Retiree Spotlight: Dyan Elliott
Retiree Spotlight: Dyan Elliott
By Sara Maza
Photography credit: Randy Belice
On December 2, 2024, the History Department celebrated the career of Dyan Elliott, who is retiring this year and moving to Toronto after two decades at Northwestern as the Peter B. Ritzma Professor in the Humanities. 
After earning her PhD from the University of Toronto, Dyan started out at Indiana University Bloomington where she rose from assistant professor to chaired full professor; she joined us in 2006 after a brief detour through Vanderbilt University. Succeeding the eminent Robert Lerner, she helped to maintain, along with our colleague David Shyovitz and a luminous cohort of medievalists in other departments, Northwestern’s reputation as one of the most prestigious places worldwide for the study of the European Middle Ages.
The author of five books and dozens of articles, Dyan is recognized as a leading specialist in the field of medieval gender history. Our English Department colleague Barbara Newman, another authority on the history of medieval women, has this to say about her scholarship: “Dyan Elliott is one of our premier historians of medieval gender, sexuality, and religion. In such books as Fallen Bodies, Proving Woman, and The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell, she has explored the far-reaching consequences of the Gregorian reform for both priests and women. Her work has always been deeply but subtly informed by psychoanalysis as she ponders questions like: Why were newly celibate priests obsessed with the degree of guilt attached to ‘nocturnal pollution’? How did the repressed feminine return, whether in the idealized cult of the Virgin Mary or the nightmare fantasies of satanic witchcraft? How could a canonization process go wrong and result in a finding of heresy?
In her most recent book, The Corrupter of Boys: Sodomy, Scandal, and the Medieval Clergy, Dyan audaciously traces the roots of contemporary sex scandals to medieval cover-ups that sheltered abusive priests while seeking to protect the laity from scandal. She is currently working on a monograph about damnatio memoriae, or violence against the dead.”
At Northwestern, Dyan’s teaching was a magnet for undergraduates, most especially her famed lecture course on Medieval Sexuality. In 2019, with eerie prescience, she designed a new course on “The Black Death and Other Pandemics” which she wound up teaching at the height of the covid pandemic. Her reputation in the field attracted a steady stream of strong graduate students; she steered seven PhDs to completion during her time here.
The December party was, in the spirit of Dyan, fun, irreverent, and elegant. At her insistent request the speakers were few and spoke briefly, but they managed to convey our collective dismay at the departure of our erudite but decidedly un-stuffy colleague. Tributes to Dyan focused on her pathbreaking scholarship but also on her sense of style and fun. For all her serious scholarly chops, Dyan has always been drawn to the eccentric. Barbara Newman noted that Dyan “has studied married couples who took vows of chastity in wedlock—and unmarried couples who had sex in churches and found themselves stuck together, unable to free their bodies until a mortified priest came along and prayed for them” and that she convinced her editor to let her title one of her books The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell.
Annerys Cano mentioned Dyan’s “absolutely fabulous” footwear: “Those shoes, by the way, have not only carried her through years of academic brilliance but have also delivered swift justice to our temperamental office printer. Truly, a modern-day knight in patent leather armor” before praising her ability “to bring wit, humor, and humanity into any interaction.” Henri Lauzière spoke of his surprise that he, a French Canadian, had bonded with an Anglo-Canadian like Dyan but concluded with mock indignation: “She betrayed me. Like Pierre Trudeau, who stabbed Quebec in the back in 1982 by scheming with the other nine provinces to patriate the Canadian constitution, Dyan schemed with Northwestern administrators to retire.”
Participants in the event noted Dyan’s daunting extracurricular creativity. She has written two novels in the last few years, one a medieval theological thriller, another a Hitchcockian spoof about academia. She quilts (sometimes in faculty meetings), writes songs (one is about Abelard), plays the guitar, is an excellent cook and throws great parties. A Game of Thrones fan, she once showed up at a meeting lugging a large dragon head. And her outfits, the stylish dresses, statement necklaces, daring hats, and yes, those Fluevog shoes, were always a joy to behold.
With Dyan’s departure we are losing not only a brilliant medievalist and gender historian but the colleague who for several years brought us together for bibulous department happy hours in the faculty lounge. She will be much missed, but we wish her and Rick much happiness in their Canadian retirement.
More retirement party highlights
