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Professor Karen Professor Winstead Presents "What's So Good (or Bad) about Saints?"
Dr. Karen Winstead recently lectured on "What's So Good (or Bad) about Saints" in the College of Humanities 2007-2008 Inaugural Lecture Series. Professor Winstead was recently promoted to the position of full professor in Ohio State's English Department.
In his introduction to the lecture, Associate Dean of the School of Humanities Sebastian Knowles cited Professor Winstead's reputation with students as "one of the hardest and best teachers at Ohio State," as well as her "substantial and selfless service to the field." "It's no wonder," Knowles teased, "that she's interested in martyrdom."
"The lives of the saints have mesmerized me since graduate school," Professor Winstead said at the beginning of her lecture. In her career, Professor Winstead has witnessed the burgeoning of the field of study of saints' lives, and a shift in that study from aesthetics to politics. Her research, for which she won a National Endowment for the Humanities Award, focuses on the use of the traditional genre of saints' lives in controversial discussions of the 15th century.She is currently at work on her monograph, 15th Century Lives: Gender, Politics, and Orthodoxy in Medieval English Hagiography.
Fifteenth-century England, Professor Winstead argued in her lecture, "produced extraordinarily rich saints' lives, historically and politically oriented, theologically and morally complex, and deeply concerned with psychology and character development." In her examination of these issues in fifteenth century stories of saints, Professor Winstead looked at John Lydgate's Life of Saint Edmund and John Capgrave's Life of Saint Katherine, both of which used saints not only to model good behavior but also to warn of the dangers of excessive piety.
Lydgate's Life of Saint Edmund, for example, presented an elaborate model of Christian kingship for Henry XI of England. Â Edmund's death was a cautionary tale of the results of excessive piety for a king. Capgrave's St. Katherine, the scholarly queen, illustrates the imagined consequences of female leadership in the fifteenth century.
Karen Professor Winstead earned her Ph.D. from Indiana University in Medieval Literature and Comparative Studies. She is the author of Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England and John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century, and the editor of John Capgrave's Life of Saint Katherine and editor/translator of Chaste Passions: Medieval English Virgin Martyr Legends.
