Journal Celebrates Caroline Walker Bynum Across the Disciplines
The field-shaping work of Caroline Walker Bynum, Professor Emerita in the School of Historical Studies, and her significant impact on historical scholarship well beyond her areas of specialization, has been celebrated in a symposium published in a recent issue of the journal Common Knowledge.
Throughout her career, Bynum has consistently challenged existing paradigms and opened new avenues for research in medieval studies, women's history, and the study of religion. The introduction to the symposium, written by Richard Kieckhefer, highlights what he describes as the "key methodological paradox" in her work, namely how she is able to respect the "otherness and strangeness" of the past whilst still making her writing relevant to the present moment. He shows how Bynum's consideration of religious food practices in her 1987 monograph Holy Feast and Holy Fast has had resonance for discussions of anorexia and of women’s control of domestic space, and demonstrates how her book The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christendom (1995) "contributes to recent discussion of personal identity." Kieckhefer also lauds her more recent title Christian Materiality (2015) for contributing to the "material turn" in history and the humanities, namely the shift in focus among historians towards studying physical objects, artifacts, and materials as important sources of historical information and analysis.
The chapters that follow include a contribution from IAS scholar Maureen C. Miller, Elizabeth and J. Richardson Dilworth Fellow (2021) in the School of Historical Studies. Miller "traces the origins and development of Bynum's interest in the material artifacts of late medieval Christian spirituality," and describes how her process of returning to the analysis of the same text, objects, and artworks throughout her career has yielded a deep, rich engagement with her sources.
Other chapters emphasize how Bynum's "work on gender has overturned bedrock interpretations of the religious significance of the widespread ascetic practices of the Western Christian Middle Ages," and stress the wide-reaching impact of her methodological approaches, highlighting the "unparalleled impact of her work on adjacent fields, including and perhaps even especially art history." Bynum's skill as a "comparativist" historian is also established, as is her "impact on selected scholars of Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh religion — as well as of non‐Western Christianity ." An essay by one of her former students, Jacqueline Jung, now a professor at Yale, gives amusing insights into Bynum’s teaching style and encouragement of subsequent generations.
This symposium in Common Knowledge is available to read via the Duke University Press website.
