Mark Cruse (NHC Fellow, 2017–18; 2024–25)

Mark Cruse (PhD, New York University) is associate professor of French at Arizona State University. A medievalist, he has published on a wide range of topics including medieval theater, heraldry, writing tablets, the Louvre, Marco Polo, and global trade. His first monograph, Illuminating the Roman d’Alexandre (MS Bodley 264): The Manuscript as Monument (Boydell and Brewer, 2011), is a comprehensive study of one of the most famous medieval manuscripts extant. He has also published a translation of Catherine the Great’s memoirs (with Hilde Hoogenboom; Random House, 2005), and articles on Haitian literature and eighteenth-century battlefield medicine. Forthcoming in 2025 are two books: The Mongol Archive in Late Medieval France: Texts, Objects, Encounters, 1221–1422 (Cornell) and L’Iconographie de l’ Epistre Othea de Christine de Pizan (with Gabriella Parussa; Brepols). He is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (fellowship 2013–14), and has twice been a fellow at the National Humanities Center (2017–18; 2024–25).

Selected Publications

• Cruse, Mark. “Alexander the Great and the Crusades.” In A History of Alexander the Great in World Culture, edited by Richard Stoneman, 167–96. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
• Cruse, Mark. “‘Pleasure in Foreign Things’: Global Entanglement in the Livre des merveilles du monde (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 2810).” Mediaevalia 41 (2020): 217–36.
• Cruse, Mark. “A Quantitative Analysis of Toponyms in a Manuscript of Marco Polo’s Devisement du monde (London, British Library, Royal 19 D 1).” Speculum 92/S1 (October 2017): S247–S264.
• Cruse, Mark. Illuminating the Roman d’Alexandre (MS Bodley 264): The Manuscript as Monument. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2011.
• Catherine II, Empress of Russia. The Memoirs of Catherine the Great. Translated by Mark Cruse and Hilde Hoogenboom. New York: Modern Library, 2005.

Fellowship Work Summary, 2017–18

Mark Cruse made substantial progress on Marco Polo’s “Description of the World” in Manuscript and the Global Middle Ages. Additionally he completed one article and two chapters for other works: “Global Encounters the Emerging World in the Livre des merveilles du monde” (Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France) for a special issue of Mediaevalia, edited by Marilynn Desmond (forthcoming); “Literature and the Performing Arts” for The Cultural History of Color, edited by Carole Biggam and Kirsten Wolf (Bloomsbury Publishing, forthcoming); and “Mongol Courts through Medieval European Eyes” in Courts on the Move: Perspectives from the Global Middle Ages, edited by Claudia Rapp, Ekaterini Mitsiou, Johannes Preisser-Kapeller and Paraskevi Sykopetritou (Vienna University Press, forthcoming).