Lincoln Castle's west gate

The Thirteenth-Century Conference, 5 to 7 September 2025, University of Lincoln (sponsored by the Lincoln Record Society and the Pipe Roll Society)

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 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.

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.

Annual Medieval Studies Lecture 2022

The Medieval Studies Research Group at the University of Lincoln would cordially like to invite you to attend our online Annual Medieval Studies Lecture on 1 June 2022 at 6pm BST.

This year we are delighted to welcome as our speaker, Professor Amy G. Remensnyder from Brown University, an eminent international scholar of the medieval world, who will be showcasing her fascinating new research on the history of the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa between 1200 and 1700.

Lampedusa (5254484262).jpg
Lampedusa (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Title of talk: Escaping from Mediterranean Slavery: A Deserted Island and a Pirates’ Shrine

Abstract of talk: In the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean, enslaved people fleeing bondage created a maritime fugitive geography in which a tiny deserted deep-sea island lying between Mahdīya and Malta—Lampedusa—came to occupy an exceptional place. There, fugitives found succour at an unusual shrine shared by Muslims and Christians. It highlights the importance of the sea and uninhabited islands as a passage to freedom and also suggests that the Mediterranean system of slavery could engender compassion for its victims on the part of the violent men of the sea who were slavers—corsairs and pirates.

Biography of speaker: Amy G. Remensnyder is Professor of History at Brown University. In her first book, she focused on high medieval French monastic culture and collective memory. Her next book spanned the Atlantic, placing medieval Iberia in dialogue with colonial Mexico by exploring the Virgin Mary as a symbol of conquest and conversion. A practitioner of engaged scholarship, she is a co-editor of the volume Why the Middle Ages Matter: Medieval Light on Modern Injustice and is the founder and director of the Brown History Education Prison Project. She has held many research fellowships, including most recently at the American Academy in Berlin. Her current book project is a longue durée, maritime microhistory of Lampedusa, which brings together past and present to explore this Mediterranean island’s importance to mobile people now – migrants – and mobile people between 1200 and 1700: pirates and their victims.

How to attend: To register for the lecture, please click on this link. Attendees will receive an email detailing how to join two days before the event.

We hope you will join us!

Award Success for Student-Led Project on Making Lincoln Cathedral’s Medieval Manuscripts Accessible

The Medieval Studies Research Group is delighted to announce that two students from the School of English and Journalism, Abigail Laycock and Elizabeth Egan, supervised by our own Dr Renee Ward and Mrs Claire Arrand, have been awarded the Dean’s Choice Award from the Dean of Lincoln Academy of Teaching and Learning (LALT), Dr Kate Strudwick, for their Undergraduate Research Opportunities Scheme (UROS) project, ‘Excavating the Archives: Making Lincoln Cathedral Library’s Middle English Manuscripts Accessible’. Over the summer, Lily and Abbie undertook research on the archive’s collection of manuscripts in or with Middle English texts and prepared materials (text and image) that will be housed on University Library’s Special Collections LibGuide as well as on the Lincoln Cathedral Library’s website, making the content available to both public and academic audiences. To read more about the project, please follow the link here. The award is a splendid achievement and reflects the University’s close relationship enjoyed by its staff and students with Lincoln Cathedral and its collections.

Funding Success for former Lincoln MA in Medieval Studies Student!

Here, Holly Shipton, a former University of Lincoln student, shares news of her recent funding success and reflects upon how her experience at Lincoln helped here:

‘Having completed my BA History and MA Medieval Studies at the University of Lincoln I knew the next step for me was to complete a PhD and continue with my academic career. I will begin my PhD at Queen’s University Belfast in October 2021, funded by the DfE research studentship. My doctoral thesis is entitled Landscape, Ecology, and Agriculture in Medieval Ireland: Management and Decision-making on the Manors of Roger Bigod, and will ultimately address questions concerning the issue of agricultural sustainability and ecological sensibility in late medieval Ireland, and will address key gaps in our understanding of manorial management, agricultural production, and English lordship in Ireland during this period.

Studying history at the University of Lincoln provided me with not only an incredible support base, but also a number of skills which set me apart from other students when applying for a PhD. Being able to learn Latin and palaeography in such a specialist environment enabled me to complete a research topic I would not have been able to had I not learnt those skills, as I was able to translate and transcribe thirteenth-century manorial accounts written predominantly in Latin. The range of modules available to me also helped me develop these skills within a number of historical contexts in which I was less familiar, expanding my breadth of knowledge of the medieval world – including topics such as the economic history of North-western Europe and the medieval cult of saints.

When deciding what I wanted to study for my independent project as an undergraduate, and then for my Dissertation at MA level, I knew I wanted to study a topic that was not related to the modules available at the University of Lincoln, but the wide range of medieval specialists meant I could find the perfect supervisor and thus find my own academic path. My MA dissertation won the Lincoln Record Society award for best MA Medieval dissertation 2020, and I was subsequently asked by the LRS to write a short piece about my research for their review – an incredibly opportunity I would not have been afforded had I not studied at Lincoln.

I am extremely grateful to all the lecturers and researchers I interacted with during my time at the University of Lincoln, but I am especially grateful to Dr Mark Gardiner who supervised and supported me through both my dissertations and helped me enormously, along with Dr Jamie Wood, in applying for my PhD and funding.’

A Medieval Scribe in the Modern Day: the Illuminations of Toni Watts

Medieval Week 2021 provided much food for thought: lectures, podcasts, plays, and even a virtual exhibit. In ‘A Medieval Scribe in the Modern Day’, we explored contemporary manuscript illumination and its links to the medieval past through the art of Toni Watts, an illuminator based in Lincolnshire.

Do keep an eye out for Medieval Week 2022! In the meantime, we hope you will continue to enjoy the exhibit.

All Welcome – Annual Medieval Studies Lecture: Professor Miri Rubin on ‘Who were the Strangers of Medieval Cities?’ (Thursday 3 June 21 6pm)

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?
For a free ticket, please register here via Eventbrite: The Lincoln Annual Medieval Studies Lecture

(You can right-click on the link to open on a new window)

We do hope you can join us as we approach the end of the academic year.