Caroline Walker Bynum

Research Interests: religious, cultural, social, and intellectual history of western Europe from late antiquity to the end of the sixteenth century. In the 1980s and 1990s her work on gender and the history of the body established some of the paradigms still used in medieval studies. Recently her research has focused on devotional practices, especially devotional objects, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She is currently exploring the paradox of Catholic survivals, including the survival of women’s monasticism, in Protestant Germany.