In category: News

‘We’ve found a body. We’d like you to help us with our enquiries’. An unnerving telephone message to pick up amid the usual end-of-term pressures, but as it turned out I was wanted only as a witness at a distance of some 550 years. Canterbury Archaeological Trust have been leading an excavation at St Albans […]

Thinking about doing a doctorate in Medieval Studies, but unsure how to turn that initial idea into a formal funding proposal? This post offers some guidance on the process – as well as some information about what the Centre for Medieval Studies at Exeter has to offer for PhD study. From idea to application So […]

It brings me great pleasure to announce that the Arts and Humanities Research Council has seen fit to fund my new project, ‘Forging Memory: Falsified Documents and Institutional History in Europe, c. 970–1020’. This aims to place forgeries at the heart of our understanding of the growth and development of historical consciousness at a key […]

Demons appear in all kinds of medieval sources, but often feature particularly in the records kept by saints’ shrines of miracles performed by the saint. Among many other illnesses and disabilities, medieval saints are said to have cured a number of unfortunate men and women who were thought to be ‘possessed’ or ‘vexed’ by demons.  […]

I’m delighted to see the fruits of a recent Exeter-based archaeological research project on the conflict landscapes of the 12th century published in book form. The co-written title Anarchy: War and Status in 12th-century Landscapes of Conflict, a volume of synthesis which is the principal output from the project, has just been published by Liverpool […]

I have a few words about Simon to mark his departure from Exeter. We are more than sorry to be losing you, Simon. You are going not just to the USA but to Florida – the state of hanging chads and tight election results – and our loss is certainly Florida’s gain. Even as we […]

Last month in the baroque splendours of the Brevnov monastery in Prague, HERA launched its third joint programme of European research on ‘Uses of the Past’.  Amongst the 18 projects being funded for the next three years is one based, in part, at Exeter on Europe in the long tenth century: After Empire: Using and Not […]

I am pleased to be able to say that Orderic Vitalis: Life, Works and Interpretations, the first volume of essays on one of the most significant and influential historians of the Middle Ages, has now been published by Boydell and Brewer. The Gesta Normannorum ducum and Historia ecclesiastica of Orderic Vitalis are widely regarded as landmarks in the development […]

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 […]

Exeter medievalist Eddie Jones has been awarded AHRC funding for an international research network to explore the remarkable intellectual and spiritual legacy of Syon Abbey. Syon, the Birgittine monastery of monks and nuns founded by King Henry V in 1415 was a focus for intellectual and religious renewal in England in the century before the […]