Kate Kelsey Staples

Department Chair, Associate Professor

Teaching Fields

Medieval Europe
History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
British History
European History
World History

Degrees

Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 2006
M.A., University of Minnesota, 2003
B.A., University of Minnesota, Morris, 2000

Research Interests

Dr. Staples is interested in the gender, social, and cultural history of medieval Europe, especially of urban spaces. In her book, Daughters of London: Inheriting Opportunity in the Late Middle Ages (Brill, 2011), she examines the opportunities that daughters inherited from their parents in order to participate in a world that often consigned them to passive roles. Her analysis of daughters’ inheritances in London, in concert with that of their brothers, challenges our notions of women’s property ownership in the late Middle Ages. Daughters who inherited real estate were not rare in late medieval London, nor was it uncommon for these daughters to invest their property in a variety of ways. These merchants’ and artisans’ daughters may have run up against enduring patriarchal structures and norms, but they negotiated these limitations (by evading, co-opting, and contesting), as did many women before and after. Further, by considering women as daughters we are able to view women’s experience in the past with a broader lens.

Questions raised in the book have brought her to her current project that explores women and labor in urban spaces in Northern Europe. Tentatively titled, “ The Secondhand Trade in Late Medieval England ,” this project investigates the occupation of fripperers and upholders, the secondhand clothes and goods dealers of the late Middle Ages. Rather than relegated to the margins of the medieval economy, the secondhand market was multifaceted, serving many. It provided goods in demand in the late Middle Ages when the cost and power of clothing and goods could be quite high, and ready cash was relatively low. With this topic, she seeks to understand the cultural and economic standing of these traders, the material culture surrounding their product, the market spaces in which they worked, and the competitive and cooperative networks within which they operated. In all of these lines of inquiry, she is attentive to the way that gender norms shaped the trade.

Courses Offered

HIST 101: European History, Antiquity to 1600
HIST 179: World History to 1500
HIST 203: Medieval Europe
HIST 293: Britain to 1603
HIST 430: Living and Dying in Medieval Europe
HIST 346: Women, Gender, and Kinship in Premodern Europe
HIST 424: Britain 1455-1603: Rebellions and Reformations
HIST 484: Introduction to Historical Methods (capstone)
HIST 493: Medieval Europe and the World
HIST 693: Medieval and Early Modern England
HIST 700: Historiography
HIST 701: Readings in Medieval History
HIST 702: Seminar in Medieval History
HIST 793: Readings in Gender History

Graduate Students

Ph.D. Students

MA Students

Madisyn Magers

Evan Simonetti

Publications

Books:

Daughters of London: Inheriting Opportunity in Late Medieval London. Brill Academic Publishers, 2011.

Journal Articles, Book Chapters, and Essays:

’[S]he never ought to hym any peny therof’: Debt, Dispute, and Marketplace in the Courts of Chancery and Star Chamber,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 2023.

“Shoppers and Identities,” in A Cultural History of Shopping: The Middle Ages (500-1450), ed. James Davis (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2022).

“Medieval Europe,” in Companion to Global Gender History, ed. Merry Wiesner-Hanks and Teresa Meade (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2020).

“Hidden in Plain Sight,” in “Microagressions, Harassment, and Abuse: Medieval and Modern,” ed. Linda E. Mitchell and Jennifer C. Edwards, special issue, Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 53:1 (2017): 114-130.

"Con-artists or entrepreneurs? Fripperers and market space in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Paris," Journal of Medieval History 43:2 (2017): 228-254.

“The Significance of the Secondhand Trade in Europe, 1200-1600,” History Compass, Vol. 13, Issue 6 (June 2015): 297-309.

“Fripperers” and “Botchers”, Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles (Brill Academic Publishing, 2012).

“Fripperers and the Used Clothing Trade in Late Medieval London,” Medieval Clothing and Textiles, Vol. 6 (May 2010): 151-171.

“Identifying Women Proprietors in Wills from Fifteenth-Century London,” in “The Rise of the Mercantile Economy and Early Modern Women,” a forum within Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. III, September 30, 2008.

“Christina’s Tempting: Sexual Desire and Women’s Sanctity,” in Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-Century Holy Woman, ed. Samuel Fanous and Henrietta Leyser_ (New York: Routledge, 2004), 184-196.

Grants and Awards

West Virginia University Humanities Center Research Grant, 2019
American Historical Association, Career Diversity Implementation Grant, WVU History Department, Faculty PIs: Joe Hodge, Kate Staples, Brian Luskey, Melissa Bingmann,
Caperton Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Writing, 2017
West Virginia University Foundation Outstanding Teaching Award, 2012
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Teacher Award, 2012
West Virginia Humanities Council Fellowship, 2012
Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grant from the American Historical Association, 2010
Eberly College Riggle Fellowship in the Humanities, 2010
West Virginia Humanities Council Fellowship, 2007
West Virginia University Senate Grant, 2007