Posted by Edward Mills
23 June 2025As another term draws to an end, so does the first year of weekly posts on the Exeter Medieval Studies blog. Over the past year, we’ve been fortunate to host weekly posts featuring twenty-plus members of the Centre, and as we sign off for the summer, we thought we’d take a look back — and a look forward.
Local sites have remained a fixture on the blog, as they have been since its inception, and Philip Wallinder remains the oracle on all sites of interest. He’s had company this year, though, as Jennifer Farrell took us (along with her final-year students) to Tintagel, and Rowenna Langley explored Glastonbury Abbey. We were particularly delighted to welcome Rowenna to the blog as part of a cohort of undergraduate and Master’s students who’ve started to write for us, along with Shagnick Bhattycharya (whose latest post explored a curious case from the Devon Heritage Centre). If you’re an undergraduate or Master’s student reading this, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with your ideas for posts: the only requirement is an interest in the Middle Ages.
The Centre wouldn’t be much of a Centre without its events and research seminars, and several of our posts have aimed to spread the word about some of the exciting gatherings that take place under our auspices. For the Barton and Orme Lectures this year, we were thrilled to welcome our two speakers — Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo and Roberta Gilchrist — to the blog, as we did more recently with Monica H. Green, whose events in Exeter last week were met with great acclaim. Closer to home, launch events for edited volumes and hands-on workshops on scribal practice had their moment in the spotlight, too, as did (appropriately enough) our series of the same name.
As is tradition, the blog is now taking a break from regular Monday posts over the summer months, as members of the Centre head out on their own pilgrimages to archives and conferences (and, in a few fortunate cases, beaches) around the world. That doesn’t mean, though, that the blog is going entirely silent. In a few weeks’ time, we’ll be hearing from Tom Hinton, who’ll be telling us more about the recently-awarded training grant across GW4 institutions, ‘Medieval Studies Mobilising Digital Humanities‘.
Later on this summer, we’re hoping to feature occasional posts based on archive visits, particularly since things have been a little quiet in our ‘research postcards’ series (although the solitary entry this year did involve the Rockin’ Rhino ride at Longleat House). If you’re off on a research trip over the summer, don’t forget to report back in!
Things are starting to take shape for the autumn term, too: future posts will include snappily-dressed horses, semi-sane shepherds, and Pliocene thrust tectonics. If that isn’t a reason to keep coming back on a Monday, we don’t know what is.
From all of us at the Centre for Medieval Studies, we’d like to wish our readers a happy and restful summer period, and to offer our thanks for your support over the 2024-25 academic year.
Featured image: summer, from Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Français 22532 (fol. 145r).