MI Graduate Student Olivia Caroline Geraci Granted Medieval Academy Schallek Award

Congratulations to Ph.D. student Olivia Caroline Geraci, who has been granted a Medieval Academy of America Schallek Award for doctoral research on liturgical practices of medieval English women religious.

Olivia's project, "Virgins, Widows, Brides of Christ: The Rite of Profession in Medieval English Pontificals," will take her to England to survey rites of profession for women religious in a corpus of extant medieval English pontificals. Pontificals are liturgical books typically associated with the bishop whose privilege it was to perform the rites contained therein. Perhaps because of this association with a clerical male elite, they are underused resources for investigating the liturgical and devotional practices of vowed women religious.

With this project, Olivia aims to explore how the intersecting forces of geography, chronology, and religious order shape women's unique ecclesial identities as women religious. This research will also support chapter two of her dissertation, "Ego Soror: Profession, Liturgy, and Identity Formation in Late Medieval England."

Of the award Olivia shares, "As a scholar whose work relies so heavily on manuscript sources which are only rarely digitized or put into edition, it is a huge gift to get to spend my summer working hands-on and in situ with these materials. I am very grateful to the Medieval Academy of America and the Richard III Society for their generous support of my research."

The Schallek Awards support graduate students whose work, in any relevant discipline, focuses primarily on the late medieval period in England or any of the British Isles, or which involves British connections to the European Continent in the late medieval period. The five Awards of $5,000 each are supported by a generous gift to the Richard III Society from William B. and Maryloo Spooner Schallek.