We at In the Middle heartily congratulate Lois L. Huneycutt for winning the second Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship. We encourage you to apply for next year ... and, even more importantly, to consider making a donation so that this important fellowship may continue to grow.
Bonnie has long been an important influence for good in medieval studies. See, for example, this post. Or this one. Or browse some books.
The complete press release is below.
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Lois
L. Huneycutt, Associate Professor of History (University of Missouri, Columbia),
is the winner of the 2012 Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship.
Professor Huneycutt is the
second recipient of a Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship. The inaugural 2011 fellowship went to
Lorraine Kochanske Stock, Associate
Professor of English (University of Houston, Texas), in support of the
completion of her book-length monograph on medieval primitivism and the Wild
Man figure.
The
Bonnie Wheeler Fellowships are designed to help women medievalists who are
close to completing a significant work of research that will fulfill a
professional promotion requirement. The 2009 MLA Report, “Standing Still: The
Associate Professor Survey,” indicates that women are much more likely than men
to “stand still” in the course of their academic career and to be “caught in
the middle” of the promotion ladder.
The Bonnie Wheeler Fellowships aim at placing many more women scholars
at the top scholarly tier.
Professor
Huneycutt earned her Ph.D. in 1992 at the University of California-Santa
Barbara. The author of Matilda of Scotland: A Study in Medieval
Queenship (2003), she was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in
2002.
Professor
Huneycutt’s current book project, “Becoming Christian: Women, Conversion and
Resistance in the Early Medieval West,” examines the period between the fifth
through thirteenth centuries in northern Europe. Building upon Richard
Fletcher’s The Barbarian Conversion: From
Paganism to Christianity (1997), it treats the process of conversion as a
negotiation between old and new, focusing especially on “women’s roles in that
negotiation, from the highborn women who became Christian queens to the humble
wives who decided which rituals would be practiced within a household.”
Huneycutt’s
study promises to yield significant new findings. She argues that “domestic proselytization”
(J. T. Schulenberg’s term) played a much more important role in the spread of
the faith than current scholarship allows.
Indeed, the widespread changes in familial structures and roles “cannot
be explained,” she asserts, “without an acceptance that religious beliefs and
spiritual practice actually did matter” to many premodern people, especially
the women who shaped home-life.
Following the model of Robin Fleming’s recent Britain After Rome, Huneycutt pays new attention to material
culture and its transformations in the use of both sacred and household space.
“Finally,” she writes, “I am as interested in why people did not choose to adopt Christianity as I am
in why they did.”
Five
chapters are projected for Professor Huneycutt’s book. The first discusses the major missionary
movements into northern Europe. The second takes up theoretical questions
concerning the definitions of, and models for, religious conversion. The third
studies the impact of Christian conversion upon Carolingian households and
society. The fourth is devoted to cases that show a historical reluctance to
embrace Christianity, including syncretistic phenomena. The fifth draws upon the evidence of material
culture to describe the reconfiguration of many “areas of life . . . under the
new religious dispensation.”
A
special feature of the Bonnie Wheeler Fellowships is the designation of a
mentor, who is responsible for reading the work-in-progress of the fellow and
for offering feedback, constructive criticism, and encouragement. Professor Robin Fleming (Boston College),
author of Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400-1070 (2010), will
serve as mentor to Professor Huneycutt.
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