Participant Info

First Name
Katherine
Last Name
French
Country
United States
State
MI Michigan
Affiliation
University of Michigan
Website URL
Keywords
late medieval, Britain, women, social history, religion, material culture, parishes, London,
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I’m a social historian of late medieval England. I’m broadly speaking, I’m interested in the cultural and social impact of the so-call Black Death.

Recent Publications

Monographs:

The Good Women of the Parish: Gender and Religion after the Black Death (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late Medieval English Diocese (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).

 Text Book:

with Allyson Poska, Women and Gender in the Western Past 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).

Articles (Select):

“Wives in Sanctuary: Married Couples and Asylum for Debt in Westminster,” Medieval Prosopography, special issue in honor of Joel T. Rosenthal, 33 (2018): 223-37.

with Kathryn Smith and Sara Stanbury, “The Honest Bed: The Scene of Life and Death in Medieval England,” in “A Thing of the Past: Material Evidence and the Study of Medieval England’s            Past,” special issue of Fragments: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of the Ancient and Medieval Pasts, 5 (2016) 61-95. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.9772151.0005.003

“Material Culture of Childbirth in Late Medieval London and its Suburbs,” Journal of Women’s History 28: 2(2016): 126-48.

“Nouveaux Arts de la table et convivialitiés sexuées (Angleterre, fin de l’epoque médiévale),” Clio, 40:1(2014), 45-67. Also, to be published as “Gender and Changing Foodways in England’s Late-Medieval Bourgeois Households.”

“Well-Behaved Women Can Make History: Women’s Friendships in Late Medieval Westminster,” In Writing Women’s Lives, eds. Amy Livingstone and Charlotte Newman Goldy (Basingstoke:           Palgrave/MacMillan, 2012), 247-65.

“Rebuilding St. Margaret’s: Parish Involvement and Community Action in Late Medieval Westminster,” Journal of Social History, 45:1 (2011): 148-171.

“Margery Kempe and the Parish,” in The Ties that Bind: Essays in Medieval British History in Honor of Barbara A. Hanawalt, eds. Linda E. Mitchell, Katherine L. French, and Douglas L. Biggs (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2011), 159-74.

“Loving Friends: Surviving Widowhood in Late Medieval Westminster,” Gender and History 22: 1 (2010): 21-37.

Media Coverage
Country Focus
Great Britain
Expertise by Geography
England, United Kingdom
Expertise by Chronology
Medieval
Expertise by Topic
Children & Youth, Family, Gender, Material Culture, Religion, Urban History, Women