Ruth Mazo Karras
Biographic Data
| ID | 87855 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ruth Mazo Karras |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ruth Mazo |
| FAMILY NAME | Karras |
| SIGNATURE | KARRAS R M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Twin Cities Orthopedics |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6312-871X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 29 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 46 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Women and the Crusades
The Journal of Medieval History, Fifty Years On
Masculinities in Early Medieval Europe
Jonas Roelens, Citizens and Sodomites
No Romance without Finance
Today, we readily understand that medieval marriage was often preceded by complex economic negotiations about dowers, dowries, inheritances, and even the costs of weddings. This article argues that medieval courtship—whether aimed at marriage or not—was also an occasion for negotiation and benefit. Focusing on evidence from late medieval England, it shows that courtship was not solely (or even predominantly) a path to marriage: it was also a past…
Vies et morts des couples princiers
Embodying the Soul
Married Life in the Middle Ages, 900–1300, by Elisabeth van Houts
Elisabeth van Houts has made a very important contribution to the considerable recent literature on medieval marriage. Perhaps the most valuable feature of her book is its focus on women’s points of view and experiences. The period she discusses is the one when medieval marriage took its now recognisable shape as monogamous, indissoluble and consent-based. Van Houts agrees with others who have previously argued against Georges Duby’s position tha…
The Regulation of “Sodomy” in the Latin East and West
Previous articleNext article FreeThe Regulation of “Sodomy” in the Latin East and WestRuth Mazo KarrasRuth Mazo Karras Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe chronology of the widespread criminalization of same-sex activity in medieval Europe is generally agreed upon. John Boswell argued that…
Marie of France
Sexuality in Medieval Europe
Challenging the way the Middle Ages have been treated in general histories of sexuality, Sexuality in Medieval Europe shows how views at the time were conflicted and complicated; there was no single medieval attitude towards sexuality any more than there is one modern attitude. Focusing on marital sexual activity, as well as behavior that was seen as transgressive, the chapters cover such topics as chastity, the role of the church, and non-reprod…
The Making of Romantic Love
William M. Reddy’s fascinating, original, carefully argued, well-written, and intellectually challenging book argues that romantic love, as the West (and the rest of the globalised world) knows it today, developed out of one specific context—western Europe at the time of the Gregorian reforms. There are two parts to the argument: the idea that the emotions, especially the emotion of love, are historically contingent, and the particular context in…
Katherine J. Lewis. Kingship and Masculinity in Late Medieval England
Reproducing Medieval Christianity
This chapter examines three ways in which ideas about reproduction loomed large in medieval Christian culture: its relation to ideas about sexuality and nature, the somewhat overlapping topic of its relation to the sacrament of marriage, and the use of fictive parenthood or reproductive metaphors in Christian thought. Medieval Judaism is used as a point of comparison to highlight what is, or is not, distinctive about Christianity. The chapter arg…
Women, Gender, and Medieval Historians
This essay sets out the history and historiography of medieval women and gender as it stands in the second decade of the twenty-first century. It begins with a long view, tracing how approaches to medieval women have developed and changed from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. It then focuses on how feminist scholarship on the subject has developed since the 1970s. The essay addresses the importance of both women’s history and gender histor…
The Aerial Battle in the Toledot Yeshu and Sodomy in the Late Middle Ages
Thomas Ebendorfer’s fifteenth-century Latin translation of a Hebrew Toledot Yeshu text is the earliest extant Latin version to include a full narrative from the birth of Jesus to the events following the crucifixion, and predates existing Hebrew versions. After reviewing the place of Ebendorfer’s work in the textual tradition of the Toledot , the article examines carefully the work’s account of the aerial battle between Jesus and Judas, in compar…
The Midwife and the Church
At the turn of the sixteenth century in Paris, midwifery was an emergent profession regulated by the church. This article analyzes fourteen entries in the Registre de causes from the archdeaconry of Brie, 1499-1504, within the context of midwives' relationship with the church. It suggests that midwives were important appendages of the ecclesiastical bureaucracy. Midwife regulation was one aspect of the French church's attempts to maintain its aut…
The Regulation of Sexuality in the Late Middle Ages
Marital and family structures, together with the closely related areas of gender relations and attitudes to sexuality, constitute one area in which scholars have suggested medieval England clearly differs from other regions. It is always difficult to compare across regions when the nature of the evidence differs; but because marriage and sexual behavior were under the jurisdiction of the church courts and because the ecclesiastical court system u…
Chapter 3. Thomas Aquinas's Chastity Belt
Deviance and Power in Late Medieval London . Frank Rexroth , Pamela E. Selwyn
Suspended Animation
Truly interdisciplinary work is not as common as medievalists would like to think it is. Mills here provides an example that integrates literature and art history, and has a good deal to say to historians of culture as well. This is not a study of punishment as practice, but of the ‘medieval penal imaginary’, the ways people wrote about and depicted punishment. Mills begins from the popular view of the middle ages as a particularly gory time, esp…
Books under Suspicion
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The history of marriage and the myth of Friedelehe
The idea that Friedelehe and Muntehe constituted two distinct forms of Germanic marriage was based upon an attempt to reconstruct common Germanic culture with scraps of evidence from widely different times and places. A thorough re-examination of the sources for the institutions that were posited, based on this now outmoded methodology, reveals no evidence that transfer of Munt, or guardianship, distinguished between two different types of marria…
Homoeroticism and Chivalry
English Aristocratic Women, 1450-1550
Active/Passive, Acts/Passions
The Interrogation of a Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth-Century London
Research Article| October 01 1995 The Interrogation of a Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth-Century London David Lorenzo Boyd; David Lorenzo Boyd Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ruth Mazo Karras Ruth Mazo Karras Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (1995) 1 (4): 459–465. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1-4-459 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Dav…
Nature and Policy in Iceland, 1400-1800
Part 1 Perspectives: conceptual framework empirical background. Part 2 The social experience: modes of livelihood landownership foreign relations. Part 3 The human condition: morals and letters ideas of influence the environment. Part 4 Implications: analytical results theoretical reflections
Active/Passive, Acts/Passions
Journal Article Active/Passive, Acts/Passions: Greek and Roman Sexualities Get access Ruth Mazo Karras Ruth Mazo Karras Professor of history University of Minnesota Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 105, Issue 4, October 2000, Pages 1250–1265, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/105.4.1250 Published: 01 October 2000
The Regulation of Brothels in Later Medieval England
The Regulation of Sexuality in the Late Middle Ages
Marital and family structures, together with the closely related areas of gender relations and attitudes to sexuality, constitute one area in which scholars have suggested medieval England clearly differs from other regions. It is always difficult to compare across regions when the nature of the evidence differs; but because marriage and sexual behavior were under the jurisdiction of the church courts and because the ecclesiastical court system u…
The Aerial Battle in the Toledot Yeshu and Sodomy in the Late Middle Ages
Thomas Ebendorfer’s fifteenth-century Latin translation of a Hebrew Toledot Yeshu text is the earliest extant Latin version to include a full narrative from the birth of Jesus to the events following the crucifixion, and predates existing Hebrew versions. After reviewing the place of Ebendorfer’s work in the textual tradition of the Toledot , the article examines carefully the work’s account of the aerial battle between Jesus and Judas, in compar…
The history of marriage and the myth of Friedelehe
The idea that Friedelehe and Muntehe constituted two distinct forms of Germanic marriage was based upon an attempt to reconstruct common Germanic culture with scraps of evidence from widely different times and places. A thorough re-examination of the sources for the institutions that were posited, based on this now outmoded methodology, reveals no evidence that transfer of Munt, or guardianship, distinguished between two different types of marria…
Immodest Acts
Friendship and love in the lives of two twelfth-century English saints
For twelfth-century religious the vow of chastity did not mean renouncing a rich affective life. Along with the love of God, Aelred of Rievaulx and Christina of Markyate both found room in their lives for profound emotional relationships with several individuals. These relationships were not carnal but to call them ‘friendship’ underestimates their strength and passion. The modern distinction between passionate sexual love and passionless asexual…
The Regulation of Brothels in Later Medieval England
Slavery and Society in Medieval Scandinavia.
Diarium Vadstenense
Rural Communities in the Medieval West
Genicot has combined his many skills to produce a book that will be invaluable to all readers interested in medieval civilization.--'Historian.' 'Johns Hopkins Symposia in Comparative History
The Viking Achievement
Nature and Policy in Iceland, 1400-1800
Part 1 Perspectives: conceptual framework empirical background. Part 2 The social experience: modes of livelihood landownership foreign relations. Part 3 The human condition: morals and letters ideas of influence the environment. Part 4 Implications: analytical results theoretical reflections
The Vikings. Else Roesdahl , Susan M. Margeson , Kirsten Williams
Medieval Scandinavia
The Interrogation of a Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth-Century London
Research Article| October 01 1995 The Interrogation of a Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth-Century London David Lorenzo Boyd; David Lorenzo Boyd Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ruth Mazo Karras Ruth Mazo Karras Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (1995) 1 (4): 459–465. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1-4-459 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Dav…
Common Women
A “common woman” in medieval England was a prostitute, distinguished as such less for taking money for sex than for belonging to all men in common. Karras’s book tells the story of these women, their experiences, relations, and treatment under the law, and concludes that prostitution was central to the medieval understanding of feminity.
Women in Old Norse Society. Jenny Jochens
Prostitution and the Question of Sexual Identity in Medieval Europe
What has by now become the master narrative of the history of sexuality holds that not only homosexuality but the whole concept of sexuality is a creation of nineteenth-century bourgeois society. This article argues that sexual identities, constructed through what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls "minoritizing discourses," can be found much earlier, in premodern Western societies. In the European Middle Ages, for example, although there is nothing con…
Short notices
Alain Boureau, The Lord's First Night: The Myth of the Droit de Cuissage (1998), ix + 300 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, $55.00/£43.95, paperback $19.00/£15.25). Rosemary Sweet, The Writing of Urban Histories in Eighteenth Century England (1997), ix + 356 (Oxford University Press, New York, £45.00/$90.00). Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore (eds), Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U…
Active/Passive, Acts/Passions
Journal Article Active/Passive, Acts/Passions: Greek and Roman Sexualities Get access Ruth Mazo Karras Ruth Mazo Karras Professor of history University of Minnesota Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 105, Issue 4, October 2000, Pages 1250–1265, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/105.4.1250 Published: 01 October 2000
Active/Passive, Acts/Passions
The Christianization of Iceland
The First Universities
Speaking of Slavery
The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century
Book Review| April 01 2003 The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century: Endings Colin Richmond, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 344 pp. Ruth Mazo Karras Ruth Mazo Karras Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2003) 9 (2): 353–354. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-9-2-353-a Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Ruth Mazo Karras; The Paston Family in the Fiftee…
English Aristocratic Women, 1450-1550
Homoeroticism and Chivalry
The history of marriage and the myth of Friedelehe
The idea that Friedelehe and Muntehe constituted two distinct forms of Germanic marriage was based upon an attempt to reconstruct common Germanic culture with scraps of evidence from widely different times and places. A thorough re-examination of the sources for the institutions that were posited, based on this now outmoded methodology, reveals no evidence that transfer of Munt, or guardianship, distinguished between two different types of marria…
Books under Suspicion
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
History (36 works) · Medieval Literature and History (25 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Art (23 works) · History (21 works) · Classics (18 works) · Political science (17 works) · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity (15 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · Law (14 works)