Post-Doc, School of Historical Studies
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
About
I studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge and Theology at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg-im-Breisgau. I am currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Leicester.
My research focuses primarily on history, theology and literature in Anglo-Saxon England and early medieval Europe. I am currently working on a monograph, Heaven and Earth in Anglo-Saxon England: theology and society in an age of faith, which will be published by Ashgate.
Formal theology and less orthodox religious beliefs informed structures and institutions such as justice and kingship, and influenced the decisions of people who leased land, granted property and portable wealth, and sought to benefit from the help of the angels and saints often in sickness, but also in health. Using a series of case-studies, this book shows how theology interacted with and was shaped by the secular world, while also exploring the ways in which lay individuals – although isolated for the most part from the intricacies of theological discussion – nevertheless were evidently influenced by these and responded to them in their own lives and actions.
As a Ph.D. student I examined ideas about penance, purgatory and the afterlife in Anglo-Saxon England, and some of the work from this has been published in the Journal of Theological Studies (see http://jts.oxfordjournals.org/content/61/2/659.abstract). I am also writing a book which expands and develops the ideas in my thesis and which focuses more broadly on the European context of these ideas of the interim and afterlife.
I am also the principal investigator for 'Manuscripts as networks: transmitting texts and information in early medieval England' (funded by the British Academy). This project uses computer-based (semantic web) technologies to explore medieval manuscripts as key points in networks of people, information and trade; and to investigate how treating manuscripts in this way can inform approaches to and methodologies for the study and editing of medieval texts. My case-study is a group of manuscripts connected with Archbishop Wulfstan (d.1023), dating from the late tenth century to the twelfth. Scholars have tended to explore the texts in these manuscripts with a view to ascertaining an authorial original and hierarchical relationships between surviving copies of the texts. However the manuscripts themselves were produced for specific practical circumstances, and texts and information travelled physically – with people as agents – rather than only intellectually. By using technology to identify links and patterns I will develop new methodologies for understanding texts and manuscripts which treat each book as a cultural artefact representing both the changing circumstances and reuse of texts as well as the movements of individuals and information.
Other projects include work on textual editing, the historiography of Anglo-Saxon England, and the history of science, religion and magic in early medieval Europe.
