The biennial Thirteenth-Century Conference (formerly known as The Thirteenth-Century England Conference) is a long-standing international academic conference that was established in 1985 at the University of Newcastle. Since then, it has been hosted by the Universities of Durham, Wales, the Sorbonne, Cambridge, and Heidelberg. We are delighted to welcome it to Lincoln this September (Friday 5th to Sunday 7th September 2025) for its twenty-first outing. Due to an exceptional response to our call for papers, we are pleased to offer a draft programme of talks, featuring more than 25 speakers at all stages of their academic careers. These are organised into sessions on monastic records, government under Henry III, queenship and piety in the royal family, royal power in England and Denmark, royal administration in the localities, inclusion and exclusion, aristocratic women and power, new perspectives on Lincolnshire records, lordship and service, and disputes and jurisdictions.
The First Björn K. U. Weiler Memorial Lecture, the conference’s keynote lecture sponsored this year by the Lincoln Record Society, will be delivered by Professor Daniel Power of Swansea University, on ‘Eleanor of Ponthieu, Eleanor of Aumale? The Inheritance Claims of Eleanor of Castile’. Eleanor of Castile was King Edward I of England’s beloved first wife, who died at Harby in 1290 and whose viscera are buried in Lincoln Cathedral.
We are extremely grateful to the Lincoln Record Society for sponsoring the conference and to the Pipe Roll Society for sponsoring an essay prize for doctoral students.
Booking for the conference will open soon via the University’s online booking store.
For further details, please email the conference organisers, Professor Louise Wilkinson and Dr Adrian Jobson: medievalstudies@lincoln.ac.uk.
The Pipe Roll Society: Publishing Medieval Records Since 1883
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
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).
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 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).
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.
Image: a part of the network of Braulio of Zaragoza (d. 651)
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.
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).
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.
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.
Following on from the success of our Medieval Week, the Medieval Studies Research Group of the University of Lincoln are delighted to invite you to our free Annual Medieval Studies Lecture on Thursday 3rd June 2021 at 6pm (on Zoom).
This year, our speaker will be Professor Miri Rubin of Queen Mary, University of London, a leading writer, broadcaster, and medieval historian who works on religious cultures and identities in the Middle Ages. She is the highly acclaimed author of several important books, including: Mother of God. A History of the Virgin Mary (London, 2009); Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, trans. with an introduction by Miri Rubin (London, 2014); and Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 2020).
The title of her talk will be – ‘Who were the Strangers of Medieval Cities?’
Abstract (in the words of Prof. Rubin): The title of my recent book Cities of Strangers (2020) prompts me to reflect with you more explicitly on the category ‘stranger’. Current research is showing just how diverse medieval cities were, but also how constitutive of urban flourishing this diversity was. It is appropriate therefore to consider how the differences between groups were managed and understood. Was it safe to be a stranger? How made it a beneficial state of living? How did strangerhood relate to ideas about identity? How did all this change over time?
Please come along to our virtual Lincoln History Lecture, co-hosted by the Medieval Studies Research Group of the University of Lincoln and the Lincoln Record Society.
It will take place on Wednesday 21 April 2021 at 6:00pm-7:30pm.
Lecture Title: ‘The Voice of the People? Petitions from Lincolnshire’.
Speaker: Dr. Alison McHardy
People from across England petitioned the king in parliament, council and the royal chancery in the later Middle Ages, seeking favours and redress for grievances. In this talk, Dr Alison McHardy examines the petitions that originated in Lincolnshire between 1200 and 1500, and which formed the subject for her recent book for the Lincoln Record Society that she edited jointly with Dr Gwillam Dodd in 2020. The Lincolnshire petitions contain a wealth of information about men and women at all levels of society. They are particularly valuable for looking at women, since they show that women of different ranks and backgrounds (including widows, wives and nuns) were able to use petitions to right wrongs which they had suffered, whether at the hands of the crown or others. In addition to this, the
Lincolnshire petitions offer fascinating insights into matters that resonate with today’s environmental and social concerns, including famine (climate cooling), plague and racism. Finally, Dr McHardy’s talk provides a timely warning that we should approach these petitions with a healthy degree of scepticism, as some expressions were routine legal common form, and not every allegation may have been entirely true.
Brief Biography:
Dr Alison McHardy is a leading expert on the history of the diocese of Lincoln in the later Middle Ages, and is a Trustee and member of Council for the LRS. She worked at the universities of London (Royal Holloway College) and Aberdeen and, in the years before her retirement, was Reader in Medieval English History at Nottingham. She published her first article about Lincoln’s diocese in 1972, and numerous books and editions of records have followed. These include: The Church in London 1375-1392 (London Record Society, 13, 1977), Clerical Poll-Taxes of the Diocese of Lincoln 1377-1381 (Lincoln Record Society, 81), Royal Writs Addressed to John Buckingham Bishop of Lincoln, 1363-1398 (Lincoln Record Society, 86), Petitions to the Crown from English Religious Houses, c. 1272-c.1485, with Gwilym Dodd (Canterbury and York Society, 2010), The Reign of Richard II: From Minority to Tyranny 1377-97 (Manchester Medieval
Sources, 2012), Proctors for Parliament: Clergy, Community and Politics c. 1248-1539, with Phil Bradford, 2 vols. (C&S, 107, 108, 2017, 2018).
