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Graduate Students Get Hands-On Experience with Medieval Manuscripts

This fall semester, history graduate students have the rare opportunity of working with the Newberry Library's renowned collection of medieval manuscripts through a 500-level seminar course on gender, bodies, and the body politic in medieval Europe. Led by Dr. Tanya Stabler-Miller, Assistant Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago, this course examines the relationship between gender, sex differences, and politics in medieval Europe and the ways in which systems of power mapped onto perceived sex differences and bolstered, reproduced, or authenticated those systems. Through a close reading of political treatises, sermons, mystical literature, and church decrees, students in this ten-week graduate course evaluate the ways in which gendered discourses supported or weakened institutional, political, and religious authority, even in situations that seemingly had nothing to do with “real” women. The course aims to illuminate the effects of gendered symbols and discourses on institutions or spaces from which real women were increasingly marginalized, like royal authority, or completely excluded, such as the medieval university.

This graduate seminar is offered through the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library and welcomes graduate students from across the region.