Beverly Mayne Kienzle
Retired Harvard Professor, Medievalist, Women’s Historian
Beverly Mayne Kienzle, currently an affiliate of the Harvard Standing Committee on Medieval Studies, retired in 2015 as the John H. Morison Professor of the Practice in Latin and Romance Languages at Harvard Divinity School. A past President of the International Medieval Sermon Studies Society (1996–2002), she has published numerous books on medieval sermons and preaching, including Cistercians, Heresy and Crusade (1145-1229): Preaching in the Lord’s Vineyard (2001), The Sermon. Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental (2000), a sine qua non reference work for the field; the ground-breaking Women Preachers and Prophets Through Two Millennia of Christianity (1998); three co-edited volumes of essays on preaching; the co-edited Companion to Catherine of Siena (2012); more than 70 articles on preaching, medieval heresy, hagiography, Italian penitent women, and violence against women in saints’ lives, culminating with the innovative co-authored volume, Saintly Women: Medieval Saints, Modern Women, and Intimate Partner Violence (2017), which examines intimate partner violence in its historical-theological context and proposes alternative theological models for human relationships.
The foremost authority on Hildegard of Bingen’s Homilies on the Gospels, Kienzle has published six books on St. Hildegard: Expositiones evangeliorum, co-edited (2007), a critical edition of the original Latin manuscript; Hildegard of Bingen and her Gospel Homilies: Speaking New Mysteries (2009), the first full-length study of the Homilies; The Gospel Homilies of Hildegard of Bingen, English translation and Introduction (2011); A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, co-edited (2013), a collection of highly valuable artists by international experts; The Solutions to 38 Questions of Hildegard of Bingen, co-translated (2014); and Hildegard of Bingen, Gospel Interpreter (2020), a study the demonstrates the value of the Homilies as a summa of Hildegard’s theology.
Kienzle was awarded a Research Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2006, to support the book: Hildegard of Bingen and Her Gospel Homilies; a Lilly Course Development Grant, Harvard Divinity School, 1994; and a grant from the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard University, July 2008-2009, for research with Nancy Nienhuis on “Historical and Contemporary Responses to Battering: A Comparative Religious Perspective.” She was the invited Benjamin Meaker Professor at the University of Bristol in July 2004, offering a Master class on “Text and Image in Hildegard of Bingen’s works.” Recipient of several grants related to teaching theological language courses, Kienzle also received collaborative inter-faculty grants from the University Provost’s fund for: “Art, Theology, Mysticism and Female Monasticism in the Rhineland during the later Middle Ages,” with Jeffrey Hamburger; “The Medieval Book: A Series of Integrated Lectures & Workshops at the Houghton Library,” with William P. Stoneman, Curator of Early Books & Manuscripts, Nicholas Watson, and Daniel Smail. Kienzle collaborated on Website and Database on Medieval Scrolls, creating a website and database on the invaluable Medieval Scrolls at Harvard in conjunction with The Rotulus in the Middle Ages, a 2014 course taught by Thomas Forrest Kelly, Kienzle, William Stoneman, and Timothy Baker. Kienzle also co-curated “Medieval Scrolls at Harvard,” held at Houghton Library, May 5, 2014—August 16, 2014, where students in the course prepared the manuscript displays. She served on the Local Advisory Board for “Pages from the Past: Illuminated Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in Boston-area Collections,” Fall 2016—an extensive NEH-funded exhibition of manuscripts dating from the 9th to the 16th century, on display at three Boston venues: Harvard’s Houghton Library, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art.
Funding Kienzle acquired from Villa I Tatti and the Lauro De Bosis Foundation supported in part the September 21-22, 2012, conference held in her honor: “Preaching the Saints: Sermons, Art, and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” sponsored by the Harvard Committee on Medieval Studies and the Harvard Divinity School. The renowned French scholar André Vauchez delivered the keynote address on preaching about the saints across Europe, and scholars from North America, France, Italy, Israel, Australia delivered lectures. For the event, Kienzle co-curated with John Zaleski, “A History of Medieval Christian Preaching,” an exhibition in the Amy Lowell Room, Houghton Library, and on-line.
Graduate students from HDS and GSAS contributed to the exhibitions and to a Poster Session, where they discussed ongoing research with guest scholars. Students and FAS faculty attended a valuable workshop in two sessions at Houghton Library on sermon manuscripts at Harvard, led by two leading sermon studies scholars from a British University.
In retirement, Kienzle completed work with Nancy Nienhuis on Saintly Women: Medieval Saints, Modern Women, and Intimate Partner Violence (2017) and wrote Hildegard of Bingen, Gospel Interpreter.
During the pandemic, she has appeared virtually at several conferences and took a leading role in the virtual commemoration of Hildegard of Bingen’s feast day in September 2019. Kienzle also completed Virginia Cary Hudson, The Jigs & Juleps Girl: Her Life and Writings (2016), a biography of her famous grandmother and the story of her mother publishing O Ye Jigs and Juleps! (1962), the bestselling school essays written by her grandmother, Virginia Cary Hudson, at age 10. Kienzle recounts with warmth and humor her grandmother’s life and reveals her incisive observations of humankind, from simple folk to big-time gamblers and gangsters, in places from Kentucky to Havana and Las Vegas. Beverly includes the letters and the scrapbook that her grandmother made for her in 1953, with its charming poems and drawings, and excerpts from her mother’s unfinished story about publishing a best seller. Beverly continues to contribute to The Hudson Collection at The Filson Historical Society in Louisville.
In retirement, Kienzle completed work to publish selected writings of her grandmother: two newly discovered school essays from 1905: Unfinished Business (2017), My Bible (2021), as well as the adult writings: The Conjured Chest: A Cursed Family in Old Kentucky (2017) and Letters from Vegas 1953 (2018). The latest addition to this collection is entitled Chicago Escapades in Virginia Cary Hudson’s 1940 Letters (2022).