Larissa Taylor

Background, Teaching and Scholarship

In days of yore, Larissa Juliet Taylor received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University, followed by her M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University. From 2010-2012, Taylor served as Vice President, President and President Emerita of the American Catholic Historical Association.

A cultural, religious and social historian, Taylor focuses on medieval and early modern Europe and the ancient Near East.  Her most recent book, The Virgin Warrior: The Life and Death of Joan of Arc was published by Yale University Press in 2009 and has been translated into Italian and Dutch.  Her first book, Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval France won the John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America in 1996, and was followed by further books on preaching and pilgrimage.

Taylor is currently working on The History of Fear from Ancient Egypt to Jack the Ripper’s London.  Its goal will be to examine how people reacted to specific fears, real or perceived, and acted upon them. Individual chapters will include: navigating du’at in ancient Egypt; fear of war’s collateral damage expressed in Athenian plays; immigration, slavery, and environmental threats in imperial Rome; invasions in early medieval Europe; the Black Death; sexual difference in Renaissance Italy; religious hatred and killing in the Reformations; witches, vampires and ghosts; the Terror of the French Revolution; and the sensationalist press in nineteenth-century London. Throughout the book, she will examine stereotypes and persecution; othering; and the roles of changing forms of media from oral (including rumors) to semiliterate to newspapers in propagating fear that often resulted in violence. A final goal will be to understand the degree to which we have or have not changed in the contemporary world in response to fear-inducing stimuli.

Taylor teaches courses on city histories of Venice, Constantinople, and Paris; Joan of Arc; women in premodern Europe; medieval sexuality; the plague; history of fear; Tudor England; The World of Ancient Egypt; and Game(s) of Thrones. She is known by her students for her sense of humor, variously described as bizarre, hilarious, and morbid.