Laureation Address: Professor Caroline Walker Bynum
Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters
Laureation by Professor Justine Firnhaber-Baker, School of History
Tuesday 30 June 2026 – morning ceremony
Vice-Chancellor, graduates, colleagues, special guests, it is my privilege to present for the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, Professor Caroline Walker Bynum.
Professor Bynum is perhaps the most influential living historian of the Middle Ages, one who has not only transformed her own discipline, but who has also had significant impact on related fields, such as theology, gender studies, and anthropology. The author or editor of over a dozen books, she is primarily a scholar of medieval religion.
As those of you with any knowledge of the Middle Ages will know (and I hope that that includes at least some of my former students here today) that means that she works on the fundamental issue of the period, when Christianity permeated everyone’s lives – whether they themselves were Christian or not. Medieval religion is thus an extremely well-established field, replete with heavy tomes in foreign languages that every historian must get to grips with before writing anything of their own. To choose this field for your own is brave. To transform it, as she has done, is amazing.
The transformation that she has wrought is partly one of focus. She has placed women, gender, and the body at the centre of much of her work. Her books, including Jesus as Mother: Studies
in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages; Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women; and Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, have not only galvanized a flourishing subfield on specifically female spirituality but have also made women and gender central categories of analysis for the study of the Middle Ages more widely.
The emphasis Professor Bynum has placed on women and gender is one aspect of an arguably even more fundamental contribution that she has made to historical methodology, that is to how we conceptualize doing history. Her work demands that historians take medieval sources
and the culture that produced them on their own terms, allowing them to ‘reveal the past in its strangeness as well as its familiarity’, as she wrote in Holy Feast and Holy Fast.
Ranging from how medieval women used food to commune with Christ to how abbots thought of themselves as mothers, caring for their monks as Mary did for Jesus, to how miraculously bleeding communion wafers revealed the fundamental paradoxes of Christianity itself, the unexpected but instructive phenomena she has uncovered have recalibrated not only what questions we ask but also how we ask them.
As is true of every scholar’s work, but perhaps hers more than most, Professor Bynum’s signal contributions have been shaped by her own historical circumstances. Having grown up in segregated Atlanta, Georgia, her academic journey began when she left secondary school a year early to attend Radcliffe College, then the sister-school to Harvard University before it became fully co-educational. She then transferred to the University of Michigan, where she received her BA in 1962. Returning to Cambridge, Massachusetts, she undertook a PhD in History at Harvard and graduated in 1969.
After her PhD, she stayed on at Harvard to teach for the next seven years. At that time, Harvard had only eleven female faculty members, none of whom was tenured. Professor Bynum helped to found Harvard’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, but frustrated by that atmosphere, she left Harvard to move to the other side of the country, taking up a position at the University of Washington. Although some might have viewed Washington as a significant step down, it was there that she found the personal and intellectual freedom to make her field-changing breakthroughs. And recognition duly followed.
Awarded a McArthur Fellowship (also known as a ‘Genius Grant’) in 1986, she was appointed to a professorship at Columbia University in New York City in 1988. In 2003 she moved from Columbia to the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton – the very pinnacle of American academia – where she is currently Professor Emerita.
In addition to the McArthur, she has won a slew of awards, including a Haskins Medal from the Medieval Academy of America for her book Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond and a Grand Merit Cross with star from the Federal Republic of Germany. She has received honorary degrees from around the world, of which today’s award will be her sixteenth.
Here at St Andrews, where Medieval Studies remains a vibrant and valued part of the curriculum, we are especially well placed to appreciate Professor Bynum’s achievements, and we are delighted that she is here today to accept this mark of our esteem.
Vice-Chancellor, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to History, to Medieval Studies, and to the Study of Religion, I invite you to confer the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, on Professor Caroline Walker Bynum.