Robert Brentano

Memoirs of Fellows and Corresponding Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America

George Peddy Cuttino, distinguished scholar of diplomatic and diplomacy, died in Atlanta, Georgia, on 4 October 1991 in his seventy-eighth year. He was born in Newman, Georgia, on 9 March 1914. When Cuttino entered Swarthmore College in 1931, he assumed that he was heading towards a career as a diplomat, but Mary Albertsons seminar soon turned his thoughts to medieval history. After graduating with highest honors in 1935, he received an M.A. from the University of Iowa the following year. He then proceeded on to Oxford, the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship, and for the next two years he studied at Oriel College. Maurice Powicke, already the Regius Professor, was his official tutor, but increasingly he sought guidance and inspiration from Vivian Galbraith, then a Reader in Diplomatic and the scholar whom Cuttino regarded as having had the greatest formative influence on his own development. He received his D.Phil. in 1938, after which he spent a postdoctoral year at the University of Londons Institute of Historical Research.

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, 2001

The Medieval Academy of America held its seventy-sixth annual meeting in Tempe, Arizona, on 15-17 March 2001. Arizona State University was the host for the meeting, which was held jointly with the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Medieval Association of the Pacific. Meeting of the Corporation. The annual meeting of the Corporation was held on Friday, 16 March, at 1 P.M. Joan M. Ferrante, President, presided. The minutes of the seventyfifth annual meeting were heard and approved. Reports were delivered by the Executive Director, incoming Treasurer, Editor of Speculum, and Delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies. The following resolution, voted unanimously by Council at its meeting the previous day, was read by President Ferrante:

Preferences in History

In that quite specific field of history in which I most frequently work, printed speeches and addresses sometimes bear almost no resemblance to the talk that they purport to record. This seems to me a rather disingenuous deception; my own inclination is, as closely as possible, to present to the readers sight the speech that the hearer heard, and perhaps that is because I would sometimes so much like to believe that that is what the writers of my sources had done. But in the case of this presidential address, a very oral presentation of a kind of oral history, I had meant to make an exception, to groom the thing so that it would fit better in Speculums meticulously respectable pages. I was, perhaps too readily, convinced to change my mind by the person whom I consider the greatest expert on these things-presidential addresses-to believe that they are meant to be informal and revealing of the taste and style of the persons who give them, and that I might more or less simply present what I had said; and my disguise of my adviser will probably be transparent to anyone who knows the Academy. So I present this, including the remarks about friends with which I began, with few changes and the hope that readers will understand that my remembered attitudes are those of a brash young Swarthmorean, not those of a seasoned Berkeleyan.