News

Dr Alex Woolf gave the Kathleen Hughes Memorial Lecture 2012. Dr Woolf's talk, entitled 'The Churches of Pictavia', was held in Hughes Hall, Cambridge on Monday 30th April.

Jamie Page, a PhD student in the Institute of Mediaeval Studies supervised by Professor Frances Andrews and Dr Bettina Bildhauer, has appeared in a documentary on prostitution in the Middle Ages entitled "Käufliche Liebe im Mittelalter," made by the Munich-based production company Bilderfest for German terrestrial television channel SAT. 1. Jamie acted as historical consultant and was interviewed for the programme in the municipal archive of Nördlingen, where he spent part of last year conducting research for his thesis on prostitution in later mediaeval Germany.

The documentary describes living and working conditions in mediaeval brothels on the basis of archival evidence from Nördlingen, and focuses in particular upon the career of Els von Eystett, a prostitute at the centre of an abortion trial conducted in the town in the late fifteenth century. The programme was aired on 28.02.12 and ties in with the popular Die Wanderhure series of TV films.

Further information on the documentary can be found at: http://www.sat1.de/film/die-rache-der-wanderhure/kaeufliche-liebe-im-mittelalter

2011-12 Donald Bullough Fellowship

The St Andrews Institute of Medieval Studies has appointed Dr Marlene Hennessy as the Donald Bullough Fellow for 2011-12

Dr Marlene Villalobos Hennessy has taught English at Hunter College, the City University of New York, since 2004, where she is currently Associate Professor. She has edited a collection of essays, Tributes to Kathleen L. Scott. English Medieval Manuscripts:  Readers, Makers and Illuminators (London and Turnhout: Harvey Miller/Brepols, 2009), and has published on late medieval English religious culture, Carthusian monasticism, and manuscript art.  At St Andrews she will be completing research on a reference work entitled An Index of Images in English Manuscripts from the Time of Chaucer to Henry VIII, c.1380 - c.1509: The Scottish Libraries and Collections, to be published by Harvey Miller/Brepols.  The volume is part of an ongoing series that aims to list and identify all illustrations contained in  manuscripts produced in the British Isles during the period, including informal images on catchwords, ascenders, descenders, and titles, as well as miniatures of all kinds. Every illustration is noted, from full-page miniatures and historiated initials to king’s heads, marginalia, and nota bene signs, as well as author portraits, theological diagrams, drawings of medical procedures and alchemical apparatus.  The project aims to help scholars and researchers navigate the Scottish libraries and collections, locate where images may be found, and facilitate further research, while providing information-sharing, convenience, and utility.  When not working on the Index, she will be finishing up a short monograph on devotion to the blood of Christ in late medieval England.

The Mediaeval Journal

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The editors, Ian Johnson and Margaret Connolly, flank the SAIMS fundatrix, Frances Andrews, and current director, Alex Woolf, with the first issue of the Institute’s journal TMJ.

Alex Woolf

Dr Alex Woolf recently completed a short video film on links between Reading Abbey and the Isle of May in Fife.
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Barbara Crawford

Dr Barbara Crawford has been awarded an OBE in the recent Queen's Birthday Honours List for services to History and Archaeology.

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Fernando Arias Guillén

Fernando Arias Guillén was awarded his doctorate from the University of Castilla-La Mancha in December 2010, for a thesis on royal power in the kingdom of Castile in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He was supervised by Dr Ana Rodriguez.  He has been involved in the continuing collaborations between mediaevalists at St Andrews and at the CSIC in Madrid, and also spent some months in St Andrews during his doctorate.  He is now undertaking postdoctoral research funded by a Spanish government scholarship, with the intention of writing a book comparing the development of royal power in France, Castile and England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  Chris Given-Wilson is acting as his mentor during his post-doctoral time in St Andrews.

Bursaries for M Litt in Mediaeval Studies

Applicants are eligible for the above if History is a major component of their degree.

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SAIMS 2011 Annual Newsletter

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Forthcoming Events

Mediaeval Studies Research Seminar

Award Winners

Dr James Palmer has been awarded an AHRC Early Career Fellowship for the next academic year. He will be working on his second book, Apocalyptic Traditions, Power and Society 400-1100, which will examine the relationship between beliefs about the end of time and social and political action, from the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West, to the First Crusade.

St Andrews PhD students have won two of the three annual Postdoctoral Fellowships offered by the Society for Renaissance Studies.

Alessia Meneghin, will be working on a new project, Shaping affordable fashion: Florentine mercers in the fifteenth century, which will expand on current knowledge of an occupational group that determined the access of urban workers to low-cost fashion in late medieval Tuscany. The project is based on a comparative study of the activity of four mercers in Florence between 1415 and 1479 whose surviving books make it possible to establish the number, volume and nature of transactions, the goods sold, the suppliers and their business turnover. This will allow both quantitative and qualitative analysis of issues such as the relationship between the mercers’ specializations and the demand of their clientele, the connection between that same clientele’s economic choices and their social identities, and how the choices and preferences for certain types of accessories reflect the dynamics of changes in fashion.

Stefan Visnjevac, will be working on a project entitled Speaking in Public in Late Medieval Italy – The Thought and Preaching of Leonardo Mattei da Udine (1399-1469). The aim is to produce an extensive study of the life and works of the Dominican preacher Leonardo Mattei da Udine (1399-1469) who was held in high regard during his own lifetime, but is now virtually forgotten. His diverse oral and literary output on subjects from philosophy to fashions, from speeches at the Council of Florence to sermons delivered in Florence and Udine, hold great potential for a better understanding of fifteenth-century culture, intellectual thought, and the developing processes of the transmission of ideas. An investigation of Mattei’s extensive activity in Friuli - as preacher, prior, Udine’s advisor on theological concerns, prolific book trader, and promoter of local devotional cults – will seek, moreover, to add significantly to the historical scholarship of this least-studied region of Italy.