Patricia Stoop is a research fellow at the Ruusbroec Institute of the University of Antwerp. Until March 2023 she taught Historical Dutch Literature in the Department of Literature of the same university). She held the prestigious Visiting Brueghel Chair in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania (2014 and 2018) and she was an assistant professor of Medieval Dutch Literature at the University of Utrecht (2015–2016). She holds a propedeutic degree in Greek and Latin (Nijmegen, 1993), and a doctoral degree in Dutch Literature and Languages (Nijmegen, 1997). She received her PhD in Literature at the Universiteit Antwerpen (2009). Her published dissertation Schrijven in commissie. De zusters uit het Brusselse klooster Jericho en de preken van hun biechtvaders (ca. 1456–1510) involved the study of the fifteenth-century vernacular convent sermons from the Brussels convent of Jericho and their literary and historical context.
As a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) she studied female authorship and authority in late medieval and early modern vernacular sermons from the Low Countries (2010–2013). Additionally, she is 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). The three edited volumes have been published by Brepols publishers (2013, 2015, and 2017). Recently she also published, together with Veronica O'Mara, Circulating the Word of God in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Catholic Preachers and Catholic Preaching Across Manuscript and Print (c. 1450 to c. 1550), ed. by Veronica O’Mara and Patricia Stoop. Turnhout: Brepols, 2022 (Sermo: Studies on Patristic, Medieval, and Reformation Sermons and Preaching), and in collaboration with Kees Schepers and Thom Mertens a special issue on Jhesus collacien (Ons Geestelijke Erf 92.3–4 (2022)).
She studies sermon collections and monastic library collections to explore the scope of women's knowledge and the literary means they used to express it. She is also developing a digital database that will eventually contain all vernacular and Latin manuscripts from the Low Countries that show the involvement of (religious and secular) women in the period between c. 1250 and 1600. The project, which relies heavily on material data in the sources themselves, is the first of its kind and can serve as a pilot project for other regions in Europe. Furthermore she is finishing three edited volumes: Commercial Book Production? Writing for Third Parties. Turnhout: Brepols, 2024–] (Texts and Transitions Series) and Spiritual Literature in the Late Medieval Low Countries, essays by Thom Mertens, edited, translated, and introduced by John Arblaster, Veerle Fraeters, Kees Schepers, and Patricia Stoop (Turnhout: Brepols, [2024–]).
In her strongly interdisciplinary research Patricia Stoop pays special attention to women's participation in the intellectual, religious, cultural and literary field of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. Central themes are (collective) authorship, literacy, authority and autonomy of women. In addition, she focuses on subjects such as the construction of book collections and (literary and intellectual) networks, memoria (both in the sense of memory techniques and the remembrance of persons), commercial book production, and sermon studies.