Tanya Stabler Miller

About

Tanya Stabler Miller (Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2007) is an Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago where she teaches courses on the social, cultural, and religious history of medieval Europe.  She previously taught at Purdue University Calumet.

Miller’s research focuses on lay religion, gender, and urban culture, with special emphasis on northern France. She is the author of The Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual Authority (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), which explores the intersections between gender, spirituality, political power, and urban life in medieval Paris. Using beguines (lay religious women who took no permanent vows) as a focal point, this book explores the impact of women (whether real or imagined) on the construction of medieval clerical identity; uncovers the gendered, subjective valuation of women’s voices and activities; and examines the ways in which local networks, in conjunction with the values and legal structures of urban society, shaped women’s lives in the Middle Ages. Miller has also published essays on lay religion and heresy; medieval universities and masculinity; and medieval conceptions of gender.

Miller’s research has been supported by a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Medieval Institute at University of Notre Dame (2011-12) and an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2015-16). She is currently working on a new book project tentatively titled “Men, Women, and Religious Networks in Medieval France.” This project aims to uncover a significant spiritual and intellectual network that included the two seemingly disparate, gendered worlds of the exclusively male university and the female religious community.

Research Interests

Social and Cultural History of Medieval Europe, urban culture, medieval universities, lay religious movements, gender

Selected Publications

The Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual Authority (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)

“Reviled and Revered: The Importance of Marginality in the Pastoral Care of Beguines,” in Rethinking Medieval Margins and Marginality, ed. Ann E. Zimo, Tiffany D. Vann Sprecher, Kathryn Reyerson, and Debra Blumenthal (Routledge, 2020), 146-163.

“‘Love is Beguine’: Labeling Lay Religiosity in Thirteenth-Century Paris,” in Labels and Libels: Naming Beguines in Northern Medieval Europe, eds. Letha Böhringer Jennifer Kolpakoff Deane, and Hildo van Engen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 135-150.

“Mirror of the Scholarly (Masculine) Soul: Thinking with Beguines in the Colleges of Medieval Paris” in Negotiating Clerical Identities: Priests, Monks and Masculinity in the Middle Ages (Genders and Sexualities in History) ed. Jennifer D. Thibodeaux (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, October 2010), 238-264.

“What’s in a Name? Clerical Representations of Parisian Beguines, 1200-1327,” The Journal of Medieval History, 33:1 (2007): 60-86.