Sarah Westphal-Wihl

Titles

Associate Professor of German

Sarah Westphal-Wihl joined the faculty of Washington University in the fall of 2009, and teaches in the IPH Program as well as in the Department of German.

She has a long-standing interest in the history of gender and the feminist analysis of medieval literature. Her new book, Ladies, Whores, and Holy Women: A Sourcebook in Courtly, Religious, and Urban Cultures of Late Medieval Germany, is forthcoming in 2010 from Medieval Institute Publications. Co-written with Prof. Ann Marie Rasmussen of Duke University, it shows how gender was hotly debated by medieval people, particularly in urban settings. Source texts are offered in the original language and in English translation.

Her current research is on the legal implications of the medieval concept of Minne (love), which involve conflict resolution through reconciliation. She is interested in how this legal tradition from the European past might relate to contemporary movements for peace at the community and national levels.

She is also working on early modern reports of the life of Kunigunde, a Hapsburg princess and duchess of Bavaria (1465-1520), and what they signify for the history of female biography.

The study of manuscript media informs all of her research. She is the author of Textual Poetics of German Manuscripts 1300-1500, a study of how the production of hand-written books reveals aspects of medieval reading and interpretive practice. From 1985 to 1990 she served as an associate editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She is co-editor of two Signs readers, Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages and Feminist Theory in Practice and Process.

On Leave