Who We Are
The Matrix site is managed by a large team of people including the Director and Editors who oversee all of the content of the site with input from the Advisory Board. Editors supervise the creation of content provided by our hardworking Research Assistants and contributors. USC Libraries provide design, layout, and operation of the site.
Many thanks to all who have helped to make this project.
Editors
Lisa M. Bitel (Director) is Professor of History,Gender Studies, and Religion at the University of Southern California. Her list of publications includes three books, Women in Early Medieval Europe, 400-1100 (2002), Isle of the Saints (1990) and Land of Women (1996), as well as articles on a variety of topics related to women, sanctity, and early Ireland. She is currently working on a fourth book which focuses on the cults of St. Brigit of Ireland and St. Genovefa of Paris.
Marie Kelleher is Assistant Professor of History at California State University at Long Beach. Her research focuses on women and the law in later medieval Spain, and she has published on the subject of clerics' concubines in the diocese of Barcelona.
June L. Mecham is Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Nebraska at Omaha. She has published several articles on late medieval German convents and women's spirituality.
Advisory Board
Alison Beach is an Assistant Professor of Religion at the College of William and Mary in Williambsburg, Virginia. She specializes in the history of German religious women in the central Middle Ages. She is the author of Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-Century Bavaria (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and an editor of Manuscripts and Monastic Culture: Reform and Renewal in Twelfth-Century Germany,[with Christina Lutter] (forthcoming 2005).
Constance Berman is Professor of History at the University of Iowa, Iowa City. Her work centers on medieval social history, on medieval women, and on the economic effects of monasticism. She has written extensively on the Cistercians, their agricultural practices, and their twelfth-century invention of a new institution, the religious Order. She has been especially interested in the importance of women's communities within this reform group (a participation that has been denied by many of its modern practitioners.) She has published Medieval Agriculture, the Southern-French Countryside, and the Early Cistercians (1986), and The Cistercian Evolution: The Invention of a Religious Order in the Twelfth Century (2000). She is currently completing an anthology of articles, Medieval Religion: New Approaches , which will bring together the latest research by medievalist historians on developments in medieval Catholic Christianity and its relationship to Jews, Islam, and heretical groups.
Lynda Coon is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. She has published two books: Sacred Fictions: Holy Women and Hagiography in Late Antiquity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); and That Gentle Strength: Historical Perspectives on Women and Christianity, co-edited with Elisabeth Sommer and Katherine Haldane (University Press of Virginia, 1990). She has also authored numerous articles on gender and sanctity in late antique and early medieval Europe.
Monica Green is Professor of History at Arizona State University. She has published extensively on the history of women's health care in premodern Europe. Several of her major essays are collected in Women's Healthcare and the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts (Ashgate: 2000), and her edition and translation of The "Trotula": A Medieval Compendium of Women's Medicine was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2001.
Fiona Griffiths is Assistant Professor of History at New York University. She is the author of The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006) and a series of articles about Herrad of Hohenbourg, Abelard and Heloise, and medieval canonesses.
Jeffrey Hamburger is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. His interests include medieval art, theology and mysticism, manuscript illumination and devotional imagery, and the visual culture of female monasticism. Among his books, which have won numerous awards, including the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, are Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley, 1996), The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York, 1998) and St. John the Divine: The Divinized Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology (Berkeley, 2002). He prepared a major international loan exhibition, Schleier und Krone. Kunst aus mittelalterlichen Frauenkloestern, Essen-Bonn, 2005.
Felice Lifshitz is Professor of History at Florida International University. She is the author and editor of several books, including The Name of the Saint: The Martyrology of Jerome and Access to the Sacred in Francia (forthcoming from University of Notre Dame Press); Viking Normandy: Dudo of St. Quentin's Gesta Normannorum (ORB, 1996); and The Norman Conquest of Pious Neustria: Historiographic Discourse and Saintly Relics (684 – 1090) (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Press, Toronto, 1995). She has written numerous articles on topics related to hagiography, gender, and historiography.
Lester K. Little is the former Director of the American Academy in Rome, and former Dwight W. Morrow Professor of History at Smith College. His publications include Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings (with Barbara Rosenwein, 1998); Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France (1993); Liberty, Charity, Fraternity : Lay Religious Confraternities st Bergamo in the Age of the Commune (1988) and Religious Poverty And The Profit Economy In Medieval Europe (1978).
Jo Ann McNamara is Professor Emerita at Hunter College. Her publications include Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia (1996), The Ordeal of Community (1993) and Sainted Women of the Dark Ages (1992).
Catherine Mooney is Associate Professor of Church History at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology. She is the editor uthor of Gendered Voices (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) and the author of Philippine Duchesne: A Woman with the Poor (Paulist Press, 1990) as well as articles on religious women in medieval Europe.
Bruce L. Venarde is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. His research centers around the relationship of religious and social change in the 11th and 12th centuries, with emphasis on monasticism, gender, Latin culture and learning, as well as popular and elite Christianity. He is particularly interested in the relationship between literature and social reality. His courses devote considerable time to the interpretation of medieval documents from law to lyric poetry. He is the author of Women's Monasticism and Medieval Society: Nunneries in France and England, 890-1215 (Cornell University Press, 1997) and Robert of Abrissel: A Medieval Religious Life (Catholic University of America Press)
Former Board Members
Caroline Bruzelius
Caroline Walker Bynum
Heath Dillard
Penelope Johnson
Mary McLaughlin
Suzanne Wemple
Collaborators
Collaborating partners of Monastic Matrix include:
The Index of Christian Art, Princeton University (http://ica.princeton.edu)
Getty Research Institute, Special Collections (http://getty.edu)
Peregrina Publishing
Funding
and Support
Monastic Matrix is currently housed at the University of Southern California.
The project has
also been supported by:
Mount Holyoke College
Boston College
Yale Divinity School Library
University of Kansas
The Hill Monastic Manuscript Library
The Pew Foundation (via Center for Religion and Civic Culture,
U.S.C.)
Current Research Assistants
Sarah Blake is a PhD candidate in the Classics department of the University of Southern California.
Catherine Feeley is a PhD candidate in the Classics department of the University of Southern California. Her interests are Roman social history, with an emphasis on the political and social relations between the rich and poor in Republican Rome. She majored in Medieval history and Classics in her undergraduate degree at Dalhousie University.
Kate Heckmann is a Phd candidate in Art History at the University of Southern California. She is working on a dissertation about foodways in renaissance Italy.
Kate Peck is a graduate student at New University of Ireland, Galway.
Eleanor Rust is a PhD candidate in the Classics department of the University of Southern California.
Candace Weddle is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Southern California. Her interests are in classical art and archaeology.
Former Project Participants:
David Clough, Technical Director
Marilyn Dunn, Contributing Editor
Rob Eickwort, research assistant
Katherine Gill, professor at the University of North Florida.
Paul Hill, websmith, software engineer and database administrator
Siobhan McElduff, research assistant
Ruth Robbins, research assistant
Scott Steinkerchner OP, web designer
Lisa Tom, research assistant
Wendy Wira, research assistant
. 
