Henrietta Leyser
W. John Bennett Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Institute and the Centre for Medieval Studies
Henrietta Leyser is Emeritus Fellow at St Peter’s College, Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Hermits and the New Monasticism: A Study of Religious Communities in Western Europe (1984), her first book, was an original account of a much studied subject; her second, Medieval Women: A Social History of Women in England 450–1500, which appeared in 1995 and has been reprinted several times, has proved seminal to subsequent scholarship.
With Samuel Fanous, she co-edited The Life of Christina of Markyate for Oxford World Classics. The author of wide-ranging and influential essays on medieval piety and religion, and on Anglo-Norman historiography and Arthurian romance, among other topics, she is currently at work on two projects, provisionally entitled “A Journey Through the Seven Kingdoms in the Time of Bede” and “The Doors of Heaven: English Piety, 1000–1300.” Motherhood, Religion, and Society in Medieval Europe, 400–1400, a volume of essays edited by Conrad Leyser and Lesley Smith, was presented to her in 2011. As the Distinguished Fellow for the winter term of 2012, she will be pleased to meet with Institute Mellon Fellows and researchers, as well as students and faculty from the wider medieval community at Toronto.
- 2011-2012 - Distinguished Visiting Scholar