Karras is an author and scholar of the Middle Ages, whose interests include masculinity and sexuality in Christian and Jewish societies. Her book Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages, was named co-winner of the American Historical Association's Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women's History in 2012.[4] Her other notable works include From Boys to Men and Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others.
In the field of medieval studies, Karras has spent her professional career studying medieval masculinity, sexuality, gender roles and the history of women.[3] The research foundations of her work are focused on the intersections of social, legal and cultural history in medieval societies. As primary sources, Karras employs court records, hagiography, prescriptive texts, administrative documents, and Icelandic sagas to inform her analysis.[3] Her current research is focused on the masculine figure of King David in medieval Christian and Jewish cultures. She works with dissertation and thesis students whose work is based on the central to late Middle Ages; Karras also works with postgraduates focusing on the cultural and social histories of women and sexuality.[3]
Notable works
Select publications from her research on masculinity include: the book From Boys to Men (2003), “Young Knights Under the Feminine Gaze” (2002), "Separating the Men from the Goats" (1999), "Sharing Wine, Women, and Song" (1997), and the fourth edition of her book, Sexuality in Medieval Europe (2005). Select publications from her research on women and sexuality include: Common Women (1996), “Women’s Labors” (2004), Unmarriages (2012), and “Royal Masculinity in Kingless Societies (2016).[11] She also co-edited, with medieval scholar Judith Bennett, The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (2013). Karras also has published works focused on the institution of medieval marriage such as “Marriage” (2012), Law and the Illicit in Medieval Europe (2008) and “Marriage and the Creation of Kin in the Sagas” (2003).[12]
Reception
Karras has received praise for her innovative research approaches when considering medieval masculinities and analyzing the sexual unions of marriage and prostitution during the Middle Ages. Some medieval scholars have found From Boys to Men to be a founding document in the study of men's history and a success in medieval scholarship for its development of social class expectations and experiences of socialization as being critical to how male masculinities formed separate from women.[13] Several other medieval scholars have praised Unmarriages for its fresh research complied with unpublished church court records and the intersectionality between legal, sexual and economic histories.[14]
However, other historians criticize Karras's reductive qualities during the interpretative process of analyzing the legal, religious and literary texts. Her discourse, according to some medieval scholars, places all individuals into one category and does not allow for the possibility of other explanations to be applied regarding definitional questions.[13] Some historians criticize the presentist agenda and generalizations made by Karras when she formulates conclusions on some primary sources.[14]
Awards and fellowships
Karras has received awards and honors throughout her career, including: the Rhodes Scholarship from 1979-1981; the National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 1989; American Philosophical Society research grant in 1989; she was named Scholar of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 2003; she was accepted as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey in 2003-2004; she received the Distinguished Women Scholars Award in Humanities, Social Sciences and Arts at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 2008; she was honored with the Dean's Medal and Graduate-Professional Teaching Award at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 2010; in 2012, she was honored as "Feminist Foremother" by the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship and the Joan Kelly Prize in Women's History from the American Historical Association for her work in Unmarriages; and she was an invited member to the Israel Institute for Advanced Study in 2016-2017.[12][15]
Karras has received fellowships such as the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1993-1994; the American Philosophical Society sabbatical fellowship in 2004-2005; the Medieval Academy of America fellowship in 2009; the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship in 2010; the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012; the European Institutes for Advanced Study Fellowship in 2016-2017; and the Donald Bullough Fellowship from the St. Andrews Institute for Medieval Studies in 2018.[12][11]
Karras was the North American co-editor for Gender and History from 2008 to 2013; President of the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women from 2005 to 2008; was on the editorial board for the American Historical Review; and the Medieval Academy of America as chair of the Ad Hoc Committee on Harassment in 2018, and president from 2019 to 2020.[12]
Selected publications
[Edited volume with Elisheva Baumgarten and Katelyn Mesler], Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority, and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
[Edited volume with Judith Bennett], Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
"The Regulation of Sexuality in the Late Middle Ages: England and France," Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 86 (2011) 1010–1039.
[Tiffany Vann Sprecher and Ruth Mazo Karras,] "The Midwife and the Church: Ecclesiastical Regulation of Midwives in Brie, 1499-1504," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 85 (2011), 171–192.
[Cameron Bradley and Ruth Mazo Karras,] "Masculine Sexuality and a Double Standard in Early Thirteenth-Century Flanders?" Leidschrift 25 (2010), 63–77.
[Ruth Mazo Karras and Jacqueline Murray,] “The Sexual Body,” in A Cultural History of the Human Body, vol. 2, In the Medieval Age, ed. Linda Kalof (Oxford: Berg, 2010), 59–75.
“Marriage, Concubinage, and the Law,” in Law and the Illicit in Medieval Europe, ed. Ruth Mazo Karras, Joel Kaye, and E. Ann Matter (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 117–129.
[Edited volume with Joel Kaye and E. Ann Matter,] Law and the Illicit in Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Slavery and Society in Medieval Scandinavia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
[Ruth Mazo Karras and Tom Linkinen,] "John/Eleanor Rykener Revisited," in "Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies," part 2, ed. Laine E. Doggett and Daniel E. O'Sullivan (England: Boydell and Brewer, 2016), 111-122
1 2 Partner, Nancy. Review of From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe, by Ruth Mazo Karras. Speculum 80, no. 4 (2005): 1311–13. JSTOR.
1 2 D’Avray, David. Review of Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages, by Ruth Mazo Karras. The American Historical Review 119, no. 1 (2014): 231–32. JSTOR.
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