PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

Katherine Pierpont earned her PhD in Medieval History from the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation, under the direction of Ruth Mazo Karras and Kathryn Reyerson, concerns sex workers in 12th and 13th century southern France. Before her Mellon Fellowship, she was a fixed-term Visiting Assistant Professor at Michigan State University. She already has a few publications, including a book (coauthored with Ruth Karras) called Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others, now in its fourth edition. While at PIMS, Dr Pierpont will be exploring the lives of jongleurs and jongleuses, who were paid for a variety of performances from acrobatics to singing and dancing. One goal of Dr Pierpont is to use property records and arcGIS to map areas in Toulouse where jongleurs lived in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.