Medieval Studies welcomes you to a lecture, followed by an informal reception.

Tina Chronopoulos, Binghamton Univerity

Katherine of Alexandria’s Education: A close reading of a reading list

Katherine of Alexandria is known as the saint who used her smarts to trounce and silence a group of the most highly regarded rhetoricians active in Alexandria at the time of her subsequent martyrdom. As a result, she is often held up as an early example of an educated woman in the Western tradition, albeit a fictitious one. The oldest Greek life that tells her story contains a reading list of sorts that is then repeated and recycled in subsequent Greek and Latin, as well as in vernacular retellings. In this talk I will take a closer look at Katherine’s purported education, specifically the authors and texts she is supposed to have read. I will show how paying attention to something as ordinary as a seemingly random list of authors can yield new information that can help in determining the environment of the author who wrote Katherine’s story. 

Tina Chronopoulos is a British-infused Greco-German transplant whose research and teaching interests range all over the Mediterranean and span more than a millennium, from Greco-Roman antiquity to the medieval period and beyond. Trained by old-school philologists, she enjoys deep dives into libraries and archives, as well as close readings of texts, contexts and medieval manuscripts. In the classroom, she gets excited about speaking in Latin as much as possible and encourages her students to read both the past and the present contextually while wearing the lenses of race, class, and gender.

Co-sponsored by the Society for the Humanities