Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience: The University of Chicago
Rachel Fulton
The University of Chicago
Department of History
1126 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL, 60637Office Phone: (773) 702-4326
Fax: (773) 702-7550
Office: Harper East 686
Email me
Webpage
Faculty
Rachel Fulton
Position
Associate Professor of Medieval History
Field Specialties
History of Christianity; Medieval European Cultural, Religious and Intellectual History; Liturgy and Prayer; Devotion to the Virgin Mary and Christ; Scriptural Exegesis and Hermeneutics; Warfare; Travel; History of Emotion; Creativity and the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien.
Research
My current project is a study of the cognitive and experiential making of prayer in the monastic culture of the medieval West, with special emphasis on the practices that developed from the tenth through the fifteenth centuries for prayer to the Virgin Mother of God. These practices included the recitation of a Little Office of the Virgin modeled on the monastic liturgy of the Hours and the meditation on the Joys and Sorrows of the Virgin as mediated through the practice of the rosary. My immediate purpose is to find a way to describe monastic and Marian prayer as a practical art, that is, as a practice that takes skill and uses particular tools. My ultimate goal in this project is to develop an understanding of the meaning and importance of the aesthetics of worship, that is, of worship as itself a creative act.
Publications
From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800-1200. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
- Awarded the 2006 John Nicholas Brown Prize by the Medieval Academy of America for "a first book or monograph on a medieval subject judged by the selection committee to be of outstanding quality."
- Awarded the Journal of the History of Ideas Morris D. Forkosch Prize for "the best book in intellectual history published in 2002."
- A Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title of the Year.
- Reviews by Kevin Madigan, History of Religions 45.3 (February 2006): 270; Marsha L. Dutton, The Catholic Historical Review 92.1 (January 2006): 107-110; Karl Morrison, "Constructing Empathy," Journal of Religion 84 (April 2004): 264-69; M.B. Pranger, "On Devotional Historiography," Dutch Review of Church History 84 (2004); Thomas F.X. Noble, Theological Studies 65.4 (December 2004): 861-64; Arthur G. Holder, Church History 73.1 (March 2004): 197-199; Janice Pinder, The Medieval Review, 04.06.11; Henrietta Leyser, European Review of History--Revue européenne d'Histoire 11.3 (Autumn 2004): 429-30; and Benedicta Ward, Journal of Theological Studies 54.2 (October 2003): 817-18.
"'Taste and See That the Lord is Sweet' (Ps. 33:9): The Flavor of God in the Monastic West." The Journal of Religion 86.2 (April 2006): 169-204.
"The Virgin in the Garden, or Why Flowers Make Better Prayers." Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 4 (Spring 2004): 1-23.
"'Quae est ista quae ascendit sicut aurora consurgens?': The Song of Songs as the Historia for the Office of the Assumption." Mediaeval Studies 60 (1998): 55-122.
"Mimetic Devotion, Marian Exegesis, and the Historical Sense of the Song of Songs." Viator 27 (1996): 86-116.
Review of Donna Spivey Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul: Understanding Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2001), in The Medieval Review, 02.03.08.
