Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, FSA
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton works in Middle English literature and medieval Latin intellectual history, including religious and political censorship, apocalypticism, visionary writing and women’s mysticism. She has also worked on medieval manuscript studies in England and Anglo-Ireland, history of the book and medieval literary theory, especially in relation to marginalia, text-image relations, and reading practices before print. In addition, she publishes on dance history (seventeenth-century to the present), and contemporary dance criticism, and she has begun working on Canadian colonial wilderness and exploration narratives of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Address: South Bend, Indiana, United States
Address: South Bend, Indiana, United States
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https://www.canadianmedievalists.org/Margaret-Wade-Labarge/12892827
-winner of the 2022 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize from the Canadian Society of Medievalists:
https://www.canadianmedievalists.org/Margaret-Wade-Labarge/12892827
-Link to 88 pages available online via Google Books:
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Clerical_Proletariat_and_the_Resurge.html?id=B7UjEAAAQBAJ
Link to the video recording of the book launch for The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, FSA. Speakers: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Fordham University • Misty Schieberle, University of Kansas • Susanna Fein, Kent State University • Michael Calabrese, California State University, Los Angeles • Ralph Hanna, Oxford University. Moderator: Matthew Fisher, UCLA. Organizer: Arvind Thomas, UCLA
Religion and Literature 54.3 (2022), 150-153.
https://www.canadianmedievalists.org/Margaret-Wade-Labarge/12892827
-winner of the 2022 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize from the Canadian Society of Medievalists:
https://www.canadianmedievalists.org/Margaret-Wade-Labarge/12892827
-Link to 88 pages available online via Google Books:
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Clerical_Proletariat_and_the_Resurge.html?id=B7UjEAAAQBAJ
Link to the video recording of the book launch for The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, FSA. Speakers: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Fordham University • Misty Schieberle, University of Kansas • Susanna Fein, Kent State University • Michael Calabrese, California State University, Los Angeles • Ralph Hanna, Oxford University. Moderator: Matthew Fisher, UCLA. Organizer: Arvind Thomas, UCLA
Religion and Literature 54.3 (2022), 150-153.
(Memoirs published in "Kane from Canada," ed. Mary Kane and Jane Roberts (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2017), xxix - xxxviii).
The Middle Ages, by contrast, with its extraordinarily rich concepts of interiority, inner psychology, and transcendence offers a much wider perspective on women’s roles than we, as medievalists, are collectively exploring these days. This conference, then, will highlight not women and the body, but women and the mind. Like their male counterparts, medieval women were capable of acting as forceful political agents; rigorous, and even transgressive theological, medical, and legal thinkers; innovative authors and artists; and courageous champions of ecclesiastical and social reform. By inviting participants from all three of the Abrahamic traditions that the medieval world gave to the modern one, we hope to compare fruitfully how women’s intellectual and religious roles developed, and how they influence those roles today. By inviting a range of specialists and clergy who study the thought of women c. 500 – c. 1550 from across a range of European countries, we plan to showcase the extraordinary wealth of the period in women who thought and often even led.
To this end, we encourage the investigation of unexplored or underutilized sources for the lives of medieval women. Many of the primary sources written by women themselves, such as theological treatises, works of literature, and letters, have yet to be critically studied as proper contributions to the intellectual life of the Middle Ages. But there are other sources, many of which were authored or created by women, that hold untold potential for recovering the voices of thinking medieval women, and that are only now beginning to receive scholarly attention: charters, wills, court records, liturgical books, music, manuscript illuminations, sculptures, textiles, and archaeological remains. Given the often vexed and fragmentary nature of the evidence for the lives of medieval women, creative constellations of the sources that do survive need to be configured in order to provide a fuller account of their lives. A new history of medieval women can and must be told, a history that enriches our understanding of their intellectual achievements, a history that places their minds at the center of their agency, creativity, and authority.
(The cover image depicts Esther in an authoritative teaching posture, advocating before the Persian king, Ahasuerus for the Hebrew people, an act of bravery that thwarted the genocide of her people. The image comes from one of the most lavishly illustrated medieval Hebrew manuscripts extant, 'The Northern French Miscellany', containing biblical texts and prayers (c. 1277-1286). © The British Library Board, London, British Library, MS Additional 11639, fol.260v).
culture, particularly in the bureaucracies of the early fifteenth-century Dublin-Pale, with its royal administration modeled on Westminster’s but also with its more diverse linguistic interactions and political tensions in Ireland’s vibrant multicultural setting.
nurturing the resurgence of English writing, in part as a result of the mass
underemployment of clerks originally trained for the church but unable to find steady positions in it. Surviving instead as ecclesiastical or choral "piece-workers," or in secular jobs in government or private households, this "clerical proletariat" lived and worked in liminal spaces between the
ecclesiastical and lay world. And there the most enterprising found new
material—and new audiences—for poetry in English.
Bringing together contributors from the disciplines of literature, history and religion, this volume challenges several traditional views: firstly, the still-prevalent idea that women’s intellectual accomplishments were limited to the Latin literate. The collection therefore engages heavily with vernacular writings (in Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, French, Dutch, German and Italian), and also with material culture (manuscript illumination, stained glass, fabric and jewelry) for evidence of women’s advanced capabilities. But in doing so, the contributors strive to avoid the equally problematic view that women’s accomplishments were somehow limited to the vernacular and the material. So several essays examine women at work with the sacred languages of the three Abrahamic traditions (Latin, Arabic and Hebrew). And a third traditional view is also interrogated: that women were somehow more “original” for their lack of learning and dependence on their mother tongue. Scholars here agree wholeheartedly that women could be daring thinkers in any language; they engage readily with women’s learnedness wherever it can be found.
Contributors: Asma Afsaruddin, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Amanda Bohne, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, Adrienne Williams Boyarin, Dyan Elliott, Thelma Fenster, Sean Field, Sarah Foot, Megan J. Hall, Ruth Mazzo Karras, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Rachel Koopmans, F. Thomas Luongo, Leanne MacDonald, Gary Macy, Maureen Miller, Barbara Newman, S.J. Pearce, Anna Siebach-Larsen, Gemma Simmonds, David Wallace, John Van Engen, Nicholas Watson, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne.