![]() ![]() Many of these are Europeanists, of course, but the path I followed led me into American religious history, where Bynum’s influence is also conspicuous. Truly, it is the book that changed my life.Ĭountless other scholars of religion and history in my cohort have felt similarly about Holy Feast and Holy Fast indeed, lively friendships have formed among its admiring readers. ![]() ![]() ![]() It is the book that animated my earliest academic forays (including that thesis, on Catherine of Siena), that got me going in the study of gender and religion even before I had personal mentors working in that area, and that has continued to inspire me. My mentors in the history of Christianity (and in political thought) urged me to read the text for my senior thesis research, and it immediately became the book for me, a model of scrupulous concentration on specific detail and thick context, of brilliant historical analysis, of prose that is resplendent in its attentiveness to the subtleties of language. It came into print at a time when I, then an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, was discovering my own desire for an academic vocation. In the world of scholarly books, Holy Feast and Holy Fast by Caroline Walker Bynum stands as my first and most enduring literary passion. ![]()
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