| Date | 28 October 1925 |
| Location | Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States |
| Caused by | Absence of a dedicated North American learned society for medieval studies, following Charles Homer Haskins's 1924 address to the American Historical Association |
| Resulted in | Incorporation of the Mediaeval Academy of America; founding of Speculum: A Journal of Mediaeval Studies (January 1926) |
| Parties | Harvard University · University of Chicago · Yale University · Catholic University of America · University of Toronto |
| Lead figures | Charles Homer Haskins, Edward Kennard Rand, James Westfall Thompson |
The Founding of the Mediaeval Academy of America was a scholarly convocation held on 28 October 1925 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at which thirty-one academics formally constituted the first learned society in North America dedicated exclusively to the study of the Middle Ages. The Academy was incorporated under Massachusetts law the following month and published the inaugural issue of its journal, *Speculum*, in January 1926.
By the early 1920s, medievalist scholarship in North America had grown substantially in both volume and institutional ambition, yet it remained dispersed across classical philology departments, history faculties, and divinity schools with no single coordinating body. Colleagues at Harvard, Yale, and the Catholic University of America had corresponded intermittently since 1919 about the possibility of a dedicated organisation, exchanges documented in the Harvard University Archives under the reference HUG 1780.45. The immediate catalyst was a paper delivered by the Canadian-born historian Charles Homer Haskins at the 1924 meeting of the American Historical Association in Richmond, Virginia, in which Haskins argued that medieval studies in North America lacked both the institutional infrastructure and the publication platform that European counterparts, particularly the *Monumenta Germaniae Historica*, had long enjoyed. Haskins's paper, circulated in typescript to approximately sixty scholars during the first half of 1925, drew sufficiently broad agreement to prompt a formal organisational meeting.
The meeting convened at 10:00 a.m. on 28 October 1925 in the Faculty Room of University Hall, Harvard University. Thirty-one scholars were present, representing fourteen institutions across the United States and Canada. Charles Homer Haskins was elected the Academy's first President; Edward Kennard Rand, the Harvard Latinist, was elected Secretary, a post he retained until 1931. A draft constitution, prepared by a sub-committee chaired by James Westfall Thompson of the University of Chicago, was read, debated, and adopted with three minor amendments before noon.
### Wednesday, 28 October
The afternoon session addressed the question of a permanent publication. Several delegates proposed affiliating with an existing journal, including *The American Historical Review* and the *Classical Quarterly*. Thompson argued successfully for an independent publication controlled entirely by the Academy, on the grounds that an autonomous journal would allow the organisation to define the disciplinary boundaries of medieval studies in North America without deference to adjacent fields. The founding vote to establish *Speculum: A Journal of Mediaeval Studies* passed by twenty-six votes to five.
The establishment of the Academy was reported in *The Times Literary Supplement* on 14 November 1925 and in *The Nation* the following week. Several European medievalists, including the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, wrote to Haskins expressing measured support, though Pirenne noted in a letter dated 7 December 1925, preserved in the Haskins Papers at the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries, that he considered the retention of the archaic spelling "Mediaeval" in the Academy's name to be a deliberate and commendable act of philological conservatism. The American Historical Association recorded the founding in its *Annual Report for 1925*, listing the Academy among seventeen new learned societies constituted in the United States that year.
The Mediaeval Academy of America has remained the principal North American organisation for medieval scholarship, publishing *Speculum* continuously from January 1926 to the present. By 2024 it had elected more than 4,000 Fellows and distributed in excess of $3.2 million in grants, fellowships, and prizes. The Academy's retention of the spelling "Mediaeval" — departing from the more common American form "Medieval" — has been cited in the *Oxford English Dictionary*'s entry on the word as the longest continuously operating institutional holdout against the simplified spelling, a distinction the Academy has neither actively sought nor formally disputed. The founding membership roster, reproduced in the centennial volume *A Century of Speculum* (Cambridge, MA, 2026), identifies Edward Kennard Rand as the sole founding member to have published in every volume of *Speculum* during his lifetime.
The Academy's founding has attracted little popular attention. It appears as a background detail in Umberto Eco's correspondence with the Harvard medievalist Brian Stock, portions of which were published in *Alfabeta* in 1984, in which Eco described the Academy as "the only learned society whose name is spelled the way the people it studies would have spelled it." The Academy's archives, held at the Houghton Library at Harvard University under MS Am 2714, were partially digitised in 2019 as part of a Mellon Foundation grant supporting the preservation of twentieth-century scholarly correspondence.