Medievalist, Dr. Tekla Bude, discusses her journey in medieval studies, the development of her upcoming book, as well as the value of learning about a deep past, and what it can teach us about our present
Moreland Hall
By Gabriella Grinbergs, CLA Student Writer - February 26, 2025
When you hear the word “medieval”, what comes to mind? The elaborate fashions of old European royals, ordering servants around in picturesque stone castles? Or knights, swords drawn, valiantly riding into battle on horseback? Or maybe the infamous spread of the bubonic plague?
While these images aren’t completely unrelated, Dr. Tekla Bude’s research and classes reveal the true complexities and societal intricacies in Europe of, what is commonly referred to as, the Middle Ages.
Bude’s fascination with the medieval has been a part of her life for as long as she can remember. Early on, she fell in love with the aesthetics of the classic film Sleeping Beauty and young adult novels, like The Chronicles of Narnia, set in a medieval-like past.
“I got my first etymological dictionary when I was probably in grade school,” Bude recalled. “I've always been obsessed with the history of words.”
It was during her undergraduate years at University of Michigan that she chose to depart from her pre-medical education to focus on medieval studies, earning bachelor’s degrees in English and German.
“I will say that no matter what your degree path is, the moment you decide ‘this is the career I want’, you're rejecting a lot of possibilities,” Bude explained. “You're starting to put a stake in the ground that feels really risky.”
With this decision came a “whole other layer of professionalism” and a necessary ability to separate her love of the subject from the reality of pursuing a career in academia. Ultimately, however, her passion for her field far outweighed the risk.
She went on to complete a Master of Studies – a year-long program specifically in medieval literature – at the University of Oxford on top of a master’s degree in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. While at Oxford, she completed a project on Richard Rolle, a writer from the 14th century who was fundamental to the development of English prose.
“Eventually that would go on to become the kernel of my Ph.D. project,” she explained, “and the core of my book that came out a couple of years ago, too.”
Sonic Bodies: Text, Music, and Silence in Late Medieval England was published in 2022, roughly six years after becoming an OSU faculty member, and stemmed from a personal obsession with music. Her love of music combined with her devotion to medieval literature as she analyzed how “bonds between readers or between readers and the text are strengthened or changed when a musical performance becomes part of that relationship.”
Sonic Bodies later won the Anne Middleton Book Prize from the International Piers Plowman Society, a scholarly group that focuses on Piers Plowman and related late medieval literature. Winning this prestigious award was “sort of a surprise” Bude described. “To be recognized for my work by that group of people in particular was incredibly meaningful.”
As of now, Bude is developing her second book on mathematical imagination in the tenth to fifteenth centuries. The core argument of her research positions mathematics as “a historically determined discipline” and analyzes how different systems of thought in the medieval era shaped how mathematics is used and interpreted today.
“If you ask a random person on the street, ‘what is math?’ you might get a bunch of different answers,” she explained. “What I'm trying to do in this book is to say that for people in the medieval period, they might also have had any number of different answers to the question, what is mathematics?”
According to Bude, mathematics might have been found in places we, as modern math users, might not immediately identify. One example includes how medieval mystics conceptualized the idea of God as a type of infinity “that resides in the infinitesimal as a circle of infinite size, or as the tangent between a straight line and a circle of infinite size,” and other concepts of infinity often found in modern mathematics.
“If you've ever taken calculus,” she stated, “you'll recognize some of the same sort of thought processes of an integral or differential calculus in that way of thinking about God.” While not identical to integral or differential calculus, Bude clarified, a form of latent mathematics was present in medieval mysticism.
Bude also plans to explore how mathematics was embedded in material practices, like the development of textiles and Nålebinding – an early common form of knitting. She even ties literary texts into this research by analyzing writers’ contemplations of the future as a type of risk assessment and probabilistic sets of reasonings.
Much of the research process for this, Bude explained, involves relearning linear algebra, set theory, and basic theorems and principles of calculus while examining various literary, mystical, and legal texts, in search of similar thought processes.
As for her students at OSU, Bude teaches several upper-division courses on a variety of medieval topics, which interested students should feel free to email her about. She hopes her students leave her class with an understanding of how drastically language, systems, ideas and literature itself can change and shape our perceptions of the world today.
“The more widely you read cross-culturally and cross-temporally, the better sense you get for the huge variety and possibility of the human condition and how it can be talked about,” Bude said. “So, as a humanities degree is the process of trying to make you more humane by helping you understand different types of people, I think learning about the deeper past is really crucial to that.”
In this way, Bude believes everyone should take a course on any type of distant history – whether it be on the medieval period, classical India, or Egyptology – with the goal of deepening and broadening one’s studies as much as possible.
Medieval literature shows its value at OSU as it reveals different possibilities for social and informational structures, Bude expressed, which pose their own benefits and shortcomings.
Many of the negative impacts in the medieval period, according to Bude, resulted from information systems that weren’t built for the development and spread of rationality and logic. From these shortcomings, she continues, there are significant lessons to be learned from the distant past.
“The medieval has a lot to teach us about our present moment.”