Martha Driver, Moderator

Martha Driver, PhD, FSA, is Distinguished Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Pace University in New York City. A co-founder of the Early Book Society for the study of manuscripts and printing history, she writes about illustration from manuscript to print, book production, and the early history of publishing. In addition to publishing some 80 articles in these areas, she has edited twenty-nine journals, including the Journal of the Early Book Society, along with several scholarly books. Her website is marthawdriver.com 

Cynthia Hahn

"Women as Patrons of Precious arts—Reliquaries to Jewelry and Relic-jewelry!"

Cynthia Hahn is Distinguished Professor of art history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has published extensively on many aspects of medieval art, including pilgrimage, and manuscripts with narratives of saints’ lives, but of late has focused on reliquaries. Her publications include: Portrayed on the Heart: Narrative Effect in Pictorial Lives of the Saints from the Tenth through the Thirteenth Century. University of California Press, 2001, Strange Beauty: Origins and Issues in the Making of Medieval Reliquaries 400–circa 1204, Penn State University Press, 2012; and as editor with Holger Klein, Saints and Sacred Matter: The Cult of Relics in Byzantium and Beyond, Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard Univ Press, 2015. Also with Reaktion press: The Reliquary Effect: Enshrining the Sacred Object, 2017. Her most recent book on the subject of reliquaries, Passion Relics and the Medieval Imagination, appeared during the pandemic from University of California Press. She is currently back to working on manuscripts and also diverted by the study of bodily ornamentation for another book with Reaktion.

Marlene Hennessy

"Wives of Merchants as Book Patrons and Purchasers"

Marlene Villalobos Hennessy is Professor in the Department of English at Hunter College, CUNY. She is the author of a reference work, An Index of Images in English and Scottish Manuscripts from the Time of Chaucer to Henry VIII, c. 1380 – c. 1509. Scottish Manuscripts & English Manuscripts in Scotland. Fascicle I: National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh (Turnhout: Brepols/Harvey Miller Publishers, 2022), and has published numerous essays on late medieval British manuscripts and religious culture. She is currently completing a catalogue with Kathleen L. Scott, Book Ownership by Merchants and Artisans in Britain, c. 1300–1600: A Sourcebook. One of her other ongoing research projects is a monograph, Blood Writing: Manuscripts and Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages.

Kristen Herdman

"Unrolling Revelation: Material, Making, and Meaning"

Kristen Herdman is a PhD Candidate in Yale’s Medieval Studies program. Her research interests include textiles, monastic architecture, and art historical approaches to manuscript studies, with special attention to fifteenth-century medieval devotional books and the complex relationship between text and image. Kristen’s dissertation, entitled Unrolling Revelation: Material, Making, and Meaning, addresses the multi-modal, multi-media work of the late medieval nuns of Lower Saxony.

Katherine Hindley

Details coming soon!

Nicole Lopez-Jantzen

"Uncovering Women in Early Medieval Italy"

Dr. Nicole Lopez-Jantzen is an Associate Professor of History at CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College, where she teaches courses on pre-modern Mediterranean, modern European, and women’s history, and has taught medieval studies courses at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her recent research has focused on race, gender, and sexuality in early medieval Italy, as well as the uses of the early medieval past in modern Italian nation building. Additionally, she is the President of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship (2024 & 2025), on the editorial board of postmedieval, and is the early medieval Europe book review editor for Speculum.

Kavita Mudan Finn

Kavita Mudan Finn is an independent scholar who has published widely on medieval and early modern literature, Shakespeare, popular medievalism, and fan/reception studies. She has published two books, The Last Plantagenet Consorts: Gender, Genre, and Historiography 1440-1627 (Palgrave, 2012) and Global Medievalisms: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2022), co-authored with Helen Young. Her work has also appeared in Viator, Shakespeare, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, Arthuriana, Critical Survey, The Journal of Fandom Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and a range of edited volumes. She works as a freelance editor and indexer, and is writing a biography of the fifteenth-century English queen Elizabeth Woodville for Routledge.

Nicole Rice

"Medieval Women and English Hospitals"

Nicole R. Rice is a professor of English at St. John’s University in New York. Her scholarship explores connections among late medieval religious culture, social life, and literature, with a focus on devotional prose and drama. With Margaret A. Pappano, she co-wrote The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England (Notre Dame, 2015). Her two latest books include Manuscript Culture and Medieval Devotional Traditions: Essays in Honour of Michael G. Sargent, co-edited with Jennifer Brown (Boydell & Brewer, 2021), and The Medieval Hospital: Literary Culture and Community in England, 1350–1550 (Notre Dame, 2023).

Kathryn A. Smith

"Hidden in Plain Sight: Fourteenth-Century English Women and/in their Books”

Kathryn A. Smith is Professor in the Department of Art History at New York University. She is the author of Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women and Their Books of Hours (2003) and The Taymouth Hours: Stories and the Construction of the Self in Late Medieval England (2012), both published by The British Library, as well as numerous articles, essays, and reviews on early Christian and late medieval art, especially the illustrated religious manuscripts of Gothic England. Her current book project, The Painted Histories of the Welles-Ros Bible, is the first long-form art historical study of the earliest full prose vernacular Bible from England, its illustrations, and its noble female patron. Her principal research interests include late medieval devotional art, word-image relationships in medieval manuscripts, and women as patrons and subjects of medieval representation. A Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and the Royal Historical Society, Smith is Founding Series Editor of Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages (Brepols), and was a co-editor of the journal Studies in Iconography.