Research

During the 1980s and 1990s, my research was primarily concerned with saint veneration practices, and their attendant manuscript sources. I published numerous studies on the narrative biographies of Norman saints, which I analyzed for what they revealed about the politicized creation and utilization of historiographical representations (narratives about the remote or recent past). Most noteworthy was my monograph, The Norman Conquest of Pious Neustria: Historiographic Discourse and Saintly Relics (684 – 1090) (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Press, Toronto, 1995), and my methodological/theoretical article, "Beyond Positivism and Genre: Hagiographical Texts as Historical Narrative" Viator 25 (1994) pp. 95 – 113; the latter was the subject of a round-table discussion at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds in 2000, entitled “No More Hagiography?” I also published a number of studies of other aspects of and sources for the history of medieval Normandy, above all the works of Dudo of St. Quentin, whose Gesta Normannorum I translated into English. The Latin text of Dudo’s narrative appears here on this website.

In the latter part of the 1990s, I turned my 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. Between 1995 and 2004, I was fortunate to be able to spend a total of three years in Germany and Austria (in Berlin, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Freiburg and Vienna) doing manuscript research on liturgical sources. My research was funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, the DAAD, and Florida International University. My study of these liturgical phenomena resulted in my second monograph, The Name of the Saint: The Martyrology of Jerome and Access to the Sacred in Francia, 627 – 827 (Notre Dame, IN, 2005), and in a number of other articles on litanies, baptismal rites, and the like. During this period, I also co-edited a collection of methodological essays with Celia Chazelle: Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieval Studies: A Reconsideration (2007).

I have recently been above all concerned with the history of women and gender during the early Middle Ages. I have just published collection of essays, inspired by the work of Jo Ann McNamara, that I co-edited with Lisa Bitel: Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives (2008). Over the last few years I have also been at work on a book-length study of a series of eighth-century women’s manuscripts from the Main River valley region, tentatively entitled Gendered Transmissions: Women, Men and Christian Culture in the Early Middle Ages.