Caroline Walker Bynum teaches the history of the European Middle Ages at Columbia University. Her best-known works are Jesus as Mother (1982), Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1987), and The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (1995). A historian of medieval religious thought and practice with a special interest in women’s piety, Bynum has turned recently to an investigation of attitudes toward the natural world in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The present essay grows out of both her earlier research on miracles of bodily transformation and her current study of medieval conceptions of natural and psychological change.

Bibliography

Docere verbo et exemplo: an aspect of twelfth-century spirituality, by Caroline Walker Bynum. Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1979.

Jesus as mother: studies in the spirituality of the High Middle Ages, by Caroline Walker Bynum. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

Gender and religion: on the complexity of symbols, edited by Caroline Walker Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.

Holy feast and holy fast: the religious significance of food to medieval women, by Caroline Walker Bynum. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Fragmentation and redemption: essays on gender and the human body in Medieval religion, by Caroline Walker Bynum. New York: Zone Books; Cambridge, Mass.: Distributed by the MIT Press, 1991.

The Resurrection of the body in Western Christianity, 200-1336, by Caroline Walker Bynum. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Last things: death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, edited by Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

Metamorphosis and identity, by Caroline Walker Bynum. New York: Zone Books; Cambridge, Mass.: Distributed by the MIT Press, 2001.

Presidential Columns

The Last Eurocentric Generation (Perspectives, February 1996)
The AHA and Its Affiliates Have Never Needed One Another More (Perspectives, April 1996)
Doing History in the 21st Century: A Statement of Priorities (Perspectives, December 1996)