Katie Bugyis
Katie Bugyis is a historian of Christian theology, liturgical practice, and material culture, who is particularly interested in reconstructing the lived experiences of religious women in the Middle Ages through their documents of practice and other material remains.
Her book, The Care of Nuns: Benedictine Women’s Ministries in England during the Central Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 2019) , recovers the liturgical practices of Benedictine nuns in England from 900 to 1225 primarily through detailed analyses of the books their communities produced and used. Integrating methodological approaches yet to be employed in the study of these women—from ritual studies to manuscript archaeology—she demonstrates that they actively participated in the organization, performance, and memorialization of their liturgical practices, including public teaching and preaching, reading the gospel liturgically, hearing confessions, and offering intercessory prayers for others. Care of Nuns was awarded the American Society of Church History's 2020 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize, which annually honors outstanding scholarship in the history of Christianity by a first-time author.
Bugyis is currently working on two projects. The first is Pastoring Nuns: Sibyl Felton, Barking Abbey, and Leading Liturgy in Late Medieval England. The heart of this book is a biography of Sibyl Felton, the abbess of Barking Abbey in Essex, England, from 1393 to 1419. She has often been remembered as a “great abbess,” but her story has yet to be told in full, together with the women who formed her and the community she supported with her expert leadership, capacious literacy, and transformative liturgy. Essential to this story are the many books she commissioned, acquired, treasured, read for guidance, applied in worship, and passed on to her sisters at Barking. Pastoring Nuns shows that, by studying the composition, use, and contents of these books, we come closest to the woman who once owned them. We encounter the ideas, teachings, and practices that may have inspired, comforted, challenged, and even perplexed Sibyl as she pursued her vocation as a Benedictine nun and abbess. They bring her story to life.
The second project, Medieval Liturgy: Tutorials for Students, Teachers, & Researchers, is a collaboration with Margot Fassler. They are developing a website that addresses a frequently expressed need for instruction in medieval liturgical books and fragments. It offers resources—teaching videos, written guides, links to relevant online materials, and more—to teach scholars how to read the surviving liturgical evidence from medieval religious communities and to bring these texts and materials to life in well-reasoned and responsible ways. This project received a three-year seed grant ($100,000) from the University of Notre Dame’s Faculty Research Support Program in 2022 and a three-year Humanities Initiatives at Colleges and Universities grant ($150,000) from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Bugyis has published numerous book chapters and articles, in such journals as Speculum, Traditio, Church History, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Journal of Medieval History, Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies, and Viator. She also has coedited two volumes, Women Intellectuals and Leaders in the Middle Ages (D.S. Brewer, 2020) with Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and John Van Engen, and Medieval Cantors and Their Craft: Music, Liturgy, and the Shaping of History (York Medieval Press, 2017) with Andrew Kraebel and Margot Fassler. Her research has won fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Medieval Academy of America, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Her book, The Care of Nuns: Benedictine Women’s Ministries in England during the Central Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 2019) , recovers the liturgical practices of Benedictine nuns in England from 900 to 1225 primarily through detailed analyses of the books their communities produced and used. Integrating methodological approaches yet to be employed in the study of these women—from ritual studies to manuscript archaeology—she demonstrates that they actively participated in the organization, performance, and memorialization of their liturgical practices, including public teaching and preaching, reading the gospel liturgically, hearing confessions, and offering intercessory prayers for others. Care of Nuns was awarded the American Society of Church History's 2020 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize, which annually honors outstanding scholarship in the history of Christianity by a first-time author.
Bugyis is currently working on two projects. The first is Pastoring Nuns: Sibyl Felton, Barking Abbey, and Leading Liturgy in Late Medieval England. The heart of this book is a biography of Sibyl Felton, the abbess of Barking Abbey in Essex, England, from 1393 to 1419. She has often been remembered as a “great abbess,” but her story has yet to be told in full, together with the women who formed her and the community she supported with her expert leadership, capacious literacy, and transformative liturgy. Essential to this story are the many books she commissioned, acquired, treasured, read for guidance, applied in worship, and passed on to her sisters at Barking. Pastoring Nuns shows that, by studying the composition, use, and contents of these books, we come closest to the woman who once owned them. We encounter the ideas, teachings, and practices that may have inspired, comforted, challenged, and even perplexed Sibyl as she pursued her vocation as a Benedictine nun and abbess. They bring her story to life.
The second project, Medieval Liturgy: Tutorials for Students, Teachers, & Researchers, is a collaboration with Margot Fassler. They are developing a website that addresses a frequently expressed need for instruction in medieval liturgical books and fragments. It offers resources—teaching videos, written guides, links to relevant online materials, and more—to teach scholars how to read the surviving liturgical evidence from medieval religious communities and to bring these texts and materials to life in well-reasoned and responsible ways. This project received a three-year seed grant ($100,000) from the University of Notre Dame’s Faculty Research Support Program in 2022 and a three-year Humanities Initiatives at Colleges and Universities grant ($150,000) from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Bugyis has published numerous book chapters and articles, in such journals as Speculum, Traditio, Church History, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Journal of Medieval History, Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies, and Viator. She also has coedited two volumes, Women Intellectuals and Leaders in the Middle Ages (D.S. Brewer, 2020) with Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and John Van Engen, and Medieval Cantors and Their Craft: Music, Liturgy, and the Shaping of History (York Medieval Press, 2017) with Andrew Kraebel and Margot Fassler. Her research has won fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Medieval Academy of America, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
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Books by Katie Bugyis
Bringing together contributors from the disciplines of literature, history and religion, this volume challenges several traditional views: firstly, the still-prevalent idea that women’s intellectual accomplishments were limited to the Latin literate. The collection therefore engages heavily with vernacular writings (in Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, French, Dutch, German and Italian), and also with material culture (manuscript illumination, stained glass, fabric and jewelry) for evidence of women’s advanced capabilities. But in doing so, the contributors strive to avoid the equally problematic view that women’s accomplishments were somehow limited to the vernacular and the material. So several essays examine women at work with the sacred languages of the three Abrahamic traditions (Latin, Arabic and Hebrew). And a third traditional view is also interrogated: that women were somehow more “original” for their lack of learning and dependence on their mother tongue. Scholars here agree wholeheartedly that women could be daring thinkers in any language; they engage readily with women’s learnedness wherever it can be found.
Contributors: Asma Afsaruddin, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Amanda Bohne, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, Adrienne Williams Boyarin, Dyan Elliott, Thelma Fenster, Sean Field, Sarah Foot, Megan J. Hall, Ruth Mazzo Karras, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Rachel Koopmans, F. Thomas Luongo, Leanne MacDonald, Gary Macy, Maureen Miller, Barbara Newman, S.J. Pearce, Anna Siebach-Larsen, Gemma Simmonds, David Wallace, John Van Engen, Nicholas Watson, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne.
This interdisciplinary book is the first of its kind to be dedicated wholly to exploring these cantors and their craft. As the use of this word––“craft”––in our titles suggests, the essays in this volume are studies of constructions, both of the building blocks of time and of the people who made and performed them, in acts of ritual remembrance and in written records. These essays respond to a fundamental question: How can the range of cantors’ activities help us understand the many different ways in which the past was written and, in the liturgy, celebrated across this long period? Our contributors present a variety of different approaches to answering this question, and in the process their essays recover some of the multifaceted work of medieval history-making. In most cases, their answers involve recourse to the liturgy, a mode of history-production in which all members of the community––lay and religious, men and women––had roles to play. Cantors, as this volume makes clear, shaped the communal experience of the past in the Middle Ages.
Contributors include: Cara Aspesi, Alison I. Beach, Katie Bugyis, Anna de Bakker, Margot Fassler, David Ganz, James Grier, Paul Antony Hayward, Peter Jeffery, CJ Jones, Andrew Kraebel, Lori Kruckenberg, Rosamond McKitterick, Henry Parkes, Susan Rankin, C. C. Rozier, Sigbjorn Olsen Sonneysn, Tessa Webber, and Lauren Whitnah.
Publications by Katie Bugyis
* Please contact me if you are interested in receiving a copy of the entire article.
* Please email or message me if you would like to receive a copy of the entire article.
* Please contact me if you are interested in receiving a copy of the entire article.
* Please contact me if you are interested in receiving a copy of the entire article.
*Please note that only a selection of the article has been provided for download.
Showcased here is the introduction to the article. For the complete article, follow the link provided.
Note: Only an excerpt of the essay is attached here. Please check out the edited volume, Medieval Cantors and their Craft: Music, Liturgy and the Shaping of History, 800-1500, for the complete text.
Showcased here is the introduction to the article. For the complete article, follow the link provided.
Showcased here is the introduction to the article. For the complete article, follow the link provided.
Bringing together contributors from the disciplines of literature, history and religion, this volume challenges several traditional views: firstly, the still-prevalent idea that women’s intellectual accomplishments were limited to the Latin literate. The collection therefore engages heavily with vernacular writings (in Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, French, Dutch, German and Italian), and also with material culture (manuscript illumination, stained glass, fabric and jewelry) for evidence of women’s advanced capabilities. But in doing so, the contributors strive to avoid the equally problematic view that women’s accomplishments were somehow limited to the vernacular and the material. So several essays examine women at work with the sacred languages of the three Abrahamic traditions (Latin, Arabic and Hebrew). And a third traditional view is also interrogated: that women were somehow more “original” for their lack of learning and dependence on their mother tongue. Scholars here agree wholeheartedly that women could be daring thinkers in any language; they engage readily with women’s learnedness wherever it can be found.
Contributors: Asma Afsaruddin, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Amanda Bohne, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, Adrienne Williams Boyarin, Dyan Elliott, Thelma Fenster, Sean Field, Sarah Foot, Megan J. Hall, Ruth Mazzo Karras, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Rachel Koopmans, F. Thomas Luongo, Leanne MacDonald, Gary Macy, Maureen Miller, Barbara Newman, S.J. Pearce, Anna Siebach-Larsen, Gemma Simmonds, David Wallace, John Van Engen, Nicholas Watson, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne.
This interdisciplinary book is the first of its kind to be dedicated wholly to exploring these cantors and their craft. As the use of this word––“craft”––in our titles suggests, the essays in this volume are studies of constructions, both of the building blocks of time and of the people who made and performed them, in acts of ritual remembrance and in written records. These essays respond to a fundamental question: How can the range of cantors’ activities help us understand the many different ways in which the past was written and, in the liturgy, celebrated across this long period? Our contributors present a variety of different approaches to answering this question, and in the process their essays recover some of the multifaceted work of medieval history-making. In most cases, their answers involve recourse to the liturgy, a mode of history-production in which all members of the community––lay and religious, men and women––had roles to play. Cantors, as this volume makes clear, shaped the communal experience of the past in the Middle Ages.
Contributors include: Cara Aspesi, Alison I. Beach, Katie Bugyis, Anna de Bakker, Margot Fassler, David Ganz, James Grier, Paul Antony Hayward, Peter Jeffery, CJ Jones, Andrew Kraebel, Lori Kruckenberg, Rosamond McKitterick, Henry Parkes, Susan Rankin, C. C. Rozier, Sigbjorn Olsen Sonneysn, Tessa Webber, and Lauren Whitnah.
* Please contact me if you are interested in receiving a copy of the entire article.
* Please email or message me if you would like to receive a copy of the entire article.
* Please contact me if you are interested in receiving a copy of the entire article.
* Please contact me if you are interested in receiving a copy of the entire article.
*Please note that only a selection of the article has been provided for download.
Showcased here is the introduction to the article. For the complete article, follow the link provided.
Note: Only an excerpt of the essay is attached here. Please check out the edited volume, Medieval Cantors and their Craft: Music, Liturgy and the Shaping of History, 800-1500, for the complete text.
Showcased here is the introduction to the article. For the complete article, follow the link provided.
Showcased here is the introduction to the article. For the complete article, follow the link provided.
My lecture was recorded and can be viewed at the following site: https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/video/liturgy-matters-katie-bugyis.
My current book project, In Christ’s Stead: Benedictine Women’s Ministries in England, 900-1225, recovers the liturgical and pastoral ministries of English women religious, who lived in monastic houses that followed the Benedictine Rule, from the end of the ninth century to the beginning of the thirteenth. Four ministries are examined in detail—public teaching and preaching, the liturgical reading of the gospel, the practice of penance, and care for the poor, sick, and deceased—and they are prefaced and contextualized by close studies of the very monastic officers that most often performed them—cantors, sacristans, prioresses, and abbesses. Most innovative and central to this study are the close paleographical and codicological analyses of the surviving liturgical manuscripts that were produced by or for female Benedictine houses. Though they are dialogically related to the other textual sources and material evidence I examined, these manuscripts served as the primary documents of practice for my research, because they offer witnesses not only to the liturgical and pastoral roles that women religious performed, but also to their productions as copyists, correctors, and even creators of liturgical texts.
N.B. This presentation has now been published as an article in _The Journal of Ecclesiastical History_ under the same title. A copy of the introduction to this article can be downloaded from my Academia.edu page.
N.B. This presentation has now been published as an article in _The Journal of Ecclesiastical History_ with the title, "The Writer of the Life of Christina of Markyate: The Case for Robert de Gorron (d. 1166)". A copy of the introduction to this article can be downloaded from my Academia.edu page.
N.B. This presentation has now been published as an article in _Traditio_ under the same title. A copy of the introduction to this article can be downloaded from my Academia.edu page.
The Middle Ages, by contrast, with its extraordinarily rich concepts of interiority, inner psychology, and transcendence offers a much wider perspective on women’s roles than we, as medievalists, are collectively exploring these days. This conference, then, will highlight not women and the body, but women and the mind. Like their male counterparts, medieval women were capable of acting as forceful political agents; rigorous, and even transgressive theological, medical, and legal thinkers; innovative authors and artists; and courageous champions of ecclesiastical and social reform. By inviting participants from all three of the Abrahamic traditions that the medieval world gave to the modern one, we hope to compare fruitfully how women’s intellectual and religious roles developed, and how they influence those roles today. By inviting a range of specialists and clergy who study the thought of women c. 500 – c. 1550 from across a range of European countries, we plan to showcase the extraordinary wealth of the period in women who thought and often even led.
To this end, we encourage the investigation of unexplored or underutilized sources for the lives of medieval women. Many of the primary sources written by women themselves, such as theological treatises, works of literature, and letters, have yet to be critically studied as proper contributions to the intellectual life of the Middle Ages. But there are other sources, many of which were authored or created by women, that hold untold potential for recovering the voices of thinking medieval women, and that are only now beginning to receive scholarly attention: charters, wills, court records, liturgical books, music, manuscript illuminations, sculptures, textiles, and archaeological remains. Given the often vexed and fragmentary nature of the evidence for the lives of medieval women, creative constellations of the sources that do survive need to be configured in order to provide a fuller account of their lives. A new history of medieval women can and must be told, a history that enriches our understanding of their intellectual achievements, a history that places their minds at the center of their agency, creativity, and authority.
In this course, we will think with some of the greatest minds who have contributed to the various Christian theological traditions, specifically on the question of what it means to be human, the question proper to the systematic locus of “theological anthropology,” and the question that grounds and animates the Program of Liberal Studies. Answering this question necessarily implicates the questions stated above, but it also considers many of the following features of being human: the unique manner in which humans are said to be created (i.e., in the image and likeness of God), the status of humans with respect to the rest of creation, the relationship between the body and the soul, the powers of the soul, free choice, the acquisition of virtues, the moral life (as individuals and as communities), sin and grace, suffering, salvation, death, and beatitude. In the first half of the course, we will explore ancient and medieval formulations of and answers to these questions, and in the second half of the course, we will examine more contemporary responses to these questions that critique past works of Christian theology for forgetting, marginalizing, distorting, subjugating, or dehumanizing humans of certain races, ethnicities, classes, genders, sexual orientations, and abilities. At the very end of the class, we will even trouble the anthropocentrism inherent to many theological anthropologies and consider whether a dramatic conversion in the way that humans understand and live out their relationship with other created beings is called for now.
In this course, we will discover that the Bible is not one book. It does not speak with one voice. It does not offer up one unambiguous truth. This is both a historical fact and a theological proposition. As a historical artifact, the Bible was compiled over the course of several centuries on either side of the year 0 C.E., and in the case of the Hebrew Scriptures—what some Christians call the Old Testament—the various writings collected relate events that were said to have happened several centuries or even millennia before. Nearly all of the material contained in the Bible began as an oral tradition, passed down through generations before someone decided that it should be written down, and in most cases, we have no idea who that someone was. In the original Greek, ta biblia means the scrolls or books. And, so, the Bible is really more of a collection or a library.
Acknowledging the long and complex history of the Bible’s composition may seem unsettling at first, especially given its status as a cultural icon. In popular parlance when we refer to something as “the Bible”—as in, for example, The Golf Bible—we mean that it is authoritative, univocal, practical, accessible, comprehensive, and exclusive. This is to say that it is the only book you will need about the topic it purports to examine, because it contains everything you will ever need to know about that topic. But—and here’s the theological proposition—God is not golf. The major monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam hold that God so transcends human experience that God is unknowable, at least on this side of death. But this does not mean that we cannot say anything about God or, worse yet, that we cannot relate to God. It just means that whatever means of access to God we have, whether through the natural world, personal experience, communal tradition, or, indeed, the Bible, will not give us the whole of what we seek. It is perhaps fitting then that the Bible contains multiple ways of coming to know God, presented by various writers and communities in different times, and that these paths to God often do not obviously converge on a single version of who God is. Thus, the library becomes a labyrinth at the center of which is a God who eludes our grasp.
Since it would be impossible to read our way through the entirety of this library and explore every corner of this labyrinth in a single semester, I have chosen texts that address one of its central through lines: God’s justice and humanity’s quest for liberation. The search begins almost immediately after creation, when the first humans confront the fact that their freedom seems to be the very source of their enslavement. It continues with the story of a people liberated by God only to find themselves slaves to their own inability to trust this God. In the Psalms, we hear both praises of the saving power of God’s justice and laments over humanity’s enduring bondage to sin. The Wisdom literature offers guidance on how to live according to God’s justice, particularly for the sake of the most marginalized and downtrodden of society. In Job and Ruth, the quest for liberation is brought into focus in the stories of two righteous people and their fidelity to God and their kin. With the prophet Isaiah we hear the promise of one who will come to liberate humanity once and for all, and in the Gospels, this promise seems to be fulfilled, but not in the way that anyone expected. Finally, Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the Letter of James, and the Book of Revelation all address communities that are still trying to figure out how to live liberated lives in the midst of oppressive conditions.
Sometime around the year 529 in Monte Cassino, Italy, this radical movement of Christoformic living found a unique expression in a rule, which was created to guide the practices of a group of Christian laymen, who wished to pray, work, and live together. Benedict of Nursia (c. 480-550) is most often credited with the composition of this rule, though this claim cannot be proven definitively. Questions of authorship aside, the lives of earlier desert fathers and mothers, and the guides for cenobites that they sometimes left behind, undoubtedly shaped the rule's construction, but in sharp contrast to previous guides, this new rule was not crafted to provide a definitive way to perfection, but to articulate a more moderate path for beginners to monasticism. Arguably the rule's commitment to moderation in all of its precepts is what made it the most popular guide to monastic practice for men and women in Western Christianity.
In this course, we will explore the rich tradition of thought and practice that the Benedictine rule established. First, we will read the rule itself and heed the opening words of its prologue, to " listen to the precepts of the Master " and discover what values are essential to the corporate prayer and work (or ora et labora) of the monastic way of life (or conversatio). Then we will explore these values in greater depth by reading, watching, and listening to the works of some of the most influential Benedictine monks, nuns, oblates, and admirers. We will remain attentive to how these thinkers and practitioners of the rule adapted it to meet the concerns of their present context. The rule itself permits the modification of certain precepts according to the needs of particular communities and, more significantly, leaves certain details and potential issues related to the monastics' daily routine unaddressed, thus necessitating further elaboration by later adherents. Ultimately in this class we seek to answer the question of whether the rule provides any guidance for the way we non-monastics should live today.
This course will provide a systematic introduction to Christian thought organized around the central tension involved in attending to the sufferings of this world while setting one’s sights on the next. This exploration will be framed by the Sermon on the Mount, which is one of the key passages of the New Testament, in which Jesus provides what is perhaps the clearest articulation of how the “old law” of this present world is related to the “new law” that he is thought to have inaugurated. This will require us to first consider those Jewish sources, which Jesus took to be his own and upon which he claimed to expand. In this way, we will consider the central tension between contemporary Christianity and “secular” society as a continuation of the earliest negotiations between the emerging “Jesus” movement and the Jewish tradition to which it belonged. After an investigation of this problematic in the foundational documents of the Jewish and Christian canons, we will turn to various contemporary readings in Christian social thought that consider the implications of the “Jesus-event” for pursuing the ends of social justice. These readings will provide an introduction to defining Christian doctrines, like the Incarnation and the Trinity, while also providing a platform for thinking about larger questions concerning the meaning of suffering, the demands of justice, our obligations to the poor, and the ultimate ends of our lives together, which should be of broader interest for persons of any or no religious affiliation.
In this course, we are going to join the long, venerable tradition of Christian Theology in order to ponder these questions with some of the tradition’s greatest minds. Through our readings and collective work, we will roam widely in this tradition with respect to chronology, geography, denomination, genre, and gender and state of life of the theologian. Too often in the past the academic study of Theology has limited its canon of texts to systematic treatises by ordained male clerics. Not so for this class. We will read and interrogate works by women and men; vowed religious, ordained, and lay; ancient, medieval, and modern; personal essayists, preachers, mystics, musicians, poets, painters, fiction writers, and much, much more.
(The cover image depicts Esther in an authoritative teaching posture, advocating before the Persian king, Ahasuerus for the Hebrew people, an act of bravery that thwarted the genocide of her people. The image comes from one of the most lavishly illustrated medieval Hebrew manuscripts extant, 'The Northern French Miscellany', containing biblical texts and prayers (c. 1277-1286). © The British Library Board, London, British Library, MS Additional 11639, fol.260v).
To uncover these liturgical and pastoral ministries, this study investigates a variety of textual sources and material evidence – monastic rules, customaries, penitentials, ecclesiastical decrees, canon law collections, theological treatises, chronicles, saints’ lives, miracle collections, letters, charters, cartularies, wills, mortuary rolls, manuscript illuminations, seals, sculptures, and grave goods. But most innovative and central to this study are the close paleographical and codicological analyses of the surviving liturgical manuscripts that were produced by and for houses of Benedictine women religious in central medieval England. When identified and then studied as a whole – which they have not been until this point – these books provide a treasure-trove of unexamined evidence for understanding the lives of women religious. The manuscripts analyzed include psalters, prayerbooks, gospel books, lectionaries, homiliaries, calendars, pontificals, and ordinals. These books serve as the foundational documents of practice for this study, for they offer witnesses not only to the liturgical and pastoral ministries that women religious performed, but also to the productions of female scribes as copyists, correctors, and even creators of liturgical texts.