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CORVALLIS, Ore. - Eugene native Ruth Mazo Karras, now a prominent historian at the University of Minnesota, will give a lecture at Oregon State University on Thursday, Feb. 16, on unconventional forms of marital union in medieval Europe.

Her talk, "Unequal Partners: Alternatives to Marriage in Medieval Europe," begins at 4 p.m. in OSU's Memorial Union Room 206. It is free and open to the public, part of OSU's Horning Lecture Series that focuses on marriage, reproduction and sexuality.

In her lecture, Karras will outline the legal and theological bases of conventional marriage in medieval Europe, and then discuss the large number of unions that fell outside those norms for a number of reasons - both voluntary and involuntary. And those informal unions, she adds, were tolerated by some but condemned by the church and society.

Karras was educated at Oxford and Yale and taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University before joining the faculty at Minnesota. A former Rhodes Scholar, she is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

She has written dozens of scholarly articles and four books focusing on all aspects of medieval history, including her most recent book, "Sexuality in Medieval Europe."

The series is sponsored by OSU's Horning Endowment.