Virginia Blanton (she/her/hers)

Biography

Dr. Virginia Blanton is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of English. Her research focuses on representations of female saints in the religious culture of medieval England and on medieval women and their relationship with books, as writers, readers, patrons, and book owners. Dr. Blanton is author and editor of the three-volume series Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe (2013-2017) and an award-winning monograph, Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St. Æthelthryth in Medieval England, 695-1615 (2007). Her most recent books include an edition and a full-length study of a collection of female saints’ lives: Saints’ Lives for Medieval English Nuns, I: A Study of the ‘Lyves and Dethes’ in Cambridge University Library, MS Additional 2604 (2023) and Saints’ Lives for Medieval English Nuns, II: An Edition of the ‘Lyves and Dethes’ in Cambridge University Library, MS Additional 2604 (2024). Dr. Blanton is a founding member of the multidisciplinary NEH-funded team, CODICES, which conducts optical, chemical, and computational analyses of manuscripts and early printed books. She is also affiliate faculty with UMKC's Center for Digital and Public Humanities. Dr. Blanton leads an international digital humanities initiative, Cantorales in the Americas and Beyond, which is to catalogue choir books made in Spain between 1200-1800 that are now in other parts of the world. This research team includes musicologists, archivists, book historians, and graduate and undergraduate students.

Courses

• The Arthurian Legend
• Medieval Women
• Book History

Publications

• Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St. Æthelthryth in Medieval England, 695-1615. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007.

• Intertexts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture Presented to Paul E. Szarmach. Brepols, 2008.

• Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Hull Dialogue. Brepols, 2013.

• Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Kansas City Dialogue. Brepols, 2015.

• Medieval Women and Film. 2nd ed., The University of Iowa Libraries, 2015. https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mff/vol50/iss3/1/

• Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Antwerp Dialogue. Brepols, 2017.

• Visualizing Gender and Sexuality in the Middle Ages, Different Visions, 2022 https://differentvisions.org/issue-eight-visualizing-gender-and-sexuality-in-the-middle-ages/ 

• Saints’ Lives for Medieval English Nuns, I: A Study of the ‘Lyves and Dethes’ in Cambridge University Library, MS Additional 2604. Brepols, 2023.

• Saints’ Lives for Medieval English Nuns, II: An Edition of the ‘Lyves and Dethes’ in Cambridge University Library, MS Additional 2604. Brepols, 2024.