Jessica Weiss

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Medieval European History

Graduate Student
B.A., University of Arizona; MSc, University of Edinburgh, UK

Advisor: Carol Lansing

I am a PhD in Late Medieval/Renaissance Italian History and I will submit my dissertation in August 2010. Through my dissertation I hope to develop a clearer picture of the primary and secondary education options available to women in Medieval and Renaissance Italy and Sicily. As a majority of women were educated were inside the walls of a convent, my research is centered on the lives of women living in the Poor Clare convents (the female branch of the Franciscans) of Central and Southern Italy and Sicily. My focus is specifically on the manuscripts that were produced by and for women intended for pedagogical and devotional purposes. I am particularly interested in the revival of ancient memory development techniques in the fifteenth century and the ways in which these techniques were adopted into the medieval curricula for women. I believe it is important for modern scholars to reflect on these medieval techniques and the ways in which they might be applied to the modern university classroom.