Faculty - Lifshitz

Dr. Felice Lifshitz

Professor

Office: 1-22 Assiniboia Hall
Email: felice.lifshitz@ualberta.ca

Degrees

BA, Medieval Studies, Barnard College (USA)
MA, History, Columbia University (USA)
PhD, History, Columbia University (USA)

Research

I am currently finishing a book, entitled Gendered Transmissions: Women, Manuscripts and Christian Culture in early Carolingian Francia, based on a group of manuscripts produced and used in women’s monasteries in the Rhine-Main area of present-day Germany during the eighth century. I explore how one group of religious women helped to shape the culture of medieval Europe through the texts they wrote and copied (and therefore transmitted), as well as through their editorial interventions in the copied texts (omissions, additions, combinations with other texts, and so forth). I argue that their efforts and preferences were consistently pro-feminist. I have also just begun a new book project, tentatively entitled, Gender and Cinematic Medievalism, based on a group of twentieth-century films produced throughout Europe and North America, and set in the Middle Ages. I examine the differing roles ascribed to the female characters in the films over the course of the century, and show how they both reflected and reinforced the gendered contexts in which the films were made. I argue that the depictions of the past purveyed in medievalist films played an important, yet ever-changing, role in constructing modern gender ideologies.

Full C.V.

Teaching

Fall 2011 WST 301: History of Feminist Thought
A medievalist by training, I am cross-appointed every Spring semester to the Campus St. Jean, where I teach (in French) courses in pre-modern World History and in Medieval Studies.

Selected Publications

Why the Middle Ages Matter: Medieval Light on Modern Injustice co-edited with Celia Chazelle, Simon Doubleday, and Amy Remensyder (forthcoming, Routledge, 2011); note my contribution: “Women: The Da Vinci Code and the fabrication of tradition.”

Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives co-edited with Lisa Bitel (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008; paperback edition, 2010); note my contribution: “Priestly Women, Virginal Men: Litanies and their Discontents” (pp. 123 – 143).

Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieval Studies co-edited with Celia Chazelle (Palgrave, 2007); note my contribution: “A Cyborg Initiation? Gender Ideology and Baptismal Liturgy in Carolingian Francia” (pp. 101 – 118).

“Gender Trouble in Paradise: The Case of the Liturgical Virgo” in Images of Medieval Sanctity ed. Debra Higgs Strickland (Brill, 2007) pp. 25 - 39

The Name of the Saint: The Martyrology of Jerome and Access to the Sacred in Francia (627 – 827) (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005)

 "Differences, (Dis)appearances and the Disruption of the Straight Telos: Medievalology as a History of Gender" in Mediävistik im 21. Jahrhundert: Stand und Perspektiven [Medieval Studies in the 21st Century: Current Status and Future Outlooks] eds. Jörg Jarnut and Hans-Werner Goetz (Munich, 2003) pp. 295 – 312.

"Demonstrating Gun(t)za: Women, Manuscripts, and the Question of Historical 'Proof'" in Vom Nutzen des Schreibens. Soziales Gedächtnis, Herrschaft und Besitz [On the Uses of Writing. Social Memory, Lordship and Property] eds. Walter Pohl and Paul Herold (Vienna, 2002) pp. 67 – 96.

"The Martyr, the Tomb and the Matron: Constructing the (Masculine) Past as a Female Power Base" in Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography eds. P. Geary, G. Althoff and J. Fried (Cambridge, 2002) pp. 311 – 341.

"Gender, Exegesis and Exemplarity East of the Middle Rhine: Jesus, Mary and the Saints in Manuscript Context" Early Medieval Europe 9 (2000) pp. 325 – 344.

"Is Mother Superior? Towards a History of Feminine Amtscharisma" in Medieval Mothering eds. Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons (Garland, 1996) pp. 117 – 138.

The Norman Conquest of Pious Neustria: Historiographic Discourse and Saintly Relics (684 –1090) (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Press, 1995).

"Des Femmes Missionnaires: L'Exemple de la Gaule" [« Some Women Missionaries : The Example of Gaul »] Revue d'Histoire Ecclésiastique 83 (1988) pp. 5 – 33.