School Book Prizes

Congratulations to all students who have been awarded book prizes by the School of History for distinction level performance at subhonours in 2012/13.

Students who have received an award email can now select their prize by clicking here.

Dr Justine Firnhaber-Baker awarded French History Prize

Dr Justine Firnhaber-Baker has been awarded the French History Article Prize for 2012 for her article ‘Jura in Medio: the settlement of seigneurial disputes in medieval Languedoc‘, published in French History 26:4 (December, 2012). French History is published by Oxford University Press.

Dr Firnhaber-Baker’s article addresses a major lacuna in the scholarship on medieval ‘dispute processing’, meaning the settlement and pursuit of violent conflict, usually by aristocrats. Although most of the classic articles on the subject focus on France in the high Middle Ages, there has been almost no attention paid to the later period, largely due to scholars’ assumptions that the imposition of state-sponsored coercive justice eliminated such activities. Focusing on royal judicial and administrative responses to seigneurial wars in fourteenth-century Southern France, the article demonstrates that processes of violent conflict and extrajudicial settlement actually remained robust in the later Middle Ages. The key difference in this later period was that royal courts and officers were now involved in the pursuit and settlement of the dispute through both judicial and extra-judicial means. Although royal involvement in extra-judicial settlements could be viewed as signs of royal weakness, in fact, it demonstrates the crown’s successful penetration of local power relations.

This award complements several recent successes for Dr Firnhaber-Baker, including an AHRC Early Career Fellowship.

Robert Lehman Fellowship

Dr Emily Michelson has been awarded the Robert Lehman Fellowship at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. She will spend the  2013-2014 academic year in Florence along with 14 other fellows from around the world. I Tatti offers Fellows the precious time they need to pursue their studies with a minimum of obligations and interruptions together with a maximum of scholarly resources. While at I Tatti, Emily plans to complete the bulk of the research for a project examining Jewish conversion to Catholicism in the late sixteenth century. Her research will use sermons, diaries, treatises, and other sources available in Florence and Rome to examine why Jewish conversion was especially meaningful in Rome in this period, as the city became a centre of a re-invented Catholicism. 

Honours Pre-Advising

Honours Pre-advising for students who want to take Honours modules in the School of History in 2013-14 will take place between Wednesday 10 April and Thursday 18 April 2013 (4.30 pm). For more information, please visit the dedicated Pre-Advising website.

Prospective Honours students are strongly encouraged to attend the Information meetings that will take place on Wednesday 10 April 2013 (Week 9) in School II:

• Prospective Junior Honours - 1 pm
• Prospective Senior Honours - 2 pm

If you have any questions that are not covered in the Pre-Advising website, you can contact the History Honours Adviser, Dr Kostas Zafeiris (asohist@st-andrews.ac.uk).

Justine Firnhaber-Baker wins AHRC early career fellowship

Dr Justine Firnhaber-Baker has won an early career AHRC fellowship to fund work over the next two years on a project entitled ‘The Jacquerie and Late Mediaeval Revolts’. The fellowship will allow her to spend most of the next two years doing research for and writing a monograph on a peasants’ revolt known as the Jacquerie that took place in northern France in 1358. She will carry out much of the research for that book in the national and regional archives of France and in the Bibliothèque nationale. The fellowship also provides funding to hold two conferences on the phenomenon of late medieval revolt and popular protest at St Andrews in 2014 and 2015. (An initial conference on this topic is being held next week, 19-20 April, with the support of the School of History and the St Andrews Institute for Mediaeval Studies.)

British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship

Dr Bridget Heal has been awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for her project on 'Lutheran Visual Culture during the Age of the Renaissance and Baroque.' The project asks how and why German Lutheranism – a confession that of course derived its significance from the promulgation of the Word – came to value images so highly. The research covers the period from the mid-sixteenth century, an era of intense doctrinal debate following Luther’s death, to the mid-eighteenth century. By then the role of images in Lutheran religious culture had been affirmed by the construction of splendid monuments such as Dresden’s Frauenkirche. The project seeks to illuminate the ways in which religious identity was constituted and expressed during the early modern period, and to draw attention to the blending and cross-fertilization of religious traditions that the study of religious leaders and institutions tends to obscure.

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