Exeter Medieval Studies Blog

In category: Research Postcards


Research Postcard: Courtesy Books and College Libraries

As an undergraduate, I spent quite a lot of time in and around Emmanuel College, Cambridge. One of my best friends was a student there, and in the spirit of putting inter-collegiate rivalries aside, we visited each other fairly frequently. A not-insignificant portion of my undergraduate dissertation was written, as was his, in the throes […]


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Research Postcard: Talking about Gender and Healthcare in Cologne

At the end of January I went to a workshop at the University of Cologne, run by a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities and expertly organized by Eva-Maria Cersovsky and Ursula Giessmann. It focused on ā€˜Gender(ed) Histories of Health, Healing and the Body, 1250-1550ā€™. Iā€™ve long been interested in this area, which is important for […]


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Visiting a PhD Crime Scene

In my PhD research, I am looking at the local pasts that were communicated through liturgy in the tenth century in a metropolitan city on the Moselle river: Trier. My main corpus of sources consists of prayers, sermons, hymns and hagiographical texts, all of which can be found in medieval manuscripts from this area. In […]


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Research Postcard – More Magical Activities in Malta

Appropriately ā€“ given that it was Halloween ā€“ I spent part of reading week in the archives researching the history of magic.Ā  Dr Alex Mallett (formerly of Exeter, now based in Leiden) and I were doing some of the final research for an AHRC-funded project led by Professor Dionisius Agius, Institute of Arab and Islamic […]


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Research Postcard – More Magical Activities in Malta

Appropriately ā€“ given that it was Halloween ā€“ I spent part of reading week in the archives researching the history of magic.Ā  Dr Alex Mallett (formerly of Exeter, now based in Leiden) and I were doing some of the final research for an AHRC-funded project led by Professor Dionisius Agius, Institute of Arab and Islamic […]


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Helen Birkett in Middletown, CT: Collaborating with the Traveler’s Lab

This term I am based at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, working with the Travelerā€™s Lab research group. The Travelerā€™s Lab is a small network of scholars interested in medieval mobility and communication, and in using new digital analytical methods to explore medieval data. It is also distinctive ā€“ in the Humanities, at least! ā€“ […]


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Helen Birkett in Middletown, CT: Collaborating with the Traveler’s Lab

This term I am based at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, working with the Travelerā€™s Lab research group. The Travelerā€™s Lab is a small network of scholars interested in medieval mobility and communication, and in using new digital analytical methods to explore medieval data. It is also distinctive ā€“ in the Humanities, at least! ā€“ […]


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On Tour with the Normans: Four Unmissable Sites in Sicily

Having finally submitted my thesis on Norman ethnic identity, I decided to celebrate by taking a holiday. And what better place for a young Norman historian to visit than Sicily?! It’s somewhere that combines exciting historical sites with the sun and warmth that seemed to bypass Devon this summerā€¦ Plus, as a newly-trained Norman expert, […]


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Sarah Hamilton, New Haven, CT: What’s the Use of Cursing?

Itā€™s unusual for British universities to be in a position to buy medieval manuscripts. Yet the recent publicity given to the discovery of a unique leaf from the Sarum Ordinal printed by William Caxton in the 1470s amongst the binding fragments of various manuscripts and early printed books purchased by the University of Reading in […]


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James Clark in Champaign, IL: A French Noblewoman Makes her Monastic Vows

In the heart of the American Mid-West, two and a half hours from Chicago, in the University twin town of Urbana-Champaign is a rare gem of a collection of medieval manuscripts.   An early translation of the Rule of St Benedict Among them is a French translation of the Regula Benedicti,Ā itself a relatively rare survival, […]


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