While she attended Harvard Extension full time at night she held three jobs at once, including full-time work in psychiatry at Mass General Hospital as secretary for a program helping cancer patients cope with their illness. With a virtual minor in psychiatry she brought Freudian analysis to her first publication, an article on Elizabeth I.

When she graduated in 1981 as Harvard's class marshal she still wondered where her interest in religious history came from.

The never liked history in school, hated the memorization. Doing well in math "up to calculus," she wanted to be an astrophysicist or, because she's a Philadelphia native and a Flyers and Montreal Expos fan, a sports writer. "I'm good at writing," she said. "I thought I could write about things like that." She was told she could write about ladies' golf.

One day she picked up Anya Seton's Katherine, a historical novel set in 14th-century England in the reign of Edward III during and after the plague. As another and another period novel brought medieval life alive, she checked the history to see whether the fiction was accurate. Like the novels, medieval history came to life.

"Reading that historical novel was a moment of inspiration. It's influenced my teaching since then," Taylor said. The courses she teaches at Colby--Western and Central Europe, High and Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, and early modern Europe religious, cultural and intellectual history--include historical novels and films. "I want to get students to experience history, to read good historical novels," she said, the kind that aim to get into the mind of the ordinary person in the past.

As a graduate student in Reformation Europe at Brown University, Taylor embarked on dissertation research in 15th- and 16th-century books of published sermons in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and in regional archives in Dijon and Rouen. The sermons, full of animal stories and sexuality, surprised her. "The social commentaries they made, the humor they injected, were useful pedagogically for me. It has actually taught me a lot about teaching," Taylor said. She'll use statues, relics, a pilgrim's staff or come to class in period costume to get students intrigued and "involved in a past that's a mystery." As far as most of those long-ago preachers were concerned, she says, the "perfect" or "ideal" sinner to be brought back into the fold was a woman who engaged in prostitution. Taylor had come to her research with the notion that all churchmen were misogynistic, but that's not true at all, she says. The preachers said women attended church and were more devout than men.

Her every notion of the medieval church challenged and her curiosity about medieval prostitution piqued, her interest turned toward the so-called "harlot saints" like Mary Magdelene, who preached to and converted large groups of men and women in southern France. Taylor later gave papers on Mary Magdelene at universities and conferences but has left off working on her. "I've been going different directions," she said.

During her two years reading the sermons of those long-gone male preachers--some 22 of them, whose 1,600-plus sermons are the material of her first book, Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and Reformation France--she lived among medieval cathedrals that made the "feel" of medieval religion palpable. Catholicism, she says, intrigued her. Although Taylor's parents were non-practicing Presbyterians and she didn't know church history, theology or the Bible, she started attending masses. "I was drawn to the beauty of the services," she said. "I was going but I didn't know why."

One midday in the mid-'90s, sitting in the 12th-century Romanesque basilica in the hilltop town of Vézelay, the site of Mary Magdalene relics, she "really felt transformed," Taylor said, by the beauty of the tympanum sculpture depicting the story of Christ's life, the 200-foot long and 60-foot high nave, the majesty of the gothic choir that filled with light.