BHum (Carleton); MA (Toronto); PhD (Toronto)
Dr. Kirsten Schut is a faculty fellow in the Foundation Year Program. She holds a Bachelor of Humanities from Carleton University and an MA and PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled “A Dominican Master of Theology in Context: John of Naples and Intellectual Life beyond Paris, ca. 1300-1350,” was a study of the life and works of an Italian Dominican friar and theologian who was closely associated with the Angevin rulers of Naples and participated in the canonization of Thomas Aquinas. She has since held postdoctoral fellowships in history departments at the Universities of Cologne and Bristol and back in Toronto at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.
Kirsty’s main postdoctoral research project concerns the custom of lay Christians seeking to die and/or be buried wearing monastic habits from medieval Europe to the colonial Americas and up to the present day. This widespread but little-studied practice provides a window into changes and continuities in the interconnected histories of monasticism, clothing, and death. She is currently working on two books: an intellectual biography of John of Naples and a history of lay death and burial in religious habits.
Kirsty has taught undergraduate courses in medieval history and religion in Toronto, Mississauga and Ottawa, and recently spent a year teaching ancient and medieval philosophy and theology for Carleton University’s Bachelor of Humanities/Great Books program.
Later medieval intellectual history; education, pastoral care, and preaching; Dominicans and other mendicant orders; the Kingdom of Naples; saints and quasi-saints; histories of death and dying; monastic clothing; gender; Latin manuscripts
“John of Naples and Pastoral Care for the Dead and Dying at the Court of Robert of Anjou.” Micrologus 31 (2023): 107-125.
“Death and a Clothing Swap: An Unusual Case of Death and Burial in the Religious Habit from Fourteenth-Century Naples.” Viator 50.2 (2019) [2020]: 185-230.
“Jews and Muslims in the Works of John of Naples.” Medieval Encounters 25.5 (2019): 499-552.
“Politics and Power in the Works of John of Naples.” Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, n.s. 3 (2018): 37-79.
“The Next Best Thing to a Saint? Peter Lombard and the Sentences in the Principia of John of Naples.” Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales 84.2 (2017): 343-81.
