Professor Ruth Karras

Lecky Professor Of History

she/her

I am a scholar of medieval women, gender and sexuality. My books have dealt with slavery, prostitution, masculinity, and quasi-marital unions. My current research focuses on women’s and family strategies in the making and breaking of marriage in later medieval Paris. I have been active in the profession internationally both in the field of women's and gender history and the field of medieval studies.

I am interested in the intersection of social and cultural history; legal history; the history of women, gender, and sexuality. I have worked with a wide variety of sources, including court records, hagiography, and Icelandic sagas, to name a few. I have particular interests in medieval masculinities, and in the way particular stories are retold and reinterpreted across time and geographies.

I am a co-editor of the Journal of Medieval History, which publishes research on all aspects of the history of Europe and the Mediterranean region, broadly conceived, in the period roughly 500-1500.

Before coming to Trinity I taught in the United States at the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, and the University of Minnesota, where I was named Distinguished Teaching Professor for my work in teaching postgraduates.

I am no longer taking PhD students due to approaching retirement.

Publications

Books

Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others, fourth edition co-authored with Katherine Pierpont (Routledge 2023). 1st edition (2005) translated as Sexualität im Mittelalter, trans. Wolfgang Hartung (Artemis & Winkler, 2006); Seksualność w średniowiecznej Europie, trans. Arkadiusz Bugaj (Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 2006).
Thou Art the Man: The Masculinity of David in the Christian and Jewish Middle Ages (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).
Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in Medieval Europe (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England, (Oxford University Press, 1996).
Slavery and Society in Medieval Scandinavia (Yale University Press, 1988). Chapter reprinted in Critical Readings on Global Slavery, ed. Damian Alan Pargas and Felicia Roşu (Brill, 2017), 699-711.

Edited Books

Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority, and Transmission in Medieval Jewish Culture, co-edited with Elisheva Baumgarten and Katelyn Mesler (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017)
The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, co-edited with Judith M. Bennett (Oxford University Press, 2013; paperback edition 2016).
Law and the Illicit in Medieval Europe, co-edited with Joel Kaye and E. Ann Matter (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

Articles in Referred Journals (selected)

“Gender or Genders in Medieval Europe,” Storica 30 (2024) 15-33.
“Believing Medieval Women,” special issue of Medieval People, 39 (2024), 9-28.
Judith M. Bennett, Ruth Mazo Karras and Janelle Werner, ‘No Romance Without Finance: Courtship in Medieval England’, Speculum 99 (2024).
“The Regulation of ‘Sodomy’ in the Latin East and West,” Speculum 95 (2020) 969-986.
“Royal Masculinity in Kingless Societies,” Journal of the Haskins Society 28 (2016), 83-100.
"The Aerial Battle in the Toledot Yeshu and Sodomy in the Later Middle Ages," Medieval Encounters 19 (2013) 493-533.
“The Regulation of Sexuality in the Late Middle Ages: England and France,” Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 86 (2011), 1010-1039.
[Tiffany Vann Sprecher and Ruth Mazo Karras,] “The Midwife and the Church: Ecclesiastical Regulation of Midwives in Brie, 1499-1504,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 85 (2011), 171-192.
“The History of Marriage and the Myth of Friedelehe,” Early Medieval Europe 14 (2006), 119-151.
“Women’s Labors: Reproduction and Sex Work in Medieval Europe Journal of Women’s History. 15:4 (2004), 153-58.
“Marriage and the Creation of Kin in the Sagas,” Scandinavian Studies 4 (2003), 473-90.
“Active/Passive, Acts/Passions: Greek and Roman Sexualities,” American Historical Review 4 (2000), 1250-65.
[David L. Boyd and Ruth Mazo Karras,] "The Interrogation of a Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth-Century London," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1 (1994), 459-65.
"Misogyny and the Medieval Exemplum: Gendered Sin in John of Bromyard's Summa Praedicantium," Traditio 47 (1992), 233-57 [actual date of publication 1993].
"The Latin Vocabulary of Illicit Sex in English Ecclesiastical Court Records," Journal of Medieval Latin 2 (1992) 1-17.
"The Regulation of Brothels in Later Medieval England," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14 (1989): 399‑433. Reprinted in Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages, ed. Judith M. Bennett, Elizabeth A. Clark, Jean F. O'Barr, B. Anne Vilen, and Sarah Westphal-Wihl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 100‑134.
"Friendship and Love in the Lives of Two Twelfth-Century English Saints," Journal of Medieval History 14 (1988): 305‑20.

Book Chapters (selected)

“Mothers and Forced Marriages in the Later Middle Ages,” in Early Modern Improvisations: Essays on History and Literature in Honor of John Watkins, ed. Katherine Scheil and Linda Shenk (Abingdon: Routledge, 2024), 58-67.
“Injection: A Gender Perspective on Domestic Slavery,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery Throughout History, ed. Damian A. Pargas and Juliane Schiel (Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2023), 215-224.
“Attitudes to Same-Sex Sexual Relations in the Latin World,” in A Companion to Crime and Deviance in the Middle Ages, ed. Hannah Skoda (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2023), 84-101.
“David and Jonathan: A Medieval Bromance,” in Rivalrous Masculinities, ed. Ann Marie Rasmussen (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), 151-173.
“Afterword,” in Crusading and Masculinities, ed. Natasha R. Hodgson, Katherine J. Lewis and Matthew M. Mesley, Crusades Subsidia 13 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 345-55.
“David and Bathsheba: Sexuality in Medieval Judaism and Christianity,” in God’s Own Gender? Masculinities in World Religions, ed. Daniel Gerster and Michael Krüggeler (Ergon Verlag, 2018), 201-228.
[Ruth Mazo Karras and Tom Linkinen], “John/Eleanor Rykener Revisited,” in Founding Feminisms: Essays in Honor of E. Jane Burns, ed. Laine E. Doggett and Daniel E. O’Sullivan (D.S. Brewer, 2016), 111-121.
“The Christianization of Medieval Marriage,” in Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Mengel and Lisa Wolverton (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), 1-24.
“The Wife of Bath,” in Historians on Chaucer: The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, ed. Stephen Rigby (Oxford University Press, 2014), 319-333.
“Clergé, mariage et masculinite au Moyen Âge,” in Une histoire sans les homes est-elle possible? Ed. Anne-Marie Sohn (Lyon: ENS Editions, 2013), 109-120.
[Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras,] “Women, Gender, and Medieval Historians,” in The Oxford Handbook of Women & Gender in Medieval Europe, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1-17.
“Marriage: Medieval Couples and the Uses of Tradition,” in Why the Middle Ages Matter: Medieval Light on Modern Injustice, ed. Celia Chazelle, Simon Doubleday, Felice Lifshitz, and Amy G. Remensnyder (Abington, Oxon: Routledge, 2012), 54-65
“Thomas Aquinas’s Chastity Belt: Clerical Masculinity in Medieval Europe,” in Gender & Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives, ed. Lisa Bitel and Felice Lifshitz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 52-67.
“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,
“’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.
“‘Because the other is a poor woman, she shall be called his wench’: Gender, Sexuality, and Social Status in Late Medieval England,” for Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages, ed. Sharon Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 210-29.
"Two Models, Two Standards: Moral Teaching and Sexual Mores," in Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 123-138.
“Prostitution in Medieval Europe,” in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality: A Book of Essays, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (Garland Press, 1996), 243-60.