Fiona Griffiths

Fiona Griffiths is a historian of medieval Western Europe, focusing on intellectual and religious life from the ninth to the thirteenth century. Her work explores the possibilities for social experimentation and cultural production inherent in medieval religious reform movements, addressing questions of gender, spirituality, and authority, particularly as they pertain to the experiences and interactions of religious men (priests or monks) with women (nuns and clerical wives). Griffiths is the author of Nuns' Priests' Tales: Men and Salvation in Medieval Women's Monastic Life, The Middle Ages Series (The University of Pennsylvania Press: 2018) and The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century, The Middle Ages Series (The University of Pennsylvania Press: 2007); she is co-editor (with Kathryn Starkey) of Sensory Reflections: Traces of Experience in Medieval Artifacts (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019) and (with Julie Hotchin) of Partners in Spirit: Men, Women, and Religious Life in Germany, 1100-1500 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014). Her essays have appeared in Speculum, Church History, the Journal of Medieval History, and Viator. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; and the Institute of Historical Research (University of London).
Books
Articles/Chapters
Contact
Series Editor (with Beatrice Kitzinger and Kathryn Starkey): Sense, Matter, and Medium New Approaches to Medieval Literary and Material Culture (De Gruyter)
Conference | Priests' Wives and Concubines In the Medieval West (800 - 1200)
“Wives, Concubines, or Slaves? Peter Damian and Clerics’ Women,” Early Medieval Europe 30.2 (2022), 1-25.
“Noble Fathers and Low-Status Daughters in the Eleventh Century: Rilint, libera, and Hiltigund, presbyterissa,” C. Warren Hollister Essay, Haskins Society Journal 32 (2021), 23-46.
“Amputation and Warfare in the Eleventh Century: Absence, Sensation, and Embodiment” (with Kathryn Starkey), postmedieval 12 (2021), special cluster, Sensory Presence and Senses of Absence in the European Middle Ages, ed. Fiona J. Griffiths and Kathryn Starkey, 101–122.
“Prayer for the Dead: Women, Death, and Salvation,” in Lives, Identities and Histories in the Central Middle Ages, ed. Julie Barrau and David Bates (Cambridge University Press: 2021), 25-41.