Helen Moody, PhD
After a long and fulfilling career in training and consulting for leading laboratories, Helen Moody has returned to her original interest in medieval studies, particularly the history of literature and the literature of history. She received her doctorate, in English, from the University of California at Berkeley, in 1981, shortly after founding her company. Her dissertation analyzed the historical context and literary development of Latin and Old French satires against women and marriage and how they influenced late medieval literature.
In January 2016, Routledge, the world’s leading academic publisher in the humanities and social sciences, published her and coauthor Anne Van Arsdall’s translation of the Old French Chronicle of Morea: An Account of Frankish Greece after the Fourth Crusade.
She has presented papers on the “true” story of Abelard and Heloise and on the querelle des femmes. Her papers on the Old French Chronicle of Morea explored its depictions of love and chivalry and described the journey of its unique manuscript from Greece to Burgundy, as well as the many afterlives of its story. Her attention turned toward Merovingian France, in particular toward Radegund of Poitiers, on whom she has presented papers. She continues her research on Radegund, as well as on figures from other medieval worlds.
Anne Van Arsdall, PhD
Anne Van Arsdall has a PhD in English/medieval studies from the University of New Mexico, and BA and MA in languages from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Professionally, she worked as a staff writer at the Santa Fe New Mexican and the Los Alamos Monitor, publishing newspaper articles, most of them features with photos she shot. For some years afterward, she was a science/technical writer at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories, where she edited and published numerous scientific articles and papers, and one book, Pulsed Power at Sandia National Laboratory: the first fifty years.
In her area of academic specialization, early-medieval medicine, she has published several articles and two books, Medieval Herbal Remedies (2002) and Herbs and Healers (2012) with Timothy Graham. Most recently, she completed the translation of a crusade chronicle, the Old French Chronicle of Morea (2015), with Helen Moody. She is at work on a creative nonfiction book based on the Chronicle and notes from her research.