Virginia Blanton is associate professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where she serves as doctoral faculty in English and Religious Studies. Her research focuses on medieval hagiography and religious ritual, as well as the representations of women in religious culture.
The research for this lecture is based on Professor Blanton's discovery of a 15th century manuscript at Cambridge University, which contains a manuscript that contains accounts of 19 female saints.
“When I first read the manuscript, I did not fully realize how important it might be,” Blanton told the Miscellany News. “[The legendary] provides some evidence of the text being used in ways we did now know it had been, especially by women."
Blanton is the author of Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St. Æthelthryth in Medieval England, 695-1615
, which was awarded the Society of Medieval Feminist Scholarship First Book Prize in 2008. She is co-editor of Intertexts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture Presented to Paul E. Szarmach 
and of Medieval Women in Film. She also edited two issues of the Medieval Feminist Forum and serves on the editorial board of Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art. Her current projects include Reading Nuns: A Critical Edition of a Middle-English Legendary, co-edited with Veronica O’Mara, and the monograph Shaping English Identities: Sanctity and Devotion in Late Medieval England.This talk, sponsored by the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program, is co-sponsored by the Department of English, the C. Mildred Thompson Fund of the Department of History, the Department of Religion, and the Media Studies and Women’s Studies Programs.
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Sources: Vassar College, The Miscellany News
