News Archive
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.
 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. |
The Mediaeval Journal
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Alex WoolfDr Alex Woolf recently completed a short video film on links between Reading Abbey and the Isle of May in Fife. View here |
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2011-12 Donald Bullough FellowshipThe 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. |
2010 Annual NewsletterView the 2010 Annual Newsletter here |
Saims Essay prizeThe SAIMS essay prize 2010-2011 was awarded to Matthew Hudson |
Annual Lecture: William of Newburgh and the New Titus: Richard I and the Jews of YorkThe Annual Lecture of the Institute of Mediaeval Studies was delivered by Professor Nicholas Vincent on Wednesday 2nd March 2011. Nicholas Vincent is Professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia. He has published several books and some fifty academic articles on various aspects of English and European history in the 12th and 13th centuries, having arrived at Norwich via Oxford, Cambridge, Paris and Canterbury. He made his name on a seminal study of cult and ritual at the court of Henry III and is is currently finishing an edition of the charters of the Plantagenet kings and queens from Henry II to King John. |
2010-11 Donald Bullough FellowshipThe St Andrews Institute of Medieval Studies has appointed Dr Ross Balzaretti as the Donald Bullough Fellow for 2010-11 Dr Ross Balzaretti has taught History at the University of Nottingham since 1990, where he is currently Associate Professor. His most recent book is Narrative and History in the Early Medieval West, edited with Elizabeth Tyler (York). He has published widely in the fields of early medieval gender and sexuality, and was editor of Gender & History between 2004 and 2010. At St Andrews, he will be writing a short book, Liguria in the Early Middle Ages, to be published by Duckworth in a new series edited by Prof. Ian Wood. This will draw together written, archaeological and ecological sources. The current chapter titles are: 1. Ligurian Landscapes; 2. Archaeological approaches; 3. Written Sources and political change; 4. Case Study I: Genoa; 5. Case Study II: Vara Valley; 6. Liguria and Europe. He has been working on the history of Liguria since 1994, and a book of interdisciplinary essays Ligurian Landscapes (edited with Mark Pearce and Charles Watkins) was published by Accordia in 2004, in which he has an essay ‘The History of the Countryside in sixteenth-century Varese Ligure’. He will also be putting the final touches to his book on The Lands of St Ambrose: Monks and Society in Early Medieval Milan (Brepols). |
2009 Annual NewsletterView the 2009 Annual Newsletter here |
Saims Essay prizeThe SAIMS essay prize 2009-2010 was awarded to Chantal Gustaw |
Professor Michael Clanchy (FBA) Institute of Historical Research, University of LondonProfessor Clanchy held two workshops, Wednesday 17th March 2010 entitled "From Memory to Written Record": Abelard and his masters, Anselm of Laon and William of Champeaux. Thursday 18th March 2010 entitled Latin charters before 1300 conserved at St Andrews. |
Annual Lecture: Ordinary Beauty in the Middle Ages Professor Carruthers is Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature and Professor of English at New York University. She is author of several seminal works, including 'The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images 400-1200' (Cambridge, 1998). While she was in St Andrews Professor Carruthers led a workshop on her most famous work, 'The Book of Memory' (Cambridge, 1990. second edition 2008) |
Workshop led by Professor Julia SmithProfessor Julia Smith held a workshop entitled 'Contexts for Early Medieval Hagiography', on Wednesday 9th December 2009. |
The Quality of Scottish Mercy: Royal Letters of Remission in Scotland, c.1100- c.1600.Professor Cynthia Neville, the 2009 Bullough Fellow at SAIMS, held a workshop entitled The Quality of Scottish Mercy: Royal Letters of Remission in Scotland, c.1100-c.1600. |
2009-10 Donald Bullough Fellowship The St Andrews Institute of Medieval Studies has appointed Dr Cynthia Neville as the Donald Bullough Fellow for 2009-10 Dr Cynthia Neville, George Munro Professor of History at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada, will be a visiting fellow in the Department of Mediaeval History from September to December 2009. She has published extensively on various aspects of the legal and social history of the Anglo-Scottish border lands in the later Middle Ages and, more recently, on the social and cultural encounter between Gaels and Europeans in Scotland in the period between 1100 and 1400. She is the author of two books: Violence,Custom and Law: The Anglo-Scottish Border Lands in the Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh University Press, 1998) and Native Lordship in Medieval Scotland: The Earldoms of Strathearn and Lennox, c.1140-1365 (Four Courts Press, 2005). A third, entitled Land, Law and People in Medieval Scotland will be published by Edinburgh University Press in the fall of 2009. While in St Andrews she will be completing work on Volume Four of the Regesta Regum Scottorum: The Acts of Alexander III, the Guardians and John, 1249-1306 (forthcoming from EUP in 2010, with Alan Young) and on a comprehensive study of pardon in Scotland between 1100 and 1603. |
Barbara Crawford Elected President Barbara has recently been elected President of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland for a three year term. This is Scotland's oldest antiquarian society, founded in 1780, and has a membership of over 3500 Fellows.
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SAIMS In The NewsOn 18th December - the day the government published the result of its audit of university research culture in the UK - the Times Higher Education newspaper gave a prominent slot to our very own rock band, Dry Island Buffalo Jump, several of whose members met through the Institute. As the THE put it, quoting Chris Jones, 'The Institute makes St Andrews a real kick-ass place to study Mediaeval History, Culture and Literatures'. The band was gifted it's unusual name by fellow SAIMS member Alex Woolf who had dreamed of a band of that name during his student years. The band played and were interviewed on Radio Scotland on March 17th. |
Professor Robert Bartlett has been awarded a Leverhulme major research fellowship. Dr Simon MacLean has been awarded a prestigious prize by the Leverhulme Trust. Alex Woolf wins Scottish History Book of the Year Award. Dr Bettina Bildhauer has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, a prestigious prize by the Leverhulme Trust. She will be working on the German late Middle Ages and the way they are perceived in modernity. |
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. 
Barbara Crawford