Medieval Europe

Education

• M.A. and Ph.D, History, The Ohio State University
• B.A., English and History, Michigan State University

Research Interests

Leigh Ann Craig, Ph.D., studies the intersections between western European religion, medicine, disease, and disability in the high and later Middle Ages. Her present book project, tentatively entitled "I Have Been Bitten: Rabies, Belief, and the Ethics of Care in Fifteenth Century France" (presently in contract with University of Michigan Press), focuses on medieval modes of treatment and community care for those who were exposed to, or acquired, dog-borne rabies encephalitis. The study takes an integrative approach to all such treatments, including those recommended by learned physicians, those recommended in folklore, and those offered at the shrines of the saints; it also considers the formal and applied ethics of end-of-life care. In prior works, Craig has used the lens of disability to examine the process of diagnosis (inclusive of somatic diagnoses and demonic ones) when medieval people experienced loss of mind. She has also explored the participation of later medieval women in a variety of modes of Christian pilgrimage. 

Select Publications

• "Deprived of Sense and Intellect: Insanity, Possession, and Diagnosis in Medieval Europe" (University of Michigan Press, 2026)
• "Wandering Women and Holy Matrons: Women as Pilgrims in the Later Middle Ages" (Brill, 2009)
• Associate Editor, "The Encyclopedia of Medieval Pilgrimage" (Brill, 2009)

Courses

• Survey of European History I
• The Art of Historical Detection: Premodern Disease
• The Early Middle Ages
• The High and Later Middle Ages
• Europe in the Early Modern, 1350-1650
• Medievalism in Film
• Professionalization for the History Major I, II, & III

Awards

• VCU College of Humanities and Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award (spring 2015)
• Research Fellow, Humanities Center, Virginia Commonwealth University (spring 2015)
• Fellow, Harris-Manchester Summer Research Institute, University of Oxford (summer 2010)