Paul Freedman, Chester D. Tripp Professor of History at Yale University, will deliver this year’s Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture on February 13, 2006 at 4:10 p.m. (location to be announced). His lecture is entitled “The Allure of Spices in Medieval Europe.”

A distinguished medieval historian, Professor Freedman’s books include Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford University Press, 1999), The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia (Cambridge University Press, 1991), and The Diocese of Vic: Tradition and Regeneration in Medieval Catalonia (Rutgers University Press, 1983). He also co-edited, with Caroline Walker Bynum, Last Things: Death and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). His many honors and awards include the Haskins Medal from the Medieval Academy of America and the Otto Grundler Prize from the International Congress of Medieval Studies for Images of the Medieval Peasant. He has received many distinguished research awards, including grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2002/2003, he was a Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers.

From 1979–1997, Professor Freedman taught at Vanderbilt University, where he was the recipient of the Nordhaus Teaching Prize in 1989. He was a Fellow at the Warren Center in 1991/92, and served as Warren Center director from 1993 through 1997.
The Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture Series was established in 1994 through the endowment of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas E. Nash, Jr., and Mr. and Mrs. George D. Renfro, all of Asheville, North Carolina. The lectureship honors Harry C. Howard Jr. (B.A., 1951) and allows the Warren Center to bring an outstanding scholar to Vanderbilt annually to deliver a lecture on a significant topic in the humanities.