yale 229: Essays on Yale 229. Work on the Arthurian manuscript has prompted two Hampden- Sydney Freshman Seminars, “Quest for the Grail” and “Arthurian Tradition,” as well as a Hampden-Sydney Honors course being taught this year, “Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code.” For this course, McRae combines her expertise on the Grail legend, Paris, and literary criticism with the expertise of Elliott Associate Professor of Religion Dr. J. Michael Utzinger on early Christian texts and modern American religion to decipher the codes of the popular and controversial novel. She is currently working on a new English translation of the Quest of the Holy Grail and expects input from her Honors students.

McRae followed up her 2004 and 2003 books (Alain Chartier: The Quarrel of the Belle dame sans mercy and Le Cycle de la Belle dame sans mercy d’Alain Chartier: Une
anthologie poétique du XV siècle) with an article, “Cyclification and Circulation of the Quarrel of the Belle dame sans mercy,” based on archival evidence uncovered in libraries in France, Denmark, and the Netherlands concerning the hand-written manuscript copies of the literary quarrel of the Belle Dame. The article will appear in 2008 in Chartier in Europe, published by Boydell and Brewer. McRae has presented several papers on that topic as well, including, most recently, “Mythopoetics and the Case of La Belle dame Sans Mercy” at the International Courtly Literature Society in Lausanne, Switzerland, in the summer; and “The Illustrated Chartier Manuscripts” at the 42nd International Congress on Medieval Studies held in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in May.

She is actively involved in many professional organizations, including the Modern Language Association and the South Atlantic Modern Language Society, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, the Medieval Academy, the International Machaut Society—on the directing board of which she sits—the International Arthurian Society, and the International Courtly Literature Society.

In the fall students in McRae’s French Theatre: Molière class acted as dramaturges for the production, directed by Associate Professor of Theatre Shirley Kagan, of the playwright’s Tartuffe, a satire on religious hypocrisy.

With a B.A. from Agnes Scott College, an M.A. from Middlebury College, and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, McRae began teaching at the College in 1997 and was promoted to the rank of associate professor in 2003.

BEYOND THE Classroom FOR THE Classroom
Hampden-Sydney College Faculty Scholarship 2005-2008
A report by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty