“Superior Women examines the claims of abbesses of the abbey of Sainte-Croix in medieval Poitiers to authority from the abbey’s foundation to its 1520 reform. These women claimed to hold authority over their own community, over dependent chapters of male canons, and over extensive properties in Poitou; male officials such as the king of France and the pope repeatedly supported these claims. To secure this support, the abbesses relied on two strategies that the abbey’s founder, the sixth-century Saint Radegund, established: they documented support from a network of allies made up of powerful secular and ecclesiastical officials, and they used artefacts left from Radegund’s life to shape her cult and win new patrons and allies. Abbesses across the 900 years of this study routinely turned to these strategies successfully when faced with conflict from dependents, or more local officials such as the bishop of Poitiers. Sainte-Croix’s nuns proved adept at tailoring these strategies to shifting historical contexts, turning from Frankish bishops to the kings of Frankia, then to the Pope and finally to the King of France as former allies became unavailable to them. The book demonstrates respectful cooperation between men and monastic women, and more extensive respect for female monastic authority than scholars typically recognize. Chapters focus on the cult’s manuscripts, church decoration, procession, jurisdictions between cult institutions, reform, and rebellion.”
Daily Life of Women in Chaucer’s England (ABC-Clio, 2022). 
The late medieval period in England was one rich with opportunities for women, who played fundamental roles in family businesses as well as in the peasant community and economy, and who wrote letters, created autobiographies, and documented their spiritual journeys. Their lives fit into a pattern of seasonal celebrations and rituals shaped, for the majority of women, by work, marriage, and motherhood. The text further considers status distinctions, then shifts to experiences that affected all women, such as the ritual year, disease, food and drink, sex or celibacy, and religion.
By providing an overview of the history of English women and gender in the 14th and 15th centuries, the book provides a background suitable for students as well as for academics beginning work in this field.
Christine de Pizan and the Querelle des Femmes
(A Reacting to the Past Game in Development, Level 3).
This is a Reacting to the Past game that the Reacting Editorial Board advanced to Level 3 status in August 2023, which means it is included on the Reacting Consortium website for download by approved instructors (Level 5 is print publication). The project includes a student gamebook with primary sources, an instructor manual, and more than thirty historical roles for students to play.
Christine de Pizan and the Querelle des Femmes examines the power, authority, and roles of women in the 1413 French court. Debates over misogyny in literature, legal theory, and political roles demonstrate the centrality of both women and gender to major issues in late medieval France. Two noble factions, the Armagnacs and Burgundians, negotiate the power vacuum left by the extended illness of King Charles VII, while two factions of authors, the Humanists and the Profeminines, publicly debate misogyny in legal theory and literature—Salic Law and the Romance of the Rose. Authors seek patronage from the nobles, while nobles seek the authors’ support—and to use authors’ skills to promote their own positions. The game is set during a peaceful interlude in the Hundred Years War, and an opening phase of the French civil war managed by Queen Isabeau of Bavaria. Meanwhile, Christine de Pizan, an influential author at the French court, engaged in debates about misogyny, morality, and the capabilities of women, and wrote a long defense of women in The Book of the City of Ladies, showing women’s abilities, power. Christine puts women and gender as issues at the center of game debates, and includes important female characters as roles. It has resonances for continuing debates about representations of women in art and political participation.
Co-edited Issue
With Linda K. Mitchell, Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, Special Issue: Microaggressions, Harassment, and Abuse–Medieval and Modern, 53, no. 1 (2017).
Articles
“Building Community: Material Concerns in the Fifteenth-Century Monastic Reform,” Women and Monastic Reform in the Medieval West, c. 1000-1500: Debating Identities, Creating Communities, edited by Julie Hotchin and Jirki Thibaut (Boydell Press, 2023).
“Medical and Spiritual Healing of Death and Disease in Medieval Miracle Stories,” Death and Disease in the Medieval and Early Modern World, edited by Nükhet Varlik and Lori Jones (York Medieval Press, 2022).
“The SMFS Survey on Harassment,” Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, Special Issue: Microaggressions, Harassment, and Abuse–Medieval and Modern, 53, no. 1 (2017).
“#Femfog and Fencing: The Risks for Academic Feminism in Public and Online,” Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, Special Issue: Microaggressions, Harassment, and Abuse–Medieval and Modern, 53, no. 1 (2017).
“Wiki Women: Bringing Women Back Into Wikipedia Through Activism and Pedagogy,” The History Teacher 48, no. 3 (May 2015): 409-36.
“Casting, Plotting, and Enchanting: Arthurian Women in Starz’s Camelot and the BBC’s Merlin,” Arthuriana 25, no. 1 (2015): 57-81.
“My Sister for Abbess: Fifteenth-Century Power Disputes over the Abbey of Sainte-Croix, Poitiers,” Journal of Medieval History 40, no. 1 (2014): 85-107. Winner of the 2015 Society for French Historical Studies William Koren, Jr. Prize
“Reading Telemachus through Orestes: Using the Oresteia to explain The Odyssey,” The Classical Outlook 90, no. 1 (2012): 1-3.
“‘Man Can be Subject to Woman’: Female Monastic Authority in Fifteenth-Century Poitiers” Gender & History 25, no. 1 (2013): 86-106. Co-runner up for the 2013 Society for French Studies Malcolm Bowie Prize
“Their Cross to Bear: Controversy and the Relic of the True Cross in Poitiers,” in Essays in Medieval Studies 24 (2007): 65-77.
Review Essay
“The Return of the Queen,” Journal of Women’s History 29, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 169-176, a three-book review essay.
Book Reviews
Review of “Abortion in the Early Middle Ages, c.500-900,” by Zubin Mistry, Gender & History, 29, no. 2 (2017).
Review of “Des Comptes d’apothicaires: Les épices dans la comptabilité de la maison de Savoie (XIVe et XVe s.),” by Fanny Abbott, Speculum 90, no. 4 (2015): 1076-77.
Review of “Preaching in the Age of Chaucer: Selected Sermons in Translation,” by Siegfried Wenzel, Medieval Sermon Studies 55 (2011): 94-95.
Review of “Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St. AEthelthryth in Medieval England, 695-1615,” by Virginia Blanton, for Medieval Feminist Forum 45, no. 2 (2009)
Review of “Conquest and Colonisation: The Normans in Britain, 1066–1100,” by Brian Golding, for The Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 3, no. 2 (Fall 2002)
Work in progress
Books
Holy Healing: Saints and Urban Leprosaria in the Middle Ages, book project
Querelle de La Rose: Christine de Pisan and Late Medieval Notions of Women, a Reacting to the Past game.
Articles
“Medical and Spiritual Healing of Death and Disease in Medieval Miracle Stories,” Death and Disease in the Long Middle Ages, edited by Nükhet Varlik and Lori Jones
“‘I’m Being Nailed to the Cross Like Jesus Was’: Martyrdom and Suffering in Medieval Hagiography and Modern Real Housewives” in Historians on Housewives, edited by Jessica Millward, Kacey Calahane, and Max Speare
Jennifer C. Edwards 