Adolescent Anglophilia, fueled by a love for “Doctor Who” and The Kinks, led Jay Rubenstein to discover a passion for the Middle Ages. Now the MacArthur Fellow and distinguished medievalist recently joined the USC Dornsife to create a new Center for the Study of the Pre-Modern World.
Nothing predisposed Jay Rubenstein to become a medieval scholar.
The small Midwestern town of Cushing, Oklahoma, where he was born and raised, is a refining center, best known as a trading hub for crude oil. There, his parents ran a scrap metal and recycling company.
“In the summer, I would be in charge of the aluminum can machine,” Rubenstein recalls.
But when he wasn’t recycling cans, the American teen was nurturing an admiration for all things British, fueled by a deep love of the BBC television series Doctor Who and the music of British rock band The Kinks. By the time he had joined Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, as an undergraduate, Rubenstein was determined to spend a semester in England.
He focused his attention on getting accepted into one of the only U.K. study-abroad programs available to him at Carleton — which happened to be at the University of Oxford’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Realizing the program would be his golden ticket to England, Rubenstein took a medieval history class in preparation.
“For the first three quarters of the class I just hated it,” he recalls. “But then we read The Art of Courtly Love, a guide book from the period on how to be a good lover in the Middle Ages.” As the class debated whether the art of courtly love had actually existed or was just an intellectual construct, Rubenstein was captivated.
Then he got to Oxford.
Discovering a new world
The oldest buildings in Cushing date from the 1920s, so the medieval city and its university were a revelation.
Oxford, he says “just struck me as dumbfoundingly beautiful. All of these gorgeous sandstone, medieval, Renaissance- and Enlightenment-era buildings, all crammed together in such a small city square. It was a stunning place to be.”
But Rubenstein says the moment he really became hooked was when he took a paleography class to learn how to read medieval handwriting. The final exam was held in an Oxford college library built in the early 17th century. The assignment was to translate a medieval manuscript.
“That was the first time I’d worked with an actual medieval book,” Rubenstein said. “Here I am with a pencil in hand, copying a book that somebody had copied out about 700 years ago with a quill pen. That gave me an electrifying sense of connection to the past.
“I still get a contact high every time I get to handle an old manuscript.”
His connection with Oxford flourished. A grant enabled him to return in the summer to research miracle cults. He wrote his senior thesis on the city’s patron saint.
A Rhodes Scholarship awarded during his senior year allowed him to return to Oxford as a postgraduate. His hometown was so excited by the news, they named a street — Jay Rubenstein Avenue — in his honor. The son of scrap metal merchants was on his way to a glittering academic career.
Centered on the pre-modern world
Rubenstein, who was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2007, joined the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, following teaching posts at the University of New Mexico, Syracuse University and Dickinson College.
As a visiting professor of history, the distinguished medieval scholar established and directs the USC Dornsife’s Center for the Study of the Pre-Modern World.
“It’s an exciting opportunity, because I get to build a center from the ground up and put my own stamp on it,” says Rubenstein, whose research focuses on the Crusades, apocalyptic thought, and religious and intellectual life in the Middle Ages.
He’s particularly excited by the fact the new center won’t be confined to Medieval Europe but will also embrace antiquity and pre-history.
Through the center, he works with USC Dornsife faculty in classics, art history, history, religion and East Asian studies.
“I think job one of a center like this is to get as many people from different departments talking to one another as possible, exchanging ideas and sharing some of their mutual interests,” Rubenstein said.
His plans for the center include establishing a summer program for scholars of the pre-modern world, major outreach to the public and the wider academic community via campus-wide events, and the creation of research symposia in conjunction with The Getty.
Rigor and accessibility
In his own writing, Rubenstein strives to present academic research in a way that remains accessible to a wider audience.
“I want to use the center as a forum for figuring out ways to write well and with intellectual rigor but also in a way that will enable what we’re doing to be of interest to the wider world,” he says. “And, of course, there’s no better place to do that than Los Angeles, the media capital of the world.”
He is clearly meeting that goal with his own writing. Terry Jones of Monty Python fame, and himself an author of a tome on medieval history, described Rubenstein’s 2011 book Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse (Basic Books)as “a page-turner” and “the most fascinating and readable book about the Crusades I have read.”
Rubenstein’s latest book, Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream: The Crusades, Apocalyptic Prophecy and the End of History (Oxford University Press, 2019), explores how people in the Middle Ages thought about the first crusade in connection with the apocalypse. He’s now planning a third volume on the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem.
“The question that will drive the narrative is, okay, you fulfilled the apocalypse, you’ve captured Jerusalem, now what do you do with it?” Rubenstein says.
Teaching the Apocalypse
This semester Rubenstein is teaching a freshman seminar “Apocalypse Medieval,” featuring what Rubenstein describes as “apocalyptically-infused sources from the Middle Ages.”
“It’s been nice for me to teach it,” Rubenstein says, “because, as I told my class on the first day, we all have something in common. I’m new here, too.”
Changing places
Rubenstein spent four years in Oxford, one in Rome and four in Paris where he lived at “possibly the best address in the whole world — 13 Rue Edgard Poe.”
Now he’s traded life in some of the world’s most historic cities for a new post in arguably its most relentlessly modern metropolis: L.A. As a medievalist, how will he adapt to living in the archetypal 20th century city?
From an academic perspective, he says the fact that L.A. is home to both The Getty and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens means he’s fortunate to have major historical resources at his fingertips.
Rubenstein also claims a personal affinity with the City of Angels. Citing Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye as his favorite book, he reveals that while in Paris he developed a passion for old American cinema, particularly Noir films of the 1930s and ’40s.
“So now coming to L.A. makes perfect sense. This is exactly where I want to be living right now. I love all the Googie architecture; I love all the neon.”
One thing is certain: Rubenstein will be easy to spot around campus. He has a predilection for wide-brimmed hats that he says would make him look right at home in a Humphrey Bogart movie.
By Susan Bell
>Read the original story on the USC Dornsife College website.