Ruth Mazo Karras
Professor of History, University of Minnesota
My historical interests focus on the history of women, gender, and sexuality in medieval western Europe. I have worked on various regions of northwestern Europe across the whole medieval period. My PhD students also work on a variety of topics, especially in the social and religious history of medieval England and Iceland but on other areas of Europe too: from queenship in Anglo-Saxon England to fatherhood in late medieval Basel, from the interaction between monks and the natural world in early medieval Germany to marriage patterns in late medieval and early modern Florence to the church and popular religion in fifteenth-century Iceland. At the undergraduate level I teach the first half of Western Civilization, the first half of the British History survey, and a course on women in medieval Europe. At the graduate level I teach Gender in Medieval Culture, Medieval England, and History of Sexuality.
I am currently director of the Center for Medieval Studies. Please join us for our colloquia and workshops!
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I am also General Editor of the University of Pennsylvania Press's Middle Ages Series and co-editor of the journal Gender & History. |
Current Research
My current research deals with quasi-marital unions in medieval Europe. Many partners in medieval Europe lived together in long-term domestic relationships other than marriage. Sometimes the partners could not legally marry because one was a priest, because they were of different religions, or because one or both was previously married to someone else in an age that did not permit divorce. Sometimes the partners could theoretically have married, but social norms militated against it: the two were of very disparate social classes, or both were poor enough that they were unable to establish an independent household. Such unions, where the protections that medieval law furnished to wives (and their children) were absent, were fraught with danger for women in particular, but they also provided a degree of flexibility and demonstrate of the adaptability of social customs in the face of unchanging (or very slowly changing) religious doctrine. The project draws on a wide range of sources from across Europe and from the entire medieval millennium. The analysis of forms of partnership with regard to the ways men and women experienced them differently, and their implications for power relations between the genders, will be central to the work.
Church court records are some of the richest sources for the history of marriage, whether legal, social, or demographic. Among other sources, this project analyzes a body of more than 1600 cases involving sexual and matrimonial offenses—carnal knowledge, adultery, concubinage, seduction, clandestine marriage—from the criminal registers of the Archdeaconry of Paris from 1483-1505. I have taken digital photographs of all four volumes of these registers—2400 pages in all—and have entered the sexual and matrimonial cases in a database. Looking at what cases the courts themselves chose to prosecute, as well as how they treated cases brought by an offended party, provides a very different picture of how sexual activity and marriage were regulated than the work many historians have done on court records.
Recent Awards and Honors
University of Minnesota, Distinguished Women Scholars Award in Humanities, Social Sciences and Arts, 2008
American Philosophical Society, Sabbatical Fellowship, 2004-05
University of Minnesota, Scholar of the College, 2003-06
Books
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Recent Articles
“Chastity and Clerical Masculinity,” in Professing Gender, ed. Lisa Bitel and Felice Lifshitz (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
“The History of Marriage and the Myth of Friedelehe,” Early Medieval Europe 14 (2006), 119-151.
“Knighthood, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and Sodomy,” in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 273-286,
“The Lechery That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Sodomy and the Vices in Medieval England,” in In the Garden of Evil: The Vices and Culture in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard Newhauser (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2005), 193-205.
“Women’s Labors: Reproduction and Sex Work in Medieval Europe Journal of Women’s History. 15:4 (2004), 153-58.
“’This Skill in a Woman is By No Means to Be Despised’: Weaving and the Gender Division of Labor in the Middle Ages,” in Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings, ed. E. Jane Burns (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 89-104
[Kathryn Kelsey Staples and Ruth Mazo Karras,] “Christina’s Tempting,” in Christina of Markyate, ed. Samuel Fanous and Henrietta Leyser (London: Routledge, 2004).
“Using Women to Think With in the Medieval University,” in Seeing and Knowing: Women and Learning in Medieval Europe 1200-1550, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 21-33.
“Marriage and the Creation of Kin in the Sagas,” Scandinavian Studies 4 (2003), 473-90.
“‘Because the other is a poor woman, she shall be called his wench’: Gender, Sexuality, and Social Status in Late Medieval England,” in Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages, ed. Sharon Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 210-29.