Dr John Slevin, former Exeter PhD student and editor of the newly published History of Alfred of Beverley, completed his doctorate as a mature student and distance-learner. Beginning and completing your doctoral studies at a different stage in life to those fresh out of their undergraduate or postgraduate degrees has advantages, but also poses particular […]
In medieval England Queen Consorts were not the only women whose status and style of life were changed forever at the coronation of a king. Crowning conferred on the monarch many prerogative rights; Richard II (1377-1399) – after defeating the challenge of the Lords Appellant in 1387 â saw them codified in law. The focus […]
Have you ever come across mysterious references to medieval heretics and their violent repression and wished to know more? Have you ever wondered about those signs welcoming you to the pays cathare as you travel through the south of France? If so, you may be interested in my recent conversation with Dr Sophie Ambler of […]
Today, Tynemouth Priory looks a likely place for a haunting. The ruin stands tall and gaunt at the high point of the windswept Northumberland coastline. Advancing towards its hollow east end is a wave of weathered gravestones. There was no gothic cemetery outside when it was a living community of monks (Benedictine) but the medieval […]
Five months on from our previous post, work has been proceeding apace at the ‘Learning French in Medieval England’ project â or, as literally no-one is calling it, ‘Tretiz Towers’. Our primary focus at the moment remains the work that we’re doing on the project’s central strand: namely, producing a digital edition of the Tretiz‘s 17 extant manuscripts. […]
Writing in 1879, the great Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins bemoaned the recent felling of the poplars at Binsey near Oxford: ‘All felled, felled, are all felled’. To him, those trees represented something precious, a âsweet especial rural sceneâ. Had he been alive in 1615, he might have felt similarly outraged about what had taken […]
Five hundred years ago this week the monarchies of England and France met in the meadowland of the Pas-de-Calais. Today these flatlands are largely nondescript for the traffic that flashes past them on the A26, âlâAvenue des Anglaisâ, but even now the fields six kilometres to the east of GuĂźnes, on the edge of the […]
Since I have the dubious honour of being the most active member of staff (here at Exeter) on social media, I’m periodically asked how students and scholars new to this brave new world should navigate it. Ultimately, there’s no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to go about social media engagement; but here are a few rather […]
Just over two months ago, we announced the start of a new project based at the Centre for Medieval Studies here in Exeter: Learning French in Medieval England. Our aim is to produce a digital edition of Walter de Bibbesworthâs Tretiz, a rhymed French vocabulary of the mid-thirteenth century that has attracted significant critical interest […]
Since Iâve been on maternity leave Iâve not surprisingly been pondering all things to do with pregnancy and baby care. Iâve also been thinking about medieval pregnancy advice, since itâs a topic Iâve touched on during my ongoing research on medieval fertility and infertility. Medical texts are probably the medieval sources which give most information […]