Tag: Europe
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Finding Transgender Worlds in Late Medieval Iceland
By Basil Arnould Price Translations are the author’s own. On May 25, 2022, software engineer Helen Staniland streamed an interview with journalist Helen Joyce. During the interview, Joyce remarked: “…we have to try to limit the harm and that means reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition. That’s for two reasons –…
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The court chapel’s position in Early Modern Europe: a methodological approach
By Manos Vakondios The “court chapel across religious boundaries” is my PhD project, part of the wider MSCA project PALAMUSTO (Palace Museum of Tomorrow)[1]. Together with nine other PhD theses, palatial spaces, concepts, and infrastructures are addressed and explored by colleagues in universities and museum institutions across Europe.[2] The research focus of my doctoral project…
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Narratology for Historical Research: Medieval Texts and Crusader Cannibals
By Katy Mortimer Historians use various methodologies to investigate the past. A particularly prominent feature of recent historiography, for example, is the exploration of social and cultural history, such as questions of gender, religion, power, and material culture. From the mid-twentieth century, moreover, the ‘linguistic turn’ and the development of narrative theory (narratology) led to…
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Blurring the lines of the two kingdoms: kirk and council in Scotland, 1689-1708
By Robbie Tree As the British Cabinet continues to run rough shod over its responsibilities, we hear grumblings over the effectiveness of our leaders and the legitimacy of central government intervention into the daily lives of the populace. These issues were relevant to early modern Scots as well, in terms of the government of both…
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Toppling Tyrants: Early Medieval Approaches to Regime Change
By Harry Mawdsley “[He] had very little sense. He conducted all his affairs without paying the slightest heed, till at length, employing a heavy hand against [his subjects], he was the cause of violent hatred and outrage among them” Such was the damning description of Childeric II’s reign in Francia by one early medieval chronicler.…
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A Royal Bedroom: Gender, Class and Material Culture
By Esther Griffin van Orsouw For my PhD research at the University of Warsaw, I investigate the consumption of art by the Sobieski family and their contemporaries in the late 17th and early 18th century in relation to space. I consider what type of objects the royals surrounded themselves with, whether they favoured any objects…
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The Palace Museum of Tomorrow
By Esther Griffin – van Orsouw Stories of royal and noble courts capture the imagination of millions of people all over the world. If we look at the offer on streaming services, we see historical titles such as ‘The Other Boleyn Girl’, ‘Versailles’, ‘The Cook of Castamar’, ‘The Last Czars’, and ‘Downton Abbey’, to name…
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A History of Argument: Teaching Students Critical Analysis
By Andrew Struan Writing in 1808 when in office as President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson told his grandson: ‘I never yet saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument’. Continuing this line of thought in his letter, Jefferson explained that his fellow Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin, was ‘the…
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‘Here terrible portents’: Famine as a Catalyst for the first Viking raids?
By Tenaya Jorgensen As an Environmental Historian, I am keenly interested in how humans have responded to climate pressures and weather extremes in the past, and what we can learn from these responses today. One aspect of my doctoral research compares periods of violence against temperature and precipitation during the early Viking Age, c. 790-920.…
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EARLY MODERN STUDENTS: NEW DIRECTIONS FOR THE STUDY OF MIGRATION AND IDENTITY
Dr Karie Schultz In recent years, the value of universities––and especially of a humanities education–– has been hotly contested. Discourse has focused on how the humanities might equip students to think critically about the contemporary problems with which they are faced. Turning our focus toward the history of universities, it is evident that these institutions…
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