Current Project

My current project is entitled “Gendered Transmissions : Women, Men and Christian Culture in the Early Middle Ages.”

Female monasticism flourished in the eighth-century Rhine-Main area, both among insular newcomers (such as Lioba and Thekla, associates of Boniface of Mainz) and among native Franks. Many eighth-century manuscripts survive from the religious institutions of the Main Valley region, including a dozen associated with women’s and double houses. The codices contain penitentials, patristic treatises, florilegia, books of the bible, sermons, the lives of saints and the passions of martyrs, all originally composed (with the exception of the biblical material) between the fourth and the seventh centuries. I am working with these (heretofore virtually ignored) women’s manuscripts, produced and used not only in the new Bonifatian foundations, but also in older Frankish houses. Women copied (and sometimes illuminated) particular texts, namely those supportive of gender-egalitarian or even proto-feminist values, as well as syneisactic or heterosocial organizational forms. Furthermore, they intervened to improve those works through a series of editorial decisions: textual alterations and emendations, large-scale omissions and interpolations, and the combination of originally separate texts to form unique wholes. I thus explore how religious women worked to shape the Christian culture of the Middle Ages through their gendered transmission of the heritage of Late Antiquity. Comparison with the wider corpus of surviving eighth-century manuscripts also indicates that some texts appear to have been preferentially received, read, duplicated, and transmitted through networks of women’s religious communities, in contrast to a different – likewise partial and likewise gendered - transmission passing through men’s monastic communities.

I have published several articles related to this material, most notably "Demonstrating Gun(t)za: Women, Manuscripts, and the Question of  Historical 'Proof'" in Vom Nutzen des Schreibens. Soziales Gedächtnis, Herrschaft und Besitz eds. Walter Pohl and Paul Herold (Vienna, 2002) pp. 67 – 96, and "Gender, Exegesis and Exemplarity East of the Middle Rhine:  Jesus, Mary and the Saints in Manuscript Context" Early Medieval Europe 9 (2000) pp. 325 – 344. I have also been working on a monograph concerning these manuscripts for several years, first while in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ (2006- 2007) and then during a Research Leave from FIU in Fall 2007. I expect to finish the book while a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin during the academic year 2008 – 2009.