degree from Columbia University in 1967, writing her thesis on De elementis: Earth, Water, Air, and Fire in the 12th and 13th Centuries.
[8] Methodologically, she broke new ground, paying "particular attention to the cultural and social milieux these sources were produced in; to the assumptions and expectations of authors and readers; to questions of form, style, and presentation.
[11] This challenged Thomas Laqueur's assertion in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990) that male and female were seen as "manifestations of a unified substratum" before the 18th century.
[12] Cadden addressed medieval discourse in all its "staggering complexity", an "interconnectedness of intellectual interests" that was "far from comforting" in its diversity.
The Medieval Foremothers Society honored Joan Cadden in the sessions "Thinking beyond the 'Woman Writer' in Reconstructing Women's Intellectual Worlds," and "(New) Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (A Roundtable)."
[16] "By listening to multiple voices and embodying synthesis in her own life and career, Joan has allowed us to see a Middle Ages that was always there but was waiting for a skilled interpreter to reveal it."