Felice Lifshitz
Professor (Medieval Europe, Historiography, Medieval Chrisitanity, gender) Columbia University, Ph.D. 1988
DM 386 Tel. (305) 348-3557 email: lifshitz@fiu.edu
Research interests
Professor Lifshitz’s research has focused on various topics, including gender during the early middle ages, especially as gender issues are evidenced in a variety of Rhine-Main area manuscript sources of the 8th and 9th centuries. These manuscripts are products of men’s, women’s and mixed religious institutions, and include liturgical, narrative, legal, homiletic and doctrinal texts. She has published articles related to these documents as well as synthetic studies of the materials. During the 1980s and 1990s, her research was primarily concerned with saint veneration practices, and their attendant manuscript sources. She has published studies on the narrative biographies of Norman saints, analyzing them for what they revealed about the politicized creation and utilization of historiographical representations (narratives about the remote or recent past). Her monograph on the Norman Conquest of Pious Neustria: Historiographic Discourse and Saintly Relics (684 – 1090) and her methodological/theoretical article, "Beyond Positism and Genre: Hagiographical Texts as Historical Narrative," Viator 25 (1994): 95 – 113 are noteworthy; the latter was the subject of a round-table discussion at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds in 2000, entitled “No More Hagiography?”
In the latter part of the 1990s, Dr. Lifshitz shifted attention to the liturgical practices of reciting, inscribing, collecting and even bearing saints’ names, independent of the figures’ historical personalities or significance. Such practices were all extremely rare among Christians during the early middle ages, when most people preferred to access the realm of sacred power through other routes, such as relics, images and, of course, stories of saints. Her study of these liturgical phenomena was published in The Name of the Saint: The Martyrology of Jerome and Access to the Sacred in Francia (627/28 – 827/28). Dr. Lifshitz is the Medieval Europe editor for History Compass.
