Handbook of Medieval Studies: Terms – Methods – Trends (De Gruyter, 2010), edited by Dr. Albrecht Classen of the Department of German Studies, was selected as one of the Outstanding Academic Titles for 2011 by Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
According to Choice’s website, “This prestigious list reflects the best in scholarly titles reviewed by Choice and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community. The list is quite selective: it contains approximately ten percent of some 7,000 works reviewed in Choice each year.”
The publication reaches almost every undergraduate college and university library in the United States.
This year’s Outstanding Academic Title list includes 629 books and electronic resources chosen by the Choice editorial staff from among the 7,263 titles reviewed (of 25,000 submitted) by Choice during the past year. The criteria used for selecting titles for this honor include the originality of the approach to the volume's subject matter (often these titles are the first treatment of a given subject) and and value to undergraduate students and undergraduate library collections.
The sections of this handbook cover major areas in the field of Medieval Studies including articles on all of the main disciplines, debates, and key concepts of modern medieval studies, a lexicon of the most important text genres of the Middle Ages, and biographical and bibliographic information about the most prominent medievalists in all disciplines and throughout the world. According to the pulisher, "The result is a reference work which exhaustively documents the current status of research in medieval studies and brings the disciplines and experts of the field together.
In 2010, The Star, the Cross, and the Crescent: Religions and conflicts in Francophone Literature from the Arab World (Lexington, 2010) by Carine Bourget of the Department of French and Italian book was selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Title.