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The sacred landscape of the Camino to Santiago— a talk by Dr Michele Vescovi, 7th October 18:15

Join The Historical Association: City of Lincoln Branch and the Medieval Studies Research Group for a paper by Dr Michele Vescovi on The sacred landscape of the Camino to Santiago 

The Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage route leading to the shrine of the apostle Saint James the Great in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, has captivated travellers for centuries. This paper delves into the multifaceted layers of its sacred landscape, exploring how natural objects and artefacts, scattered along the Camino, became associated with a sacred history of saints and warriors. We will consider these objects as narrated in medieval sources, focusing on their sacred genesis, function, and agency, showing how their material qualities engaged with the sensorial sphere and the imagination of beholders.

Speaker bio: Dr Michele Vescovi is Associate Professor in Medieval Art and Architecture at the University of Lincoln. He works on the transmission of cultures, visual translations and the creation of identities in exchanges between East and West, and North and South during the Middle Ages, with a particular emphasis on the eleventh and the twelfth centuries. 

This talk will take place on Monday 7th October 2024 at 6.15pm, with refreshments beforehand and questions afterwards. It will take place at the University of Lincoln in the Co-op lecture theatre (Minerva Building, MB0312). Register: here

Medieval Studies Research Group – Latest Hybrid Seminar on 12 November (Hybrid)

The Medieval Studies Research Group are delighted to announce this talk from our visiting scholar, Elias Carballido Gonzalez.

Title: Being Alone in Early Medieval Small Worlds: The Challenge of Labelling, Understanding, and Feeling Solitude

Topic: Early medieval local communities have been analysed from multiple perspectives that make visible the internal dynamics of their social fabric. The centrality of the notion of community and the reduced spatial scope of action of these in the early medieval rural world has led us to think less about a reality that would have existed even in these small worlds: solitude. In this paper we propose some theoretical and methodological reflections to study the physical, social and emotional experience of loneliness in these communities, taking into account the overlapping discourses, like the religious, legal and or the social, among others, that make it something complex to label from a terminological point of view, difficult to trace from a documentary point of view and, for certain authors, impossible in a pre-modern and rural world.

Speaker: Elías Carballido Gonzalez (Universidad de Oviedo)

Biography: Elías is a predoctoral fellow in Medieval History at the University of Oviedo, where he combines teaching and research work. His main lines of research have to do with internal differentiation in Early Medieval rural communities, focusing on the social and emotional experience of being alone, including from a gendered perspective. He holds a Master’s degree in Gender and Diversity from Oviedo, and is a member of the LLABOR-LANDS Group, dedicated to the studies of the medieval rural communities and led by Margarita Fernández Mier.

12 November 2024, 17:00, Alfred Tennyson Building 109, and online

Register for the talk here: https://forms.office.com/e/yCTYFYRTJs

The book cover for Lincoln Readings, showing the battle of Lincoln in 1217.

Introducing Lincoln Readings of Texts, Materials, and Contexts: Supplementum to Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Sources

The University’s Medieval Studies Research Group recently took over the editorship of  the peer-reviewed annual, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Sources (formerly the Journal of Medieval and Renaissance History, est. 1964).  To celebrate and showcase the diverse range of research that we do here on written, visual, and material sources, our first volume included contributions by nine members of University of Lincoln staff. We are delighted to report that this has now been published Open Access by ARC Humanities Press, thanks to the support of the University , especially Professor Stuart Humphries, and to the help of Claire Arrand at Lincoln Cathedral Archives: Lincoln Readings of Texts, Materials, and Contexts (oapen.org)

Edited by Dr Graham Barrett and Prof. Louise Wilkinson, Lincoln Readings of Texts, Materials, and Contexts: Supplementum to Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Sources, features peer-reviewed essays by nine Lincoln classicists, medievalists, and an early modernist. The essays cover topics including early doctrinal controversies, early Church councils, the Greek alphabet, disputes in thirteenth-century Rutland, the charters, letters, and seal of Lady Nicholaa de la Haye, castellan of Lincoln and sheriff, the proprietary queens of Jerusalem’s documents, the law and liturgy of trial by water in early medieval Iberia, a fourteenth-century aisled base-cruck building at Ketsby House Farm, and Mayflower materials in the Wren Library of Lincoln Cathedral.

The Lincoln-based contributors were: Drs Michael Wuk, Giustina Monti, Robert Portass (now Cambridge), Anais Waag (one of our Leverhulme ECRs), Graham Barrett (now Durham), and Profs  Mark Gardiner (with Jenne Pape), Anna Marie-Roos, Louise Wilkinson, and Jamie Wood (with Marta Szada).

The cover of the book, Lincoln Readings of Texts, Materials, and Contexts, showing the Battle of Lincoln in 1217.

Recovering Fourteenth-Century Text from Chemical Reagent Damage*

In recent weeks, our Lincoln Record Society-funded PhD student, Jessica Holt, has been working with Dr Nicholas Bennett of the Lincoln Record Society, the University of Lincoln’s Conservation Team, Lincoln Cathedral and the Lincolnshire Archives. Using multi-spectral imaging, they have managed to recover lost text in the registers of Bishop Thomas Bek of Lincoln (1342-1347).

During the nineteenth century, canon G. G. Perry applied a chemical reagent to several folios from MS. 209, a late fourteenth-century manuscript held at the library at Lincoln Cathedral. (5) This manuscript contains one of the only two surviving copies of Richard Rolle’s Officium et Miracula. (8)Regrettably the chemical reagent caused irreparable damage and rendered some of its’ text illegible as evidenced in the image of f.3 r. below. Perry was later named and shamed for his deed in 1866 in an edition of the Early English Text Society. (3)

Image 1: Lincoln Cathedral, MS 209 f.3 reproduced with the kind permission of the Dean & Chapter of Lincoln Cathedral. The image shows bad staining on a manuscript folio.

Image 1: Lincoln Cathedral, MS 209 f.3 r. with the kind permission of the Dean & Chapter of Lincoln Cathedral.

The challenge of trying to decipher faded court hand is not unfamiliar for those working directly with manuscripts. Whilst today, UV lamps can be used to combat this problem, researchers in the nineteenth century were forced to seek out another solution. (4) Several attempts were made using different chemical reagents to enhance the legibility of metallic inks. (1) Contrary to their original intent, however, these substances have now rendered many documents unreadable, as these substances later darkened, coating their original texts with dark brown, black, or, in some cases, blue staining. Of these chemical reagents the most common were:

  • Tincture of Oak Gall (an alcohol-based tincture that utilises essence of oak galls)
  • Sulphuric Tinctures (mixtures typically comprised of calcium carbonate, calcium polysulphide, and calcium sulphate)
  • The ‘Giobert Tincture’ (mixture comprised of water, hydrochloric acid, and potassium hexacyanoferrate) (1)

Despite the clear damage these substances were causing to manuscripts across the course of the nineteenth century, these methods continued to be used as late as 1914, when Hugo Deunsing and Martin Flasher applied sulphuric tinctures to manuscripts stored in the library of the Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem. (1)

Doctoral student, Jessica Holt, was forced to grapple with the damage caused by these chemical reagents when examining the registers of Bishop Thomas Bek of Lincoln (1342-1347). It quickly became apparent that several folios of register 6 had been damaged by an unknown nineteenth-century reagent. (6) Hope, however, laid with a technique known as multi-spectral imaging (MSI). MSI is a non-invasive scientific imaging technique that can be applied to manuscripts to recover lost text. (2, 7) This technique was also successfully used by the British Library in 2017 to recover script lost through fire damage, natural degradation, and chemical damage. (2) With the kind permission from the bishop of Lincoln, Lincoln Cathedral, and the Lincolnshire Archives, and the wonderful support of Claire Arrand, Dr Nicholas Bennett, and Professor Louise Wilkinson, we were able to transfer register 6 from the Lincolnshire Archives to the University of Lincoln, where we were able to use MSI to successfully recover the contents of the lost text with aid from Dr Philip Skipper and the conservation department.

Regrettably, unlike the damage caused to f.3 r. of MS. 209, the identity of the culprit has been lost to time. The positive results of MSI ultimately present an optimistic future for other researchers examining manuscripts similarly altered by nineteenth-century reagents.

*Jessica Holt is fortunate to have been awarded the Nigel Burn Memorial Postgraduate Studentship from the Lincoln Record Society to support her PhD.

References:

(1) Albrecht, Felix. ‘Between Boon and Bane: The use of Chemical Reagents in Palimpsest Research in the Nineteenth Century’, in M. J. Driscoll (ed.), Care and Conservation of Manuscripts 13 Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Seminar held at University of Copenhagen 13th-15th April 2001 (Brooklyn, 2012), 147-165.

(2) Duffy, Christina. ‘Multi-Spectral Imaging at the British Library’, 2018 3rd Digital Heritage International Congress (DigitalHERITAGE) held jointly with 2018 24th International Conference on Virtual Systems & Multimedia (VSMM 2018) (San Fransico, 2018), 1-4.

(3) English Prose Treatises of Richard Hampole, ed. G. G. Perry (1866).

(4) Kiernan, Kevin S. ‘The State of the “Beowulf” Manuscript 1882-1983)’, Anglo-Saxon England 13 (1984), 23-42.

(5) Lincoln Cathedral Library. MS. 209.

(6) Lincolnshire Archives. DIOC/REG/6-7b.

(7) Machain, Padriag O. ‘The Digitisation of Irish Manuscripts: Beyond and Beneath the Visible Image’, Studi Irlandesi 12 (2022), 43-56.

(8) The Officium and Miracula of Richard Rolle of Hampole, ed. Reginald Maxwell Wooley (Cornell, 1919).

The Unnamed: a Leverhulme International Fellowship at Lincoln

Jamie Wood, Professor of History and Education, School of Humanities and Heritage, has been awarded a prestigious Leverhulme Trust International Fellowship for a project, “The Unnamed: Slavery and the Making of the Church in Late Antique Iberia”, from September 2024 to June 2025.

As labourers, messengers and servants, enslaved individuals played a pivotal, yet largely overlooked, role in the making of the early medieval Church. A key reason for this neglect of the Church’s servile labour is that the sources very rarely mention their names, rendering them near-invisible to researchers. Building on training in slavery studies and social network analysis at the Universities of Bonn and Lisbon and viewing the lack of names as an opportunity rather than a challenge, this project uses Iberia from 400-700 as a case study for examining the social and economic roles of unnamed and enslaved individuals.

Jamie has already presented preliminary work on this project at the University of Barcelona (January 2024) and the University of Málaga (March 2024), and will be giving papers over the summer in Kalamazoo, Cambridge, Leeds and Canterbury on various aspects of this work. The Canterbury presentation is part of a one-day workshop on ‘Present and Precedent in the Church Councils of Late Antique Iberia’, funded by the a Royal Historical Society Workshop Grants for 2024, and coordinated by Jamie and Dr Graham Barrett (more details here).

Jamie will be working with colleagues at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies and the Centro de Estudos Clássicos (Lisbon) during the fellowship. It will feed directly into a new module, Slavery in Late Antiquity, which will be running for the first time in early 2025 and provide the seed for a broader project on slavery and the making of the Church in the Early Middle Ages.

An social network graph illustrating part of the network of Braulio of Zaragoza (d. 651)
Image: a part of the network of Braulio of Zaragoza (d. 651)

An update from one of our visiting fellows on their work on Early Medieval Italy

One of our Visiting Fellows, Dr Christopher Heath’s scholarship engages with the early medieval worlds of Italy. He is about to publish his second monograph with Bloomsbury Academic, entitled The Age of Liutprand: Dynamics of Power in Eighth Century Italy. The book considers a pivotal ‘moment’ in the history of the Italian peninsula when the Lombard kingdom, based in Pavia, attained a hegemonic position throughout Italy.

Image: Liutprand on a gold tremissis

Christopher is also one of the co-ordinating editors of the Amsterdam University Press series, Italy in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (ILAEMA), which seeks to publish and promote Italian (and Anglophone) research on Italy from c.400 to c.1000. This series has already seen some notable works come to the attention of the historical community such as Dr Edoardo Manarini’s Struggles for Power in the Kingdom of Italy and the forthcoming volume on fluvial networks in Northen Italy by Dr Marco Panato, who has just commenced a post-doctoral project at the University of Nottingham.

Later this year, Christopher is orchestrating a series of panels at the vibrant IMC in Leeds which seeks to closely analyse specific incidents in early medieval history for what they reveal about the quotidian realities of the past. Here he sets out his research plans for the next year or so, as he prepares to write a short work for the Past Imperfect series with ARC Humanities Press entitled The Lombards in Italy.

The Lombards in Italy:

Writing a work of synthesis presents several challenges, both anticipated and unexpected. Having just completed a monograph which weighs in at roughly 100,000 words, the composition of a work in a series designed to be deliberately pithy is no easy challenge to resolve. The degree of simplification and deciding what should and should not be included is an ongoing problem. One does not want to reduce details to meaningless lists of disconnected analysis or leave the reader lost in a quagmire of assumptions. One approach, that I intend to adopt is to limit discussion of political events to a minimum and focus instead on slower, even deeper rhythms of life and experience that will encourage the reader to think of early medieval society as a series of interconnected spirals that interlink and connect, in the process revealing how societies function holistically.

Image: peacock in an 8th-century sculpture from Pavia

Of course, all historians tend to suffer the hubris that their period and their subject matter is ‘more’ significant than other times and places. It is no doubt the case that early medieval historians have some work to do to convince the interested public that events, protagonists and processes in the [comparatively] distant past are still vital and significant. ‘My’ key period of interest runs from c.500 to c.800, and within this time, I focus on the early eighth century in particular. Using centuries as building blocks of analysis and thinking also attracts dangers of salience, since they are entirely artificial human constructions and variable in cultural terms. That said, if one looks at the long-eighth century – say c.680 to c.820 – one may detect crucial changes that continue to influence the subsequent development of the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. This is a connected story where Islamicate cultures bridge the gap between Byzantium and the west and evidence an increasingly interconnected world. Whilst some of these fascinating developments will not make an explicit appearance in The Lombards in Italy, the project will act as a fulcrum to a more ambitious endeavour, linked into the IMC panels, that will re-consider the wider world of the eighth century.

Jewish Life in the Middle Ages: Lincoln and Beyond – A University QR Collaborations Project with the Lincolnshire Archives

Lincoln was home to an important and vibrant Jewish community in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Fortunately for us, this community has left behind a remarkable trail of evidence in our national and regional archives. Past histories of Lincoln’s Anglo-Jewish community have been dominated by the story of Little Hugh of Lincoln, for whose death 19 innocent Jews were executed in 1255. While evidencing the increasingly difficult circumstances in which the Anglo-Jewry lived prior to their expulsion from England in 1290, the surviving records provide some fascinating insights into the dynamics of Jewish life, the Jews’ religious, social and business interactions with one another, and their encounters with their Christian neighbours, the Cathedral clergy and the Crown’s officials.  

For many years now, Lincoln has been home to the Lincolnshire Archives, one of the UK’s largest regional collections, which preserves the manuscript records of the medieval city, cathedral and diocese of Lincoln. In 2023, Professor Louise Wilkinson of the Medieval Studies Research Group received funding from the University of Lincoln’s QR Collaborations Scheme for a pilot project to survey the archival holdings relating to the medieval Lincoln Jewry that are held locally. She received valuable assistance from Dr Dean Irwin, our visiting fellow, who acted as academic advisor, from Simon Neal, our archival researcher, and from Jessica Holt, our research assistant. The project surveyed and compiled a handlist of documents relating to the medieval Jewish community that are held in Lincoln. We also hosted a free talk and document workshop at the Lincolnshire Archives in June 2023 to showcase its remarkable collections. In the longer term, we hope that this initiative may aid long-standing plans for an exhibition that is warmly supported by the head of Lincoln’s Jewish community. 

A major output of our project has been the first handlist of documents held in the Lincolnshire Archives on the medieval Jewry. Simon Neal has produced English summaries of the Latin documents (some of which also contain Hebrew or have Hebrew records associated with them) that contain references to members of the medieval Jewish community. Simon worked carefully through a range of original single sheet deeds, as well as entries in cartularies and other miscellaneous documents. He also consulted microfilm copies and transcriptions of cartularies for Lincolnshire religious houses held elsewhere that are also available for readers to consult at the Lincolnshire Archives. The records of the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln Cathedral proved to be particularly fruitful, since they contain references to local Jewish families, their neighbours, their associates, their business partners and their residences. These include, for instance, a portion of a thirteenth-century chirograph that recorded the notification of a grant by Robert le Turnur to Jacob, son of Leo, a Jew of Lincoln, of some land in the parish of St Michael on the Mount, which lay next to Jacob’s house (Lincolnshire Archives, D&C, Dij/76/2/47). A notification of a grant by Lincoln’s famous female castellan, Lady Nicholaa de la Haye (d. 1230), to Peter the Woad Seller, of her land and houses in the parish of St Michael also carefully recorded how this property lay near the land formerly of Moses son of Benedict, a Jew of Lincoln (Lincolnshire Archives, D&C, Dij/76/2/22).

A photograph of the notification of a grant by Nicholaa de la Haye, referring to land formerly of Moses son of Benedict, a Jew of Lincoln. The document reference is Lincolnshire Archives, D&C, Dij/76/2/22. Copyright: The Dean and Chapter of Lincoln Cathedral. Reuse is not permitted.
This image shows a notification of a grant of property by Nicholaa de la Haye (‘Nichola de la Haie’) to Peter the Woad Seller, mentioning the nearby land formerly of Moses son of Benedict, a Jew of Lincoln: Lincolnshire Archives, D&C, Dij/76/2/22. Copyright belongs to the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln Cathedral. Please note that reuse of this image is not permitted. We are very grateful to the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln Cathedral for granting us permission to use this image. We are also grateful to Claire Arrand, Lincoln Cathedral’s Librarian, and to the staff of the Lincolnshire Archives for their assistance. 

There are also references among the documents in the Lincolnshire Archives to the properties of Jewish women like Belaset of Wallingford, who was hanged for clipping the king’s money (Lincolnshire Archives, D&C, A/1/8, fol. 107, no. 290), and Floria of London, who went into exile in Edward I’s reign (Lincolnshire Archives, D&C, Dij/75/2/27). In fact, there are some extremely interesting post-1290 grants of former Jewish property that enrich our understanding of the local context of the sad events surrounding the Expulsion.

Researchers are welcome to contact Louise Wilkinson to request a copy of the handlist.  

How to Write a Research Proposal Without Access to a Library

Writing a research proposal is one of the most difficult parts of a PhD application. It can be even more challenging without access to an academic library. This post aims offer some suggestions on how to go about writing a research proposal if you do not currently have access to a university library.

Alumni Library Access

No matter how long ago it was that you graduated, it is worth investigating the option to rejoin your university library as an alumni member. At the University of Lincoln, access to the library is free for alumni and includes the right to borrow books. You can find information about how to register here: https://ask.library.lincoln.ac.uk/associatereaders

If you have move away from the town or city where you did your previous degree(s), but live in or near an area with a university, it is worth locating their library website and looking for information about access. Each library sets is own policies, so it can be helpful to do some research before seeking to join. For instance, some libraries ask members of the community who do not have a study, work, or alumni affiliation with the university to pay for membership, especially if they require borrowing rights. Coming in as a visitor is usually free, but you may need to show identification, or be limited to visit at certain times (i.e., some libraries will restrict visitors during exam periods or late at night). If you have any questions, best thing to do is contact the library directly and ask.

Legal Deposit Libraries

Access to online resources—especially journal articles, which are often published behind a paywall, is likely to be one of your biggest challenges. Legal deposit libraries provide access to all UK publications, which is obviously enormously helpful for research. If travelling for research is an option for you, may want to look up which one is closest to you. You can’t borrow from a legal deposit library, so visiting one does require some advance planning. For this reason, if you are able to build library visits into your research process, you may want to plan to do this after you have done some of your research online, and have figured out what books or articles you cannot find elsewhere.

You do need to sign up in advance for access, but it is free to do so–here is the link to get a reader’s pass at the British Library. Your pass grants you access to their electronic resources on visiting their reading rooms. There is no free printing, and permission to download will depend on copyright and licensing restrictions. Make sure to bring a memory stick for anything you are able download, plus a laptop or notebook for notetaking. (If you have a smartphone, you might also want to install a scanning app, which you can use to create PDFs.) If you are planning to access print materials, do investigate the library catalogue at least a week before you visit–especially at the British Library, you will need to order the print books you want to see in advance.

Another library that might be useful is the Institute of Historical Research Library in London. Membership is free. Even if you are not able to visit in person, their website has a large number of links to free online resources. The IHR also provides a range of resources for research training, which can be very helpful.

Caring or family responsibilities, work schedules, and financial limitations might mean that visiting libraries in person is not possible for you. It is possible to conduct all of the research for your PhD proposal online–read on for further suggestions.

Free Online Resources

Academic libraries spend a substantial amount of money on subscriptions to journals and databases, which we make available to researchers and students at our university. Because of subscription contracts and copyright law, many of these online resources are not accessible to alumni or associate readers. However, there are a number of places you can go to look for reliable academic resources that are available open access, published and distributed under copyright and licensing conditions that make them free to read and access.

A good place to start is the University of Lincoln library’s list of free online resources, which includes links to things like the Directory of Open Access Books, the Directory of Open Access Journals, and more. During first stages of the pandemic, when access to physical library collections was severely limited, medievalists across the world put together lists of online resources. Our medieval studies library guide contains a very large list of useful and interesting resources. This list is great for browsing, but the Medieval Academy of America has an online list that’s much for searchable, and well worth a look.

Book reviews can be helpful, at the proposal stage of research, for helping you understand the overall landscape of a field, and what big questions have been asked and answered. The final paragraph of a review will often open up the big questions of what work still needs to be done in a field, so it’s particularly worth reading this attentively. It’s a good idea to explore an open access online book reviews journal like the Medieval Review (or the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, if you’re interested in the early Middle Ages or late antiquity). These journals provide free access to reviews of newly published books that have been published, and have very archives of reviews of books going back over thirty years. Digital Medievalist is another useful free online journal, which includes reviews and reports on online projects.

Social media can be useful for information about new projects or publications, but it can be easy to miss things, and searching for past posts can be tricky. A great place to go for articles about the Middle Ages in the news, information about new projects or discoveries, and general fun and inspiration is medievalists.net

Lastly, you might want to explore academic podcasts in your area of interest. For example, New Books in Medieval History offers in-depth interviews with academics talking about their recently published books. Many universities or academic research institutes release recordings of lectures or seminar papers as podcasts. This can be a great way to access work-in-progress or simply take a break from reading on a screen.

Other Ways to Access Articles

Many, but not all, academic authors have an academia.edu or researchgate account. Both services have a good free account option, and can be useful for finding copies of papers that you might want to read. Humanities Common is another academic networking site, which some academics prefer, since it’s specifically not-for-profit and more transparent about how it uses subscribers’ data.

Finally, you can always reach out to an academic author by email, and politely ask if they can send you a copy of their work. The landscape around copyright, sharing work, and open access is changing rapidly. With traditionally published academic work, the copyright is owned by the publisher, not the scholar who wrote it, meaning that the publisher is in charge of where and how the work is distributed. Be aware that not everyone is able or willing to share their work. However, that caveat aside, most people are flattered to hear that someone wants to read their writing, and want to help if they can, so don’t be afraid to ask!

Managing References

At an early stage of collecting resources for your proposal, it is a good idea to spend some time planning how you are going to sort and manage the references you find. Without access to an academic library, you are likely to be working across Google Scholar, open access resources, academia.edu, and more. Finding a way to keep track of what you find, what you want to cite, what you want to skim (or have a book-review level knowledge of, but not necessarily read in full at this stage), what you need to really dig into and read in full if at all possible, and what looks-like-it-would-be-useful-but-turns-out-not-to-be, is absolutely vital. Reference management software is your friend here, and there are a lot of free platforms. Zotero and Mendeley seem to be the most popular right now.

How do I know when to stop reading?

In general, most people feel confident and comfortable sitting down to articulate what research needs to be done and why they’re the ones to do it when they start to recognise the names of books and scholars and see the same things repeated in footnotes and bibliographies. When you feel you have a sense of what the major ideas and questions in your field are, that’s a good point to start thinking about what you want to change or add.

Good luck with your research proposal!

Lincoln Student Secures PhD Placement at the British Library: Joining the Medieval and Renaissance Women Project

This October (2022), Paula Del Val Vales, a University of Lincoln History PhD student, is joining the British Library for a six-month-long PhD placement with their ‘Medieval and Renaissance Women Project’.

This new major project aims to digitise 80 manuscripts and 200 documents related to medieval and renaissance women from all over Europe. These include illuminated and finely decorated manuscripts, medical treatises and religious works (e.g., psalters and books of hours), as well as a variety of charters and documents concerning different aspects of women’s lives. This is a wide selection that showcases the various roles of women as patrons, readers, book-owners, collectors, and writers. The manuscripts and documents will be catalogued and made accessible to the wider public through the British Library website, contributing to enlarging our current knowledge on the history of medieval and renaissance women.

During the six months, Paula will catalogue several of the documents and manuscripts, write blog posts for the British Library, and promote this new and exciting project focused on women’s history; before re-joining the University of Lincoln to continue with her PhD thesis in History on “The Queen’s Household in the Thirteenth-Century: An Anglo-Iberian Comparative Study”, supervised by Prof. Louise Wilkinson and Dr Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo.

Well done, Paula! This is a wonderful achievement.

Lincoln Medievalists at Leeds

The annual International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds is a very special part of the medieval studies year. One of the world’s largest gatherings of medievalists, it features thousands of scholars from all over the world for five days of papers, roundtables, and discussions of all things medieval. For the first time since 2019, the congress will have an in-person as well as a virtual component. Many members of the Medieval Studies Research Group will be taking part. We hope to see you there!

File:Parkinson Building, Leeds University, England-12Sept2010.jpg
Parkinson Building, University of Leeds

On Monday, 4 July:

  • Professor Louise Wilkinson will be moderating Session 206: Noblewomen Network II: Politics, Power Relations, and Strategies.
  • Dr Michael Wuk will be speaking about ‘Rites of Passage and Conceptual Monastic Enclosures’ in Session 225. (Michael was the recipient of a 2022 Miriam Czock Fund Busary–congratulations!)
  • Dr Renata Ntelia will be speaking about ‘Medieval Playing: the Conception of the Magic Circle within the Games Canon’ in Session 223.

On Tuesday, 5 July, Dr Nicholas Bennett will be speaking about ‘Taming Giants: The Editing and Publication of Some 14th Century Episcopal Registers’.

Wednesday 6 July will be a very busy day for Lincoln medievalists!

  • Dr Hope Williard will be speaking about ‘Hidden Heroines: The Appropriation of Women’s Voices in Late Antique Latin Literature’ in Session 1006.
  • Dr Anais Waag will be speaking about ‘Marguerite of Provence and a Queen’s Self-Representation as a Political Actor’ in Session 1032.
  • Dr Graham Barrett and Dr Rob Portass will be speaking about ‘The Middling Sort: Managing Estates and Expectations in Early Medieval Spain’ as part of Session 1107.
  • The first Medieval Studies Research Group sponsored session The Many Borders of English Elites will feature papers from our wonderful PGR students Gary Stephens, ‘Borders between Humans and Animals in the Minds of 13thCentury Theologians’; Katherine Delaney, ‘The Physical and Metaphorical Borders of the Warenne Honour from 1248-1361’; and Lynsey McLaughlin ‘From within the Walls: Bordering and Visitor Spaces at Three English Castle Sites’. The session was organised by Dr Anais Waag and will be chaired by Professor Louise Wilkinson.
  • Dr Jamie Wood will be speaking about ‘Formative Spaces: Making Female Ascetics in Early Medieval Iberia’ in Session 1206.
  • The second Medieval Studies Research Group sponsored session, Queenship Across the Borders of Space and Time, organised and chaired by Dr Anais Waag, will feature more papers from our amazing PGRs! Susan Phillips will speak about ‘Goiswintha: Distraught Mother or Vindictive Queen?’ and Paula Del Val Vales will be speaking about ‘Issuing, Sealing, and Signing: An Examination of ‘Queenly Chanceries’ in 13th-Century England and Iberia’.
  • Professor Louise Wilkinson will contribute to the Roundtable discussion of the new Routledge book series Approaching Medieval Sources (Session 1402).

Last, but not least, on Friday, 7 July, Dr Anais Waag will chair the Session 1606: Teacher, Traveller, Politician and Midwife: the Many Roles of Medieval Women and Professor Louise Wilkinson will chair Session 1701: Editing Medieval Records: Past, Present, and Future.

an owl on a perch with a green dish of water next to him
As a break from conferencing, many medievalists will make time to visit the falconry display.

The conference will feature a number of papers about medieval Lincoln and Lincolnshire:

  • Ryan Michael Prescott from the University of Hull will be speaking about ‘The Northern Frontier: Lincolnshire and Yorkshire during the Reign of King Stephen, 1135-1154’, on 5 July in Session 511.
  • Session 704: Church and Society in Medieval Lincoln is sponsored by the Lincoln Records Society and takes place on 5 July.
  • Kathryn Dutton from the University of Leeds will be speaking about ‘The Evolution of a Cistercian Monastic Boundary: The ‘Close’ at Kirkstead, Lincolnshire, 1139-1299’ on 5 July in Session 728.
  • David Kennett will speaking about ‘Building the Great Brick Donjon at Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire: Construction Management in the 15th Century’ on 6 July in Session 1240.
  • Tom Revell of the University of Oxford will speak about ‘Lincolnshire as the New Jerusalem: Trans-Locating Sanctity in Old English Hagiographic Poetry’ on 7 July in Session 1529.

With this abundance of riches, it’s worth remembering that all registered participants at the Congress have access to recordings of sessions until 31 August 2022. You can find more information about this here. Whether you are attending virtually or in person (or both!), we hope you have a wonderful conference!

Image credits: “File:Parkinson Building, Leeds University, England-12Sept2010.jpg” by Tim Green from Bradford is licensed under CC BY 2.0. “at the falconry exhihit at the International Medieval Congress #owl #birdsofprey #falconry #leeds” by Alexandra Guerson is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.