Hi. This is me.
And I admit it.
I used to be a professor of medieval history at a large midwestern university. I taught a lot of students. I sat on WAY too many committees. I did research and published articles and books like this:
Here’s my last book, published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. This book is about a period when kings and emperors were getting into theoretical (and sometimes literal) battles with religious leaders like popes and bishops, about who had what kind of power and over whom. This led to the first “pamphlet war” in European history, as writers created works supporting one side or the other. The central issue was control of the Church, which was always portrayed as a female figure–the Bride of Christ and the Mother of the Faithful. So these writers played around with ideas about gender and sex (you don’t want to know some of the things that happened to the poor Bride in these pamphlets . . .). This book analyzes the ideas about sexuality and gender that were in circulation during the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, by analyzing political arguments that made use of those ideas.
Reviews:
“…superb…McLaughlin argues her point in lively and subtly amusing prose, sparked with effective quotations of medieval authors. Her book is perfect for classes on medieval politics and churches…Non-specialists can easily follow the argument, while fellow medievalists will appreciate the book’s methodological innovations and evidentiary heft, and feminists will be glad to discover that it considerably advances the scholarly project of gendering the medieval past.”
–Lisa M. Bitel, American Historical Review
“It is seldom that a book has the ability to make one fundamentally question one’s previous assumptions and see things from an entirely new perspective, particularly when as here the subject matter is one that will be so very familiar to historians of eleventh‐ and twelfth‐century Europe. This book, however, does just that.”
–Kathleen Cushing, Early Medieval Europe
But now that I’m retired, I’m devoting myself to other projects, most notably my research on autism and human rights.