On June 1, the three parts of the team gathered in person for the first time at Fordham’s LITE Center at Rose Hill to show off their work and speak more about the exciting new app that they are hoping to complete.

The app will allow users to walk around New York City and use their phones to pull up 3D models, images, and information about medieval-inspired structures that once stood where they are standing. It will also show viewers medieval-inspired elements that still exist in the city today.  

“We have [created] these … walking tours … that showcase points [around the city] that aren’t medieval, but are medieval in a way that’s understood very broadly,” explained Christina Bruno, Ph.D., co-director of the project and associate director of the Center for Medieval Studies. 

These points include examples of medievalism in architecture around the city, like coats of arms, statues and monuments that depict medieval figures, and places that have collections of medieval objects (like the Met Cloisters). In addition, they have included spots that speak to what New York itself looked like during what we think of as the medieval period, between 500 and 1500 CE, before contact with Europeans.

“[This] will hopefully be supported by a mobile application with audio guides, AR/VR content; and that is how we got involved with the New Rochelle High School students,” Bruno said.

Katherina Fostano, visual and digital resources director at the Center for Medieval Studies, happens to be friends with the chair of the math department at New Rochelle High School.  

“She connected us with a class of architecture students who went on to become very interested in the project and [began] to build 3D models of structures around the city that no longer exist,” said Bruno.  

Building Castles in 3D

One student in particular was especially interested in working on the project: New Rochelle senior Maximiliano Aguilar.  

The Center for Medieval Studies gave Aguilar incomplete pictures and drawings of medieval-style castles built during the 19th century that used to exist in New York City. Using only the pictures, Aguilar was able to construct 3D scale models of these formally impressive structures. In the year he’s been working on the project, he has been able to build two castles, Libbey Castle and Paterno Castle, fully, and plans to finish a third model that he has started over the summer.

“[The coolest thing] was the introduction to a new type of architecture,” said Aguilar, who will start at Fordham this fall. “In class, it was just simple house designs, and when I got introduced to this, I got introduced to castles … which was definitely something new to me.”

The castles that Aguilar has built and is building are the AR/VR element of the Medieval New York Project. When a user opens the app near where the castle once stood, they will be able to see through the camera a 3D model of what the castle would have looked like.

“We realized that we have a valuable opportunity to leverage emerging technologies and capture and share medievalism throughout New York City,” said Nicole Zeidan, Ed.D., assistant director, emerging educational technology and learning space design at Fordham.

The group—a professor, a psychologist, and three students—gathered in a classroom in Duane Library on Feb. 14, where they spoke to members of the Fordham community about how love appears in their professional work.  

Literature on Love

Some of them shared their favorite literature on love. Thomas O’Donnell, Ph.D., associate professor of English and medieval studies, printed out three poems and passed out copies to the audience: a joyful poem written by Comtessa de Dia, a 12th-century French noblewoman; a mournful poem by Umm Khalid, an Arabic poet from the 8th or 9th century; and a funny poem by Geoffrey Chaucer, a 14th-century English poet. 

“[Chaucer] says he is so in love that he feels like a piece of roasted fish in jam sauce,” O’Donnell said, to laughter from the audience. 

Asher Harris, a Ph.D. student in theology, talked about American jazz musician John Coltrane, who expressed love and gratitude to God for saving him from his heroin addiction. The most open expression of this love appeared in his album A Love Supreme, particularly in the song “Psalm,” said Harris, who played a recording for the audience. 

Another scholar, Christopher Supplee, FCRH ’25, a creative writing major, shared a poem he wrote and recited in honor of the event: “A World Without Love.” 

“There are matters that cannot be mended by mortal hands alone,” he said to the audience, reading from his poem. “That only miracles may fix, assuming they still exist.” 

Supplee said that when he was writing his poem, he was inspired by the question “What is love?” 

“It made me want to sit down and think about what love means to me—what are my experiences, what I’ve read, what I’ve been taught from scholars, writers, and entertainment,” Supplee said. “Love can be expressed in many different ways, whether it be through justice, romance, or friendship.” 

Queer Love at Fordham

Other scholars shared their own research on love. Benedict Reilly, a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill who studies theology, discussed the theme of love from his book Queer Prayer at Fordham. He started the book project two years ago, interviewing LGBTQ+ members of the Fordham community about how they pray. During those conversations, he learned about the connection between prayer and love. One interviewee said that she learned to love herself through prayer. Another interviewee—an asexual and aromantic woman who longed to have a child of her own—spoke about how she found love and comfort through a Hail Mary. 

“I’m sharing all of these with you because I want you to think about different prayers or songs that might be helpful to you all as you fall in love,” Reilly said. 

The final invited speaker, Sarika Persaud, Ph.D., a supervising psychologist in Counseling and Psychological Services who specializes in love and relationships, spoke about what her work has taught her about love. 

“When I’m sitting with a person and helping them heal, I’m not only opening them up to love as a feeling, to feel love again, but to love as who you are—to exist in the world as love,” said Persaud, who added that her Hinduism philosophy informs her work. “All of your desires, whatever relationships you enter into, whatever relationships come your way, whatever challenges come your way, they’re all opportunities … to love more.”

What Love Means to a Jesuit

After each guest spoke, event host and theology professor Brenna Moore invited the audience to reflect on what love means to them. 

Among them was Timothy Perron, S.J., a Jesuit in formation and doctoral student in theology. 

“As somebody who has taken a vow of celibacy, a lot of times, people think, ‘What could that person know about love, especially romantic love?’” Perron said. “But actually, I’ve thought about it a lot.” 

Before he decided to become a priest, he wondered if he could commit to that vow. After much thought, he said he realized that every human has the same needs and desires, but they appear in different ways. 

“I still have a need for close friendship, intimacy, love, and care for others … [but there are]all of these different ways that love could be understood,” Perron said. “If I see somebody who is looking for money or something, I’ll often stop and talk to them or take them to the nearest deli … Just stuff like that, where you feel that love and that connection … intentionally developing close relationships with people, keeping in close touch, calling them—all of those sorts of things, I think, are part of what love means.” 

“Many people don’t believe the Middle Ages are interesting. They only learn about that period through books, TV shows, and popular culture. But there’s so much influence on our world today that we don’t really see,” said Campagna, a master’s student in Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences who is studying medieval studies. “Transcribing records—even property records, as boring as that may sound—is part of understanding how our modern world came to be.” 

Campagna grew up on a farm in Nebraska, where she loved reading historical novels with her father. But she said she never considered history as a legitimate career path until college. 

“My history classes opened my eyes to a different way of seeing the world,” said Campagna, who earned her bachelor’s degree in history from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 2020. “And Fordham has one of the best centers for medieval studies in the country. I met some incredible faculty and got involved with the community, and things took off from there.”

Signs of the Medieval Period at Rose Hill 

Campagna is a project manager for Medieval New York, a Fordham-based website that identifies how the medieval period has influenced modern-day New York City. Since last summer, Fordham students have been developing itineraries that highlight parts of the city that are inspired by the European Middle Ages, including dozens of Gothic churches, as well as remnants from the pre-colonial period that are still visible today. When complete, the itineraries will feature audio guides and augmented reality recreations of New York City during what we commonly view as the “medieval period” on the website, said Campagna. 

“A good example is the Met Cloisters, a medieval art museum in Manhattan that’s partially composed of old structures from Europe. So you have this combination of the Middle Ages and medievalism sitting in an old-growth forest in the middle of present-day New York City,” said Campagna. 

The medieval period also reveals itself on Fordham’s campus, she added. 

“Keating Hall is an example of medieval-inspired architecture. Fordham, Columbia, and City College of New York all have this super Gothic style with buildings meant to remind us of castles,” Campagna said, adding that Gothic style is characteristic of the Middle Ages. “A lot of people associate the Middle Ages with the birth of the university as we know it, like Oxford and Cambridge, but also with a certain kind of scholarship and history that we see as legitimate. We still pull from that architectural style in order to call back to that time and project a certain image of authority.” 

Surprising Findings on Women in Medieval London

Campagna is also involved with Medieval Londoners, an online catalog of all identifiable people who lived in London during the Middle Ages. She collects and organizes data and then uploads it to the main website, which is accessible to the general public. 

“It’s a collective biography. This is pretty popular in medieval studies because you often don’t have a lot of information about one individual. But if you have a little bit of information about a lot of people within a certain social group, you can learn about what their lives might have been like by looking at all of them in aggregate,” Campagna said.    

The Medieval Londoners project inspired her undergraduate thesis, for which she studied the lives of elite women who lived in medieval London. 

“Through archival records, I saw that when a wealthy husband died, his wife often took over their business. If she married again, her new husband could take over that business. But he needed her input because of her experience and skills,” Campagna said. “It was exciting to me that women were so involved in the economic system during this time.” 

Her current master’s thesis also draws from life in medieval London. For part of her thesis, she is creating a crowdsourcing project called Get to Know Medieval Londoners, where she will train volunteers to transcribe medieval property records and collect data that will be used to better understand life in the medieval period. The data will then be uploaded to the Medieval Londoners website, which is open to the public. 

“The goal is less about the actual research, and more about collaboration and accessibility. In this country and across the world, there’s all this incredible research that only other scholars will read. I think it’s valuable to make sure that this research has a wider purpose, instead of being hoarded inside the academic system,” said Campagna, who will defend her master’s thesis this summer. 

Dismantling Academic Stereotypes

Campagna’s research is intertwined with the digital humanities, an academic field that uses the latest technology to answer traditional scholarly questions. She is among a growing group of students who are merging medieval studies with the digital humanities, said Nicholas Paul, Ph.D., associate professor of history and director of the Center for Medieval Studies. 

“Grace is one of the first students in our program to have a formal minor field in digital humanities and to be writing a thesis squarely on a digital topic,” Paul said. “Her work is very exciting and cutting edge and points the way not only to the future of projects like these, but also the humanities.” 

Campagna said she appreciates how the digital humanities make research more accessible to a 21st-century audience. 

“I was really drawn to that format of researching history. It’s very collaborative and accessible, not just one person sitting alone in a library with a lamp, poring over old manuscripts,” she said, chuckling. “I want to keep working with medieval documents, possibly for a digital humanities center, and present them in a way that is interesting and accessible—where people can actually learn something from them.” 

The grants, which are for $60,000 and will last for 12 months, will allow both of them to undertake ambitious new research projects.

Translated Texts of the Church Fathers

Bruce, a professor of history, will use his grant to launch The Lost Patriarchs Project: Recovering the Greek Fathers in the Medieval Latin Tradition, a massive cataloging project that could take as long as a decade to complete.

His research revolves around monastic communities that thrived during the Middle Ages. To understand people who lived then, scholars rely on texts written in medieval Latin. Up until now, texts from that time that are translated from other languages into Latin have been overlooked, he said.

He’s identified over 90 authors who’ve been translated from Greek into Latin. Many were Christian authors who wrote mainly about theology, church doctrine, and heresy. These “patristics,” as they’re known, were considered “church fathers” at the time.

“While there have been studies on the Greek church fathers and the writing they’ve done in Greek, there’s been almost no study of how those works were translated into Latin, and how those Latin texts were read and understood in medieval Europe,” Bruce said.

“People just think ‘Oh well, it’s just a translation, and it can’t be that important. What can it really tell us?’ But the fact that people went to the pains of translating Greek into Latin and continued to read and copy these texts over the course of the Middle Ages is important.”

Since there is currently no centralized catalogue that researchers can use to access these texts, Bruce wants to create one from scratch. He’s already begun the work compiling and writing entries with help from Kasey Fausak, a Fordham Ph.D. candidate in Medieval History, who is supported by a professional development grant from Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

“The N.E.H. has been really generous in providing funding for this. It’s basically ground work humanities—going into the manuscripts, finding texts, and presenting them in a way that’s legible and will foster future research,” he said.

Slavery in the Atlantic World

For Miki, an associate professor of history, the grant will give her time to write Brazilian Atlantic: Archives and Stories of Illegal Slavery, a book about illegal slavery in the 19th-century Atlantic World that she has been working on for several years. The project, which she described during a 2018 research seminar at the Rose Hill campus, is a narrative history of the slave trade of Brazil in the mid-1800s that punctures the idea that slavery was primarily a United States-based phenomenon that was abandoned by then, with the triumph of abolitionist movements.

“Not only do we mostly hear about the U.S. South instead of Brazil or Cuba, but the U.S. North is often considered the place of liberty, where fugitives traveling on the underground railroad fled to,” she said.

“But if you look at illegal slave trade records, it turns out that a lot of the financing for [the ships that carried slaves]  came from New York City and Boston.”

Dispelling myths about slavery is something Miki has a lot of experience with. Her last book, Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2018), tackled common perceptions of slavery in Brazil. Last year, the American Historical Association awarded it the Wesley-Logan Prize for the best book in African diaspora history.

“I’m interested in questioning these big stories that we take for granted,” she said.

The narrative of Brazilian Atlantic will center around the Mary E. Smith, one of the last illegal slave ships to be captured in Brazil in 1856, she said. It will be a character-driven book modeled somewhat on Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale, (Vintage, 1994). The challenge, she said, is figuring out a way to weave together stories of characters as disparate as the slave ship’s captain, the financiers, and the enslaved passengers, most of whom were never accurately identified in the manifest of the Mary E. Smith.

As a historian, she said, it is her responsibility to resist the desire to write a story with a satisfying beginning, middle, and end.

“We want a clean arc of a story that’s satisfying. But those of us who work in the history of slavery know we can’t get that. The archives are full of gaps, because the people who sold slaves saw them as merchandise,” she said.

“Rather than glossing over them to try to tell a story that goes from point A to point B in the end, I want to write something that also captures those questions. If you’re making a jacket or a dress, do you only see the outside of the beautiful clothes? What if you actually saw the craftsmanship, the seams and how things are made? Maybe making those things visible is part of the process. These processes are important to understanding slavery itself.”

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article and the works resulting from the grants do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“There’s been a fascination in the Middle Ages that goes back a really, really long way. And why is that? Well, this is a really great canvas on which people project their dreams, their fantasies, a different world that they wished they could inhabit,” said Nicholas Paul, Ph.D., director of medieval studies.

“At Fordham we know, we recognize, that we’re really the home for medieval studies. And we realize that that’s not something that most people would know .., that there was a great place to study the Middle Ages in New York City. So …  we thought, what better place to do that than at a medieval festival?”

The 14th-century English theologian and professor was a major inspiration for Christians who, in the years leading up to the Protestant Reformation, began to question the need for a pope and the doctrine of transubstantiation.

He was not alone in his questioning; Christians in England who longed for a simpler, more biblical religion embraced him. They were all subsequently branded Lollards, a catchphrase for heretics.

Wyclif’s influence extended beyond England into Bohemia (currently the Czech Republic), thanks to cultural and trade links that were established by the king of England’s marriage to a Bohemian princess in 1382. Until recently, this cross-continental exchange of ideas has warranted little attention from historians and scholars of religion.

Europe After Wyclif a new book published by Fordham University Press, seeks to remedy this, via a compilation of new research presented at a three-day conference that Fordham’s Center for Medieval Studies hosted in June 2014.

J. Patrick Hornbeck II, D.Phil., chair of the Department of Theology, one of the book’s editors, said the idea behind the conference and resulting book was to make Fordham a meeting place where English-speaking scholars and Eastern European scholars could interact in ways they never had before.

He cited Jan Hus, a reformer from Bohemia who was influenced by Wyclif and who was burned at the stake in 1415 for his heresies. Hus is as well-known a figure to Czech citizens as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln are to Americans. Only recently has the relationships among Wyclif, Hus, and their respective reform movements been studied in great detail, though.

“Up until a few years after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the people who were studying Jan Hus were mostly Czech speakers and the people who were studying Wyclif were mostly English speakers,” he said. “They rarely got to talk to each other.”

“Often, both groups were making assumptions about the other that were based on out-of-date material. We wanted to bring together the cream of the crop of scholars in both geographical areas, and to do so across the academic disciplines as well.”

Hornbeck pointed to a chapter by Pavel Soukup, Ph.D., associate director of the Center for Medieval Studies at the Czech Academy of Sciences, as an example of how regional controversies are inseparable from broader cultural and religious developments.

Soukup examined the ways in which bishops reported incidents of heresy, and the Vatican recorded them, over time, paying special attention to the descriptors that church officials used. For a long time, English heretics were referred to as Wycliffites, due to their association with Wyclif. When similar heretics showed up in Bohemia, they too were dubbed Wycliffites—but it was erroneous to group them together in spite of similarities.

“So Soukup plots carefully over time how church authorities eventually came to separate ‘Wycliffies’ from ‘Hussites’ or even ‘Bohemians’, as they later began to call them, and he argues that these simple changes in name can tell us much about how church leaders saw the relationships among different groups of reformers,” he said.

The conference, which was held in association with the Lollard Society and McGill University, was made possible by a $25,000 grant from The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

The Oxford Outremer Map project is a collaboration among the center’s faculty, students, and fellows to restore a 13th-century map that depicts the coastline of the Crusader states, now modern-day Israel and Palestine. The map was likely made or copied by an English monk named Matthew Paris, said Laura K. Morreale, PhD, associate director of the center, and offers a glimpse into various—sometimes abstract—functions of medieval maps.

“It’s very different than how we understand maps today,” Morreale said. “Some of the locales are biblical, so they’re not recognizable in modern terms. A couple places even depict what the mapmakers thought would happen in the future. So, not only is it a practical map, it’s also a kind of visualization of what they hope will happen one day.

“That’s part of the larger conversation,” she said. “Maps should be approached the way you would approach a piece of literature. You don’t just look at the text, but you think about its context and the material reality that surrounded it.”

When Nicholas Paul, PhD, an associate professor of history, encountered the map reproduction as part of the center’s French of Outremer digital humanities initiative, he found the document in poor condition. Besides suffering the expected wear-and-tear over eight centuries, the map had been drawn on the back of a used sheet of parchment. Over time, the colors on the front bled through and obscured Matthew’s drawings and notes.

For years the map was overlooked by medieval scholars, despite its depiction of an important region. Hoping to make it legible again, Paul and Tobias Hrynick, a doctoral student in history, brought the map to the Medieval studies center, where then-graduate student Rachel Butcher, GSAS ’15, worked to spruce it up in Photoshop.

The result is a full, colorized digital version of the map, complete with interactive features and annotations written by the graduate students and fellows.

“It’s not just digitally presented—it’s digitally enabled scholarship,” Morreale said. “It’s user-guided, so users can interact with the map on their own terms. There’s also a discussion section, where users can write in with their input, and there’s a ‘mysteries of the map’ section, where we list the parts of the map we haven’t yet been able to identify. We’re encouraging people to write in if they have some knowledge about these.”

At a colloquium on April 9, scholars discussed the significance of both the map itself—including its relevance to medieval cartography and whether Matthew Paris was indeed its author—and how scholars can use the digital restoration to maximize teaching and research.

“We’re in the process of creating a module for people who want to use this map in classrooms,” Morreale said. “That, in my mind, has been one of the greatest aspects of this project. We were able to take a discussion in our office and project it out into the larger, scholarly world. It’s now accessible to anyone who is interested, with just a few clicks.”

But thanks to a fine art facsimile of the historic tome in Fordham’s Walsh Library, students can flip through the lush pages and absorb a visual representation of medieval art and religion.

The Très riches heures facsimile is one of 300 books and objects donated to Fordham by Dr. James Leach, a New York physician who’s been curious about medieval manuscripts and liturgical books since he was young.

“When I was growing up, I had an interest in Latin and in the church,” said Leach, who heads the dermatology department at Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx. “The prayer books I was familiar with were a springboard to begin looking at the older manuscripts.”

He began amassing a collection of fine art facsimiles of medieval manuscripts, which have been produced since around 1990, typically in limited-edition runs of 300 to 900 copies. He thought that Fordham, as a Catholic university with an established medieval studies program, would be the perfect repository for these works. Leach also donated a sizable collection of original Catholic prayer missals from the late-19th to early-20th centuries.

Nina Rowe, PhD, chair and associate professor of art history at Fordham, said the University is lucky to have such high-quality reproductions available for students.

Rowe said the Très riches heures is one of the “greatest hits” of medieval art history. She also has a few other favorites among the collection.

“I’m delighted to be able to teach students from the facsimiles of the Lindisfarne Gospels, an English monastic manuscript made around the year 700 and renowned for its so-called Carpet Pages, full-page designs with intricate interlace, often in the form of the cross,” she said.

“Another favorite facsimile of mine reproduces a Moralized Bible (sometimes called the Saint Louis Bible) from Paris, 1226 to 1236. Every page features eight circles arranged in four pairs, each with little scenes linking a vignette from the Hebrew Bible to a Christian or contemporary commentary. The images are especially fun when they depict the perceived vices of early 13th-century Parisian life, evoking the real world of the street in a remote period.”

Linda LoSchiavo, TMC ’72, director of the University libraries, said Leach’s contributions are an important addition to Fordham’s Special Collections.

“The facsimiles are an extraordinary example of medieval artistry,” she said. “They’re done with highly specialized devices, and the bindings are reproductions as well.”

The cover of a facsimile of the Sacramentary of Henry II, a liturgical manuscript from the late-10th to early-11th century, includes an intricate copy of the original’s ivory relief. Other facsimiles Leach has donated include the Eton Choirbook and the Lorsch Gospels.

The recent establishment of Fordham’s Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies, and the collection of Judaica being assembled by Magda Teter, PhD, the chair’s inaugural holder, prompted LoSchiavo to ask Leach if he would consider donating a a Haggadah, a book used during Passover seders. He was happy to oblige, and earlier this year donated a facsimile of the Barcelona Haggadah. The original dates to the middle of the 14th century.

Leach hopes his gifts will help Fordham students learn that art and illuminated manuscripts flourished during the medieval period, even though the era sometimes gets a bad rap.

“Most important is that they realize that ‘medieval’ is not purely a derogatory term,” he said. “It was an age of faith and artistic productivity that contributed to Western civilization.”

Thanks to the generosity of Bronx dermatologist James Leach, MD, a fine art facsimile of this medieval prayer book—one of the most famous illuminated manuscripts of the 15th century—is housed in Special Collections at Fordham’s Walsh Family Library. It is one of 300 facsimiles, prayer missals, and other objects donated to Fordham by Leach for the benefit of art history students and medieval studies scholars.

The image accompanies the prayer for the office of Prime, the third prayer reading of the day. The Virgin kneels before her son, who lies on a bed of straw, surrounded by angels. God the Father appears at the top of the image, in the semicircular lobe at the top of the frame. He is surrounded by flaming seraphim.

The text reads:

Deus in adiutorium meum intende

Domine ad adiuvandum me festina

Gloria Patri, et Filio: et Spiritui sancto

Translation:

Incline unto my aid O God.

O Lord make haste to help me.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost.

The prayer continues on the following page.

Read more about Fordham’s collection of fine art facsimiles:

Bronx Doctor Donates Medieval Manuscript Facsimiles to Fordham

Shortly after Henry declared himself head of the Church of England with the 1534 Act of Supremacy, he closed all Catholic convents and monasteries and unhoused every nun, monk, and friar in England, Mary Erler, PhD, writes in her latest book.

“The practical question of what happened to these people after their institutions were closed has always interested historians,” said Erler, who was honored on March 7 at the Center for Medieval Studies annual conference, which drew its theme this year from Erler’s life work.

“Did men continue to operate as priests? If so, where and how? Did they assume clerical jobs, although they were no longer monks?”

In Reading and Writing During the Dissolution: Monks, Friars, and Nuns 1530-1558 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Erler investigates the virtual disappearance of English religious communities during the early years of the Reformation. Women religious in particular were left with few options after their convents closed, forcing many to simply retire to the homes of family members, Erler said.

And yet, she has found, not all religious disagreed with the king’s decision.

“We would imagine that anger and political opposition would be dominant, but this is not entirely so,” Erler said. “Some religious agreed with the reforming position—that institutional religious life was no longer workable or inspiring.”

One such religious was Margaret Vernon, a successful abbess who was the head of four nunneries. Vernon was also a close friend of the king’s chief advisor Thomas Cromwell, whom she met while Cromwell was a lawyer working for Cardinal Wolsey.

Through their surviving correspondence, Erler has worked to piece together the role Vernon played in the religious reformation, as well as in Cromwell’s life.

“A series of letters from Vernon to Cromwell suggests that she may have been part of his reforming circle,” Erler said. “Some of her letters to him were published in the 19th century, but not all, and her story has not been fully told before.”

Erler’s scholarship is timely, as the figure of Thomas Cromwell has recently gained heightened interest in advance of a PBS miniseries, Wolf Hall, which will tell the story of Henry’s court through the eyes of Cromwell. Set between 1527 and 1535, Wolf Hall chronicles the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey for failing to annul Henry’s first marriage; the failure of Anne Boleyn to produce a male heir; and the execution of Thomas More for refusing to ratify the marriage to Boleyn.

The six-part miniseries, which is based on a pair of books by British author Hilary Mantel, premieres April 5. A theatrical version is currently in previews on Broadway.

For Roman Catholics who have spent a lifetime imagining God as a father figure and praying in the name “Father,” ” Son,” and “Holy Spirit,” this gender reversal might sound jarring.

But Shannon McAlister, PhD, studies those saints and Doctors of the Church who ask: “Why?”

McAlister, an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education (GRE), explores the use of female language to describe God—God as “her” instead of “him”—particularly within the western patristic and medieval Catholic tradition.

Despite the unfriendly conditions that women often endured during the Middle Ages, McAlister has found ample evidence that medieval theologians embraced diversity in the gendered language they used to refer to God.

“There are many scripture passages that refer to God with a variety of female terminology,” said McAlister, who teaches in GRE’s Christian Spirituality program. “For instance, in the Wisdom Literature, wisdom is sometimes portrayed as a divine figure, and depicted in female terms—sophia in Greek, or chokhmah in Hebrew. Other passages describe God as conceiving and giving birth.

“My work is focused on retrieving the history of those passages and showing that this language isn’t just on the margins of medieval theological thought—it persists at the center of institutional medieval theology.”

A retrospective study such as this is important within the field, McAlister said. Because modern Catholic thought is very much grounded in tradition, the insights of past scholars still carry weight in current theological debates. At the same time, the Church’s updated, more progressive views about gender equality create a dilemma for some contemporary theologians, who struggle between upholding tradition on the one hand and feeling dissatisfied with exclusively male language on the other.

By uncovering scriptural interpretations that employ female imagery and the theological scholarship based on these images, McAlister offers a model for thinking and talking about God in a more expansive way. And this, some feminist theologians say, may help set the tone for how women are regarded in the church.

“In all of the medieval texts I’ve studied, there are multiple instances of using female imagery for God, both in the grammatically feminine words of the text itself and in the images inspired by the text… for instance, God as creatrix sapientia, literally, ‘Creatress Wisdom’,” she said.

“These scripture passages that refer to God in female terms… can stand as precedents within our current speech for God.”

McAlister pointed to a medieval discussion over whether God might be referred to as “Mother” or “Daughter” in the same sense as “God the Father” and “God the Son.” The idea was ultimately rejected based on the medieval understanding of biological fatherhood and motherhood—that the father is the primary genitor who provides the form for a child, while the mother is a secondary genitor who passively receives that form without playing the active role in conception.

On this reasoning, motherhood is inferior to fatherhood—and an inferior descriptor for God.

“Using female language for God could help women appreciate their inherent dignity as reflections of God,” McAlister said. “However, there’s more we need to do to help women understand their dignity and move into roles that express that, or to create environments in which women are valued equally.”

For modern Catholics, the increasing recognition of women’s equality means that a wider vocabulary for God is a practice that many contemporary theologians advocate. While that may not resolve all issues relating to gender equality, it can be a good start.

“I think that retrieving the history of this type of speech about God provides an example for those who wish both to preserve the wisdom of the Christian tradition and also to broaden their images for God to include female as well as male,” she said.