Michael Witmore, assistant professor of Literary and Cultural Studies in Carnegie Mellon’s English department, has established the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (PCMRS). An interdisciplinary, interschool program, the PCMRS promotes and coordinates research from the fourth century to the end of the seventeenth. The member schools include Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh, West Virginia University, Slippery Rock University, Duquesne University, and Chatham College.

The impetus for forming the PCMRS, Witmore explains, was the multitude of research going on in the region on the time period:

“After living in Pittsburgh for about four years, I had gotten to know a number of scholars from outside of Carnegie Mellon, and it seemed that in our immediate area, there was a significant group of people who were all doing medieval and Renaissance studies in various ways — teaching and writing about the period's literary, cultural, and intellectual history, visual arts, music, politics, and so on. Because work in these earlier periods is often intrinsically multi-disciplinary — so much so, in fact, that it is increasingly difficult for any one university to really cover the relevant subfields — there seemed to me to be a natural advantage to coordinating our resources and activities around town.”

What is commonly called “the Renaissance in Europe” is a conglomeration of a seemingly endless number of very different smaller fields of study.

“The Italian Renaissance, for example, is not the same as the English Renaissance,” Professor Witmore says. “Its effects in religion, politics, exploration, and colonialism, moreover, are connected with what was going on in the visual, literary, and dramatic arts. So anyone interested in the broader outlines of this phenomenon … needs to have the resources of several departments and disciplinary traditions.”

Backed by grant money from Carnegie Mellon’s English and history departments, Witmore asked an undergraduate design/ human computer interaction class to design a website for the PCMRS. The result, http://english.cmu.edu/medren, is online but still under construction, and represents the only “physical” home of the program.

Ultimately, Witmore hopes the existence of the PCMRS will impress upon college students that knowledge of the time period is not a choice but a necessity.

“Ignorance of pre- or early-modern cultures is not an option,” he says, “even for the most cutting edge institutions like CMU.”

He is optimistic about the PCMRS’s influence on the research and the scholarship as a whole.

“It will probably take a few years to really get this organization off the ground,” he says, “but if it works — and so far, so good — I think we will make Pittsburgh as a whole a true presence in medieval and Renaissance studies.”