The Graduate College

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George Beech

I met George Beech at a gathering of the Stammtisch, the bi-weekly gathering of German speakers in Kalamazoo, but our conversation turned to Paris, where he spends a good part of his time.  George is fluent in German (his undergraduate major at Michigan State), although his scholarly life has focused on medieval France and, lately, Spain.  As Emeritus at Western Michigan University, he is issuing a stream of books and essays on themes ranging from the Bayeux Tapestry, to the naming of England, to the ecumenical culture of Islamic Zaragosa.  In press is his major study, The Brief Eminence and Doomed Fall of Muslim Zaragosa: A Great Center of Jewish and Arabic Culture in 11th Century Spain (University of Zaragosa: Institute for Arabic Studies).  You may find him at work in Walwood Hall, Waldo Library, or Friedmann Hall.  He gladly takes time to chat.

Beatrice Beech is also a historian.  She met George at Michigan State, where she majored in English and Philosophy.  After relocating in Kalamazoo, she completed a M.L.S. here in 1963, and in the late 1960s began working in the university library.  She rose from cataloguing to reference to become curator of the Rare Books Collection, presently on the third floor of Waldo Library, where she saw the acquisition of important collections, including women’s poetry and NSDAP newspapers.  She has recently completed a 250 -page manuscript entitled, “Wives and Daughters in a printer's Household. The De Marnefs (1480-1618),” based on extensive research in the notarial archives.

George and Beatrice Beech

George traces the origin of our world-famous Medieval Congress to a conversation he had with two other Michigan Fulbright scholars shipping over to Europe in 1954.  One of them, John R. Sommerfeldt, came to Western Michigan University as a historian with a specialty in Cisterian studies; John Sommerfeldt was named first director of our Medieval Institute in 1962, also the first year of what became the Medieval Congress.  The early idea of the congress was to assemble Michigan medievalists and promote medieval history among high-school teachers.  By the time John Sommerfeldt was called to the presidency of the University of Dallas in 1978, the Medieval Congress had become a major event in the world of scholarship.  From humble beginnings do great structures grow.

Students of medieval Europe may wonder if there is a practical side to the discipline.  George found that side as an oenophile.  When he was studying at Johns Hopkins, he learned from one of his professors, Charles Singleton, about Boordy Vineyards outside Baltimore, developed and managed by Philip Marshall Wagner, the successor of H. L. Mencken as editorial-page editor at the Baltimore Sun.  Wagner, a native of Ann Arbor, is recognized for introducing French-American hybrids, or crosses between labrusca and vinifera vines based on cuttings from Bordeaux, to this side of the water.  In 1973, along with two colleagues, Lewis H. Carlson from History and James W. Dempsey from Admissions, George bought a property between Lawton and Mattawan, cleared five acres, and planted Wagner’s hybrids.  For years the enterprise, Lawton Ridge, bottled some 200 gallons yearly.  Today, the vineyard is under new ownership, and it issues an unusually fine product, but it does not match a 17-year-old bottle George uncorked for me recently. 

Publications by Beatrice Beech

“Charlotte Guillard: A Sixteenth-Century Business Woman,” Renaissance Quarterly, 35 (1983), 345-67.

“Yolande Bonhomme: A Renaissance Printer,” Medieval Prosopography, 6/2 (1985), 79-100.

“A Nun at Montivilliers,” in Erudition at God's Servcic: Studies in Medieval Cistercian History (Kalamazoo; Cistercian Publications, 1987), 10, 339-48.

 “Women Printers in Paris in the Sixteenth  Century,”Medieval Prosopography, 10 (1989), 75-93.

St. Bernard and His Age.  An Exhibit of Manuscripts and Rare Books from the Obrecht Collection, Gethsemani Abbey, on  Permanent Loan to the Institute of Cistercian Studies, Western Michigan University, May 9-13, 1990, Exhibit Catalogue, 14 pp.

 “The Administration of the College of Saint Bernard in the time of Jean Huon (1571-1611),” Citeaux, fasc. 3-4, 1997, pp. 327-37.

“A Note on the De Marnef Women, Printers in Paris,” Early Book Society Newsletter, Spring 1999, 4/2, 5-7.

“Madeleine Boursette, femme d'imprimeur et veuve,” in Veufs, veuves et veuvage dans la France d'Ancien Regime, Actes du Colloque de Poitiers (11-12 Juin 1998), ed. N. Pellegrin, C. Winn, (Paris: Champion, 2003),  pp.147-57.

Books by George Beech

Was the Bayeux Tapestry Made in France? The Case for St. Florent of Saumur (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 

(edited, with Monique Bourin and Pascal Chareille) Personal Names Studies of Medieval Europe: Social Identity and Family Structures (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002).  

(with Yves Chauvin and Georges Pon) Le Conventum (vers 1030) : un précurseur aquitain des premières épopées (Geneva: Droz, 1995).

A Rural Society in Medieval France: The Gâtine of Poitou in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964). 

Publications by Beatrice Beech and George Beech

“Les Obsèques d’amour: Un poème de 1546 et une controverse parisienne sur les femmes et l’amour,” Seizième siècle, 1 (2005), 237-56. 

“A Painting, a Poem, and a Controversy about Women and Love in Paris in the 1530s,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 34 (2003), 635-52.

L. Pyenson