Abstract The renowned historian and medievalist Caroline Walker Bynum has given many interviews, but none, until now, to a fellow medievalist. In what follows, Bynum discusses with literary critic Kathy Lavezzo her formation as an intellectual and feminist during the 1960s at Harvard; her crucial relationship with her mother, philosopher Merle Grubbs Walker; the central components and legacy of her scholarly corpus; her writing process, mortality, and childhood love of Tolkien; and much more.
Lavezzo et al. (2026) studied this question.