Mary Carpenter Erler is an American literary scholar specialising in medieval and early modern English literature and printing, and on women's reading and book-ownership in the same periods.
[3] In the 1990s, she chaired the Faculty during a period when the Rose Hill and Lincoln Center campus were merged, and was appointed to a distinguished professorship in 2015.
Her early research looked at the life and work of the sixteenth-century poet and printer Robert Copland, and she has since studied Syon Abbey, a nunnery which housed a substantial library and one of England's earliest printing presses.
Her work has extended to studying women's reading and book-ownership in late medieval and early modern England, topics on which she has authored two monographs.
[3] The Center for Medieval Studies at Fordham University held its 35th annual conference in 2015 in Erler's honour, entitled "Reading and Writing in City, Court, and Cloister: Conference in Honor of Mary C. Erler"; speakers included Maryanne Kowaleski, Michael Sargent, Joyce Coleman, Kathryn Smith, Caroline Barron, Sheila Lindenbaum and Thelma Fenster.