Sister Miriam Joseph Rauh collection

Sister Miriam Joseph was born Agnes Lenore Rauh in 1898 to Mamie Anne Priesendorfer and Henry Francis Rauh, in Glandorf, Ohio. Her father was an educator and publisher of the Ottawa, Ohio German language newspaper Der Demokrat. In 1893 Henry Francis Rauh married Mamie Anne Priesendorfer, of Defiance, Ohio and together the couple had a family including John Clarence, Carl H., Walter Ignatius, Agnes Lenore, Cornelius Anthony, Mary Bloise, James Emerson, and Esther Irene.

Agnes Lenore entered the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Cross in 1919, taking the name Miriam Joseph. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in journalism at St. Mary’s College, her Master’s degree in English from the University of Notre Dame, and a Doctorate in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

For thirty-eight years Joseph taught in the English Department at St. Mary’s College, contributing in the areas of rhetoric, pedagogy, and Shakespeare. Some of her publications include Rhetoric in Shakespeare’s Time, Everyday Logic, The Trivium, and Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language. She also was a visiting scholar at Northwestern University in 1961 and a visiting Professor of English in 1962.

Starting with her dissertation, Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language and through her continuing academic career, Sister Miriam Joseph was recognized as a major contributor to the study of Shakespeare and the related medieval arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.