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CAROLINE WALKER BYNUM studies the religious ideas and practices of the European Middle Ages from late antiquity to the sixteenth century. In the 1980s, her book Holy Feast and Holy Fast was instrumental in introducing the concept of gender into Medieval Studies. In the 1990s, her books Fragmentation and Redemption and The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christendom provided a paradigm for the history of the body. The essays “In Praise of Fragments” (in Fragmentation and Redemption) and “Wonder” (in Metamorphosis and Identity) are widely cited in discussions of historical method. Her recent work, in Wonderful Blood (2007) and in her forthcoming Christian Materiality (Zone Books), is a radical reinterpretation of the nature of Christianity on the eve of the reformations of the sixteenth century.
BYNUM was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in l941. She received her BA from the University of Michigan in l962 and her Ph.D. from Harvard in l969. She taught at Harvard from l969-76, at the University of Washington from l976-88, and at Columbia University from l988 to 2003. From 1990-98, she held the Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Chair in History; in January, l999, she became University Professor, the first woman to hold this title at Columbia. In January 2003 she became Professor of European Medieval History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. From 1993-94, she was Dean of the School of General Studies and Associate Vice President for Undergraduate Education at Columbia. She served as President of the American Historical Association in 1996 and as President of the Medieval Academy of America in l997-98. She was a MacArthur Fellow from 1986-1991 and holds honorary degrees from thirteen American and foreign universities. Her articles have won prizes from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and the Renaissance Society of America. Her book Holy Feast and Holy Fast received the Governor’s Award of the State of Washington and the Philip Schaff prize of the American Society of Church History. Her book Fragmentation and Redemption received the Trilling Prize for the Best Book by a Columbia Faculty Member and the Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Analytical-Descriptive Category from the American Academy of Religion. Her book The Resurrection of the Body received the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize of Phi Beta Kappa given for the best book of the year on “the intellectual and cultural condition of man,” and the Jacques Barzun Prize of the American Philosophical Society for the best work in cultural history. She is a Fellow of the American Philosophical Society and the Medieval Academy of America and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received the Distinguished Teacher Award from the University of Washington in l981, Columbia’s Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching in l997, and the Mark van Doren Teaching Award of Columbia College in 2002. In 1999 she was Jefferson Lecturer, the highest honor the Federal Government awards to a scholar in the Humanities. In June 2001 she received the Centennial Medal of the Harvard Graduate Society, and in January 2005 the Distinguished Career Award from the American Society of Church History. In 2007 her students presented her with a Festschrift titled History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person, edited by Rachel Fulton and Bruce Holsinger (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Her book, Wonderful Blood—a study of blood piety in fifteenth-century northern Germany in its larger European context—was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2007. It won the American Academy of Religion’s 2007 Award for Excellence in the Historical Studies category, and the 2009 Gründler Prize for the Best Book in Medieval Studies published in 2007. She is currently working on the role of objects in late medieval religion, placing them in the context of contemporary theories of miracles and materiality. Increasingly cross-cultural in her interests, she is exploring the applicability of the term "relic" to shrine cult in the religions other than Christianity and pursuing a comparison between the treatment of devotional statues in late medieval Christianity and the ostensibly similar practices in the Hinduism of medieval India.. |
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Statuta Casinensia (Saec. XIII-XIV) (an edition of custumals of Monte Cassino with introduction, done in collaboration with T. Leccisotti), in Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum, vol. 4 (Siegburg: Francis Schmitt, 1972), 191-258.
Docere Verbo et Exemplo: An Aspect of Twelfth-Century Spirituality, Harvard Theological Monographs (Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1979).
Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982).
Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. Caroline Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986).
Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).
Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Urzone Publishers, 1991).
“Why All the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” Critical Inquiry 22 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 1-33.
The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
Body-Part Reliquaries, ed. Caroline Bynum and Paula Gerson, Gesta 36.1 (1997), special issue.
“Death and Resurrection in the Middle Ages,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 142.4 (1998), pp. 589-96.
“Miracles and Marvels: The Limits of Alterity,” in Vita Religiosa im Mittelalter: Festschrift für Kaspar Elm zum 70. Geburstag (Berlin, 1999), pp. 799-817.
Last Things: Eschatology and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Caroline Bynum and Paul Freedman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).
Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001).
“Das Blut und die Körper Christi im Mittelalter: Eine Asymmetrie,” Vorträge aus dem Warburg Haus 5 (2001), pp. 75-119.
“Violent Imagery in Late Medieval Piety,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 30 (Spring, 2002), pp. 3-36.
[with Susan R. Kramer], “Revisiting the Twelfth-Century Individual: The Inner Self and the Christian Community,” in Das Eigene und das Ganze: Zum Individuellen im mittelalterlichen Religiosentum, ed. Gert Melville and Markus Schuerer (Muenster: LIT Verlag, 2002), pp. 57-85.
“The Blood of Christ in the Later Middle Ages,” Church History 71.4 (2002), pp. 685-715.
“Curriculum Vitae: An Authorial Aside,” Common Knowledge 9.1 (Winter, 2003), pp. 1-12. An autobiographical essay. Also appeared as “My Life and Works,” in Women Medievalists in the Academy, ed. Jane Chance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), pp. 995-1006.
“The Power in the Blood: Sacrifice, Satisfaction and Substitution in Late Medieval Soteriology,” in The Redemption: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Christ as Redeemer, ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, SJ and Gerald O’Collins, SJ, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 177-204.
“Soul and Body,” Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Supplement, ed. William Jordan with Joel Kaye and Lynn Staley (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004), pp. 588-94.
“The Presence of Objects: Medieval Anti-Judaism in Modern Germany,” Common Knowledge 10 (Winter, 2004), pp. 1-32.
“Seeing and Seeing Beyond: The Mass of St. Gregory in the Fifteenth Century,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theology in the Middle Ages, ed. Anne-Marie Bouché and Jeffrey Hamburger (Department of Art History, Princeton University, 2005), pp. 208-240.
“A Matter of Matter: Two Cases of Blood Cult in the North of Germany in the Later Middle Ages,” in Medieval Paradigms: Essays in Honor of Jeremy duQuesnay Adams, ed. Stephanie Hayes, 2 vols. (New York: Palgrave, 2005), vol. 2, pp. 181-210.
Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
“The P Word,” Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, 45.7 (October 2007), p. 58.
“Preface” and “Forms of Female Piety in the Later Middle Ages, “ in Crown and Veil: The Art of Female Monasticism in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Hamburger et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. xiii-xviii and 172-190.
“Perspectives, Connections and Objects: What’s Happening in History Now?” Daedalus
(Winter, 2009), pp. 71-86.
“Weeping Statues and Bleeding Bread: Miracles in the Late Middle Ages,” Zmanim 105
(2009), pp. 4-15 (in Hebrew).
“Miracles, Marvels, Magic,” London Review of Books 31.13 (July 9, 2009), pp. 32-33.
“Teaching Scholarship,” Perspective on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, 47.9 (December 2009), pp. 14-16.
“Violence Occluded: The Wound in Christ's Side in Late Medieval Devotion,” in Feud Violence and Practice: Essays in Medieval Studies in Honor of Stephen D. White, ed. Belle S. Tuten and Tracey L. Billado (Ashgate, 2010), pp. 95-116.
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