Patricia Stoop teaches historical Dutch literature within the Department of Literature at the University of Antwerp. She is also a postdoctoral research fellow at the Ruusbroec Institute. In 2014 and 2018, she held the prestigious Visiting Brueghel Chair in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania, and she served as Assistant Professor of Middle Dutch Literature at Utrecht University from 2015 to 2016.
She holds a propaedeutic degree in Greek and Latin Languages and Cultures (1994) and graduated in Dutch Language and Literature from the Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen (now Radboud University) in 1997. She earned her PhD in Literature from the University of Antwerp in 2009. Her first monograph, Schrijven in commissie. De zusters uit het Brusselse klooster Jericho en de preken van hun biechtvaders (ca. 1456–1510) (Hilversum: Verloren, 2013), examined the genesis of fifteenth-century convent sermons from the Augustinian convent of Jericho in Brussels and their literary and historical context. Particular attention was paid to the role of the sisters in preserving and transmitting these sermons.
As a postdoctoral researcher funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), Patricia Stoop studied themes of female authorship and female authority in late medieval and early modern sermons from the Low Countries (2010–2013). She was also one of the initiators of the international and interdisciplinary project Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe, in collaboration with Virginia Blanton (University of Missouri–Kansas City) and Veronica O’Mara (University of Hull, now Leeds). The three essay collections resulting from this project were published by Brepols in 2013, 2015, and 2017. Together with Veronica O’Mara, she also published Circulating the Word of God in Medieval and Early Modern Catholic Europe: Preachers and Preaching Across Manuscript and Print (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022). She was one of the editors of Spiritual Literature in the Late Medieval Low Countries: Essays by Thom Mertens (edited by John Arblaster, Patricia Stoop, Daniël Ermens, Veerle Fraeters, and Kees Schepers; Turnhout: Brepols, 2024).
She has (co-)edited several special journal issues, including: Patricia Stoop (ed.), 'Medieval Women’s Religious Texts in the Germanic Regions', special issue of Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, 42.2 (2016); Kees Schepers, John Arblaster, Veerle Fraeters, and Patricia Stoop (eds), 'Geest in letteren gespiegeld: Essays voor Thom Mertens, I', special issue of Ons Geestelijk Erf, 90.3–4 (2020); Kees Schepers, John Arblaster, Veerle Fraeters, and Patricia Stoop (eds), 'Geest in letteren gespiegeld: Essays voor Thom Mertens, II', special issue of Ons Geestelijk Erf, 91.1–2 (2021); Patricia Stoop, with Bram Caers (eds), ‘Writing for Third Parties: Commercial Manuscript Production in the Late Middle Ages’, special issue of Queeste, 32.1 (2025).
Currently, she investigates the extent of women’s intellectual and religious knowledge and the literary means they used to express it, drawing on sermon collections and convent library holdings. For her subproject, Bridgettine Women’s Convents in the Low Countries as Textual Communities and Centers of Knowledge Transfer in Their European Context (ca. 1440–1600), she received a SEPBOF grant from the University of Antwerp. She is also developing a digital database that will eventually include all vernacular and Latin manuscripts from the Low Countries demonstrating the involvement of women—both religious and secular—between approximately 1250 and 1600. Strongly grounded in the material evidence of the sources themselves, this project is the first of its kind and may serve as a pilot project for other European regions. She received a fellowship from the Tiele Foundation for this project in 2026.
In addition to her research and teaching, Patricia Stoop serves as President of the International Medieval Sermon Studies Society; is a board member of Signum, a contact group for the socio-economic and institutional-legal history of religious and ecclesiastical institutions in the medieval Low Countries; serves as an expert in Early Modern Literature and Book History on the advisory committee of the DBNL collection of the Digital Library for Dutch Literature (Dutch Language Union); and is a member of the scientific committee of the project Sorores: Unenclosed Religious Women in Southern Europe, Twelfth to Eighteenth Centuries. She is also a member of the editorial boards of the book series Sermo: Studies on Patristic, Medieval and Reformation Sermons and Preaching and The Other Sister: Active Women Religious in the Premodern World (both published by Brepols).
In her strongly interdisciplinary research, Patricia Stoop pays particular attention to women’s contributions to the intellectual, religious, cultural, and literary spheres of the medieval and early modern periods, as well as to sermon studies. Central themes include (collective) authorship, literacy, women’s authority and autonomy. She also focuses on topics such as the formation of collections and networks, memoria (both as memory techniques and commemoration), and commercial manuscript production.