The James Vardaman Lecture - Finding Her Voice | Dr. Carolyn Muessig

The James Vardaman Chair presents Dr. Carolyn Muessig, who will provide a lecture titled Finding Her Voice: Female Preaching in Premodern Europe.  

The lecture will be held on August 29th, 2024, in Armstrong Browning Library, 710 Speight Ave. Waco, Texas 76706, in the Treasure Room from 3:30 - 5:00 pm. 

Dr. Carolyn Muessig, Chair of Christian Thought, University of Calgary, has published extensively on preaching, monastic history, Jacques de Vitry, Catherine of Siena, and popular devotion in premodern Europe. With Beverly Kienzle she edited Hildegard of Bingen’s Latin homilies (Brepols). For 17 years, she co-edited with Veronica O’Mara the journal Medieval Sermon Studies. She co-edited Medieval Monastic Education with George Ferzoco and Envisaging Heaven in the Middle Ages with Ad Putter. Her recent monograph is Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2020). Her current project, Breaking the Glass Pulpit: Women Preaching in an Age of Silence, explores premodern female preachers in Western Europe.

Dr. Muessig's lecture is titled Finding Her Voice: Female Preaching in Premodern Europe.  Decrying the role of women as teachers, the canon lawyer Raymond of Peñafort (d. 1275) lamented that “a woman taught one time and the whole world was overthrown.” The perception of female voices as charming and deceptive instruments that led men into sin abound in medieval warnings against the dangers of women teaching. The same criticism effortlessly connected itself to discussions of women as preachers. Biblical verses like 1 Timothy 2: 12 — ‘But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to use authority over the man; but to be in silence’ — were invoked to underline emphatically that women were not permitted to preach. Yet, despite ubiquitous and negative discourses on women’s alleged pedagogical and pastoral inabilities, there were women who did preach in the premodern world. This presentation interrogates the evidence of women’s speech in sermons and preach acts. It focuses primarily on sermons composed by women and how they portray the female voice in a context of preaching and teaching. In so doing, this presentation aims to demonstrate how women carved out alternative models of female pedagogy that enabled them to voice their teachings, embodying biblical narratives with the spoken word.

This lecture is made possible by funding from the James Vardaman Endowed Professorship, currently held by Dr. Beth Allison Barr, Professor of History.