Hey there!

Thanks for checking out Dies Legibiles! We are the first undergraduate journal of Medieval Studies at Smith College, founded in 2020 by students Alexandra Domeshek and Gwen Ellis and overseen by Professor Joshua C. Birk, PhD. Our focus is the period 400 – 1600 AD; beyond that, there are no hard or fast rules! We accept submissions from all sorts of fields: art, art history, language & translation, religion, and so on. We also encourage submissions pertaining to regions outside Western Christendom.

We hope to de-center Western Europe in discourse about the Middle Ages as well as provide an academically rigorous platform upon which students can showcase their research. The undergraduate so infrequently has a chance to share their work with their peers. Academia in its highest form is the exchange of thoughts and theories; we want to facilitate this for the next generation of scholars.

Oh, you’re curious about the name?

“Dies Legibiles” is a phrase which was used in 14th and 15th-century academic calendars at Oxford University, and means “reading days”. It denotes a day on which lectures were to be held (and, conversely, “dies non legibiles” were vacation days). For us, every day is a good day for learning!