Neil McGuigan

Email: ndm6@st-andrews.ac.uk

Thesis title:“Middle Britain from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century”
Supervisor: Dr Alex Woolf

For my first degree, I studied classics and history at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Washington. My undergraduate dissertation, possibly still the most enjoyable thing I have ever researched, was on the "Myth of Cranes and Pygmies" and was supervised by Dr Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones. There I argued, very roughly, that we should reject an ethnographic or historic provenance for the story and understand it instead as a folk myth related metaphorically to the seasons.

At Edinburgh I completed a research masters under Dr Steve Boardman and Dr James Fraser. This was on the relationship between language and identity in medieval Scotland. Among other things, I took a position sceptical in regards to the pace normally claimed for linguistic change in post-twelfth-century Scotland and to the methodologies currently dominant in assessing such change; I also argued that the ideological integration of the kingdom's English-speakers into historic “Scottishness” by the later middle ages was probably more limited than has usually been envisaged.

Now, supervised by Dr Alex Woolf, I am at St Andrews, having been inspired initially to follow up loose ends from my masters. My doctoral research looks at "Middle Britain", i.e. the territory between the English and Scottish kingdoms, from the tenth to the twelfth centuries. As well as examining evidence for the frontiers of the two realms, I am looking at the chronology and nature of the political institutions important in the region, including to some extent these kingdoms but also the "big churches" like Durham, and "big families" like the Uhtredings.

My research interests, chronologically and geographically, are in insular history in the period between the seventh and fourteenth centuries, most especially the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Thematically, I am most interested in the creations and destructions of political and social order, cultural encounters, language and ethnicity, and the forces which underlie the use of myth (including historical writing, ancient and modern). I am also interested in “Big History”, and try to keep my preoccupations as broad as possible, focused on wider-picture topics that make the specialist matters comprehensible.

Teaching:

  • ID1004: Great Ideas 2 (2011, 2012), intellectual history covering theories of reality, cosmology, origins of life, and rights and justice
  • ME1004: East and West, The Mediterranean in the Middle Ages (2010)
  • ME1006: Scotland and the English Empire, 1070–1500 (2012)
  • ME2001: British Isles from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Centuries (2011)

Papers:

  • "The Anglo-Scottish frontier before the 12th century: a review of the evidence", Institute of Scottish Historical Research Seminar (St Andrews, December 2009)
  • "Reading between the lines: the last decades of ‘Middle Britain’", Institute of Mediaeval Studies Postgraduate Seminar (St Andrews, November 2010)
  • "Are Anglo-Norman accounts of the Viking-Age Northumbrian episcopate reliable?", Institute of Mediaeval Studies Postgraduate Seminar (St Andrews, May 2012)