Olha Stasiuk received her BA and first MA at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, where she started working with Medieval Canon Law, namely with female cases and narratives in Decretum Gratiani and Liber Extra. During her second MA at the Department of Medieval Studies of the Central European University in Vienna, she studied the Registers of the Apostolic Penitentiary for Central Europe and focused on cases of forced marriage and monasticism in the fifteenth century. In her current doctoral research, she returned to the Canon Law of the pre-classical and classical periods (eleventh–thirteenth centuries), now working with personae miserabiles (widows, orphans, and the poor). In her studies, she combines approaches from the fields of legal studies, gender studies, theology, and anthropology, in order to understand the canonical definition, classification, and ecclesiastical protection of the miserabiles, their survival strategies, and the influence of gender bias on the reality of the unprotected in the High Middle Ages.