Caroline Walker Bynum

Caroline Walker Bynum is professor emerita of Medieval European History at the Institute for Advanced Study, and university professor emerita at Columbia University in the City of New York. Her work has been instrumental in introducing the concept of gender into the study of medieval Christianity. Her path-breaking books, Holy Feast and Holy Fast (1987) and The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christendom (1995), created the paradigm for the study of women’s piety that dominates the field today and helped propel the history of the body into a major area of pre-modern European Studies. Her recent work, in Wonderful Blood (2007) and in Christian Materiality (2011), is a radical reinterpretation of the nature of Christianity on the eve of the reformations of the sixteenth century. She is currently working on medieval devotional objects in comparative perspective.