REGISTRATION OPEN! The Maladies, Miracles and Medicine of the Middle Ages, III. ‘Patients, Prayers, and Pilgrims’ (Friday 1 April, 2022)

I am delighted to announce that registration is now open for The Maladies, Miracles and Medicine of the Middle Ages, III ‘Patients, Prayers and Pilgrims’. The conference will be run in a hybrid format online and in-person at the University of Reading (UK). Please note that we have limited in-person attendance available, and this will [...]

CALL FOR PAPERS! ‘The Maladies, Miracles and Medicine of the Middle Ages, III: ‘Patients, Prayers and Pilgrims’

I'm excited to announce that the third quadrennial 'Maladies, Miracles and Medicine' (MM&M) conference will be taking place on Friday 1 April 2022. The Call for papers (CFP) can be found below with further details about the conference theme and the submission of abstracts. The image is presented as a .jpg, however a .pdf version [...]

Summer Weather and Winchester’s Patron Saint

If you are anything like me you will be thinking that after what felt like a prolonged grey, cold winter it feels like we should’ve turned a corner into summer. I suppose it’s mild at least and that’s almost enough to break out into a rendition of Reading Abbey’s own thirteenth-century composition ‘Sumer is icumen [...]

Call for Papers. Leeds IMC 2023: ‘Searching for Health and the Holy: Traces in Texts and Topography’

I am delighted to be able to share the following CfP for the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, July 2023. Below you will find a copy of the CfP as a jpg image. A text version of the CfP can be found below that too. Text version: Searching for Health and the Holy: Traces [...]

Studying to History at university: Initial Steps and the Application Process

Studying to History at university: Initial Steps and the Application Process

The following two videos were recorded for the Richard III Society's Schools Conference (June 2022). These videos aim to offer a brief overview for those thinking about applying to study History as an undergraduate student and to highlight some of the points prospective students should consider when looking into History degrees. Further, and more thorough, [...]

Monday 14th December 1914: Bad Weather in the Bay of Biscay

Monday 14th December 1914: Bad Weather in the Bay of Biscay

Last year I shared three December entries from my great-grandfather’s War Time Signal Log on the Reading History blog.[*]  Having come to a bit of a creative block with my writing this afternoon, I thought I would take a break from medieval medicine and return to the pages of Arthur John Pidgeon’s Log to see [...]

Finding Evidence of Holy Healing: The Case of St Robert of Knaresborough

My research focuses particularly on the experiences of pilgrims who sought out miraculous cures from saint cults in high-medieval England.  A key resource for this, therefore, are the hagiographical sources which include reports of the posthumous miracles (collected together in a subgenre called miracula) worked by various saints through their shrines.  However, these formally written-up [...]

The Maladies, Miracles and Medicine of the Middle Ages, II: Places, Spaces and Objects (23rd March 2018)

The Maladies, Miracles and Medicine of the Middle Ages, II: Places, Spaces and Objects (23rd March 2018)

My co-organiser, Frances Cook, and I are pleased to announce that we can now share our programme for the sixth annual GCMS (Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies) postgraduate and early-career researcher conference. Further details including the programme can be found below. 'The Maladies, Miracles and Medicine of the Middle Ages, II' (MMM 2018) will take [...]