The late medieval English cleric gets a pretty raw deal in film, TV and in popular histories. Where they appear at all, they are often ciphers, materialising merely to fulfil some dramatic function such as crowning a usurping monarch, or conducting the marriage of a pair of love-struck aristos. Those priests, bishops, nuns or friars […]
Mid-morning on 28 October I received an urgent request from BBC Spotlight to provide historical background on an emerging news story in Exeter: the Royal Clarence Hotel had just caught fire. Within a few minutes I was in Cathedral Yard and watched in despair as the flames spread across the building. More than 150 fire-fighters, […]
I finished my last post with the claim that, for video game medievalism, 2016 has really been building up to something greater than itself in 2017. Indeed, there is plenty to look forward to in the coming year which suggests that the digital Middle Ages is set to become more prevalent than ever. With broader […]
Having recently passed the viva for my thesis ‘Painful Transformations: A Medical Approach to Experience, Life Cycle and Text in British Library, Additional MS 61823, The Book of Margery Kempe’, it seems like a timely moment to reflect on the past few months and years of my postgraduate study at Exeter. I am grateful to […]
At the opening and closing the BBC’s adaptation of Wolf Hall I was asked to share my thoughts on Thomas Cromwell with presenter Simon Bates on BBC Radio Devon’s ‘Good Morning Devon’ Breakfast Show. Hilary Mantel’s novels have challenged the conventional casting of the familiar Reformation drama making Chancellor More the grim-faced obstacle in the path […]
This past month the Museum of Somerset in Taunton has enjoyed a particular honour: it has been host to the Alfred Jewel. Found in North Petherton (Somerset) by Sir Thomas Wroth in 1693, the Jewel was bequeathed the Ashmolean Museum in 1718 and has remained there ever since. Its homecoming (if the term may be […]
Barely a century after the Muslim invasion of Spain in 711, a tomb was found in Galicia and declared to be that of the apostle St. James. The conquest had hardly touched Galicia in the far northwest, but the densely settled region was being forcibly joined to the kingdom of the Asturs, a tiny Christian […]
When Isabel of Castile and Fernando of Aragon took Granada from the Moors in 1492, their propaganda claimed it as a heroic victory marking the culmination of an 800 year struggle against Muslim invaders. Arabic and Jewish accounts, of course, reported it differently, but one Christian account is exceptional in presenting an alternative take on […]
Recently three academics associated with the Centre for Medieval Studies visited the Cathedral Archives in Mdina, Malta, as part of a research project on ‘Magic in Malta, 1605: the Moorish Slave Sellem Bin Al-Sheikh Mansur and the Roman Inquisition.’ The project is funded by the AHRC, and the project team are Prof. Dionisius Agius from […]
A couple of weeks ago I received an email from the BBC History Magazine website asking me if I’d be willing to draw up a quiz for their Medieval Week. The brief was to come up with ten multiple-choice questions about the Middle Ages, relating to political, social, economic and cultural history. I said yes […]