Beverly Mayne Kienzle

Profile

Beverly Mayne Kienzle began teaching at HDS in 1986 and was appointed director of language studies in 1993. Her courses on Christian Latin and medieval Christianity emphasize the careful examination of primary sources and the role of texts in medieval culture. As past president of the International Medieval Sermon Studies Society, she channels her passion for medieval sermons into her teaching and her publications on preaching. Her work focuses on the place of preaching and sermons in the history of medieval religion and on evidence for women's preaching in monastic, lay, and dissident communities. A concern about violence against women motivates her continuing research on battering in historical narratives. She is also working on Italian penitent women from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and is co-editor of the forthcoming A Handbook on Catherine of Siena, as well as a volume on Hildegard of Bingen in the same E.J. Brill series. Kienzle's forthcoming English translation of Hildegard's homilies follows the edition (with Carolyn A. Muessig) of Hildegard of Bingen's Expositiones euangeliorum and her Hildegard of Bingen and Her Gospel Homilies: Speaking New Mysteries, funded by a 2006 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Other publications include: Cistercians, Heresy, and Crusade in Occitania, 1145-1229; Women Preachers and Prophets Through Two Millennia of Christianity; The Sermon; Medieval Sermons and Society; Models of Holiness in Medieval Sermons; Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons for the Summer Season (translation); and De Ore Domini: Preacher and Word in the Middle Ages.