Sciences and Belief in Early Medieval Europe
The aim of this project is to explore the cultural and political contexts of “sciences” in the early medieval world. Sciences from astronomy to medicine were not the marginal pursuits in the period it is often claimed – they were debated at courts, framed how people acted, and received significant resources in books and time. How then did thinking about the natural world shape belief and action?
This project is generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust with a Major Research Fellowship for 2018-21
Merovingians Worlds
The Merovingian kingdoms (c. 450-751) were the most powerful and long-lived of the states that transformed the inheritance of Rome after the Crisis of the Fifth Century. This was a world built on dynamic political, social, and religious interactions, and shaped by its wide-ranging connections from Britain and Ireland to Byzantium and beyond. Merovingian Worlds (contracted with Cambridge University Press) will provide a critical introduction to the rich source material, material and text, and the modern debates that shaped our perception of Western Europe after the Fall of Rome. To capture the richness of Merovingian society, the book will be structured around six interlocking themes: Global Gaul, Peoples under the Merovingians, History and Time, the Organisation of Knowledge, Power and Consent, and Religious Encounters.
Corpus of Early Medieval Latin Medicine (CEMLM)
Early medieval medicine has long been seen as a period in which monastic scribes passively copied classical writings while adding little new material. The manuscript evidence, as catalogued by Augusto Beccaria (1956) and Ernest Wickersheimer (1966), continues to define the field: historians of medicine still rely on their corpus of 225 manuscripts. Yet, since 2020, this project has identified approximately 250 manuscripts containing medical texts dating from c. 750 to 1100 listed by neither Beccaria nor Wickersheimer. These findings open new perspectives on early medieval medicine with the potential to transform our understanding of the evolution of medical knowledge and the contexts in which it was recorded. To widen access to this material and lay the groundwork for future research, we aim to (1) produce a new, comprehensive manuscript catalogue, (2) publish editions and translations of previously unedited recipe collections, and (3) publish a ‘minigraph’ introductory volume for the field. The project is a collaboration between myself, Carine van Rhijn (Utrecht), Claire Burridge (Oslo), Meg Leja (Binghamton), and Jeff Doolittle (Fordham). We are generously supported by a British Academy Project grant for 2023-8.
merovingian world 