Ruth Mazo Karras

Ruth Mazo Karras (born in 1957) is an American historian, scholar and medievalist whose academic research and publications are on religion, sexuality, marriage, slavery, gender studies, and the history of women in the late Middle Ages. She received her BA, MPhil, and PhD in history from Yale University, and an MPhil in European archaeology from the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar in 1979. Among the most cited medieval historians globally, Karras was the President of the Medieval Academy of America in 2019–20, and currently holds the chair as the Lecky Professor of History at Trinity College Dublin.

Karras is an author and critic 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. Her other notable works include From Boys to Men and Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others.

She was an assistant professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania from 1985 to 1993, and in 2018, was appointed a visiting fellow at the University of St Andrews' Institute for Medieval Studies. Before taking up her post in Dublin, Karras was also the Distinguished Teaching Professor of History at the University of Minnesota.

Education and career Ruth Mazo Karras was born in Chicago, Illinois on February 23, 1957. She completed a Master of Philosophy in European Archaeology at the University of Oxford in 1981. 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).

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.

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. Some historians criticize the presentist agenda and generalizations made by Karras when she formulates conclusions on some primary sources.

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.

Memberships, editorial and board positions Karras has been recognized with memberships of the Medieval Academy of America, American Historical Association, Women's History Association of Ireland, and Berkshire Conference of Women Historians.

She was assistant editor of Common Knowledge (published by Duke University) from 1993 to 1998 and since 2001; for Medieval Feminist Newsletter, she was editor from 1994 to 1999 and general editor from 1997 to 1998; general editor of the "Middle Ages Series" for the University of Pennsylvania Press since 1994; associate editor of Journal of British Studies since 2004; and has contributed to academic journals including Journal of Women's History, Scandinavian Studies, Early Medieval Europe, American Historical Review, and Journal of the History of Sexuality. Karras was also a member of the advisory board for the Journal of the History of Sexuality from 1990 to 1993, Medieval Feminist Newsletter from 1991 to 1994, and History Compass since 2005.

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.

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) . Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing unto Others 3rd edition (London: Routledge, 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