A brief historical interpretation based upon the excavations carried out at the Northumbrian ecclesiastical site at Auldhame in East Lothian.

This chapter looks at the use of the word plebs in a number of Late Antique texts thought to be written by Britons and discusses what this reveals about the social and ecclesiastical conditions amongst the Britons in the fifth and sixth centuries.

This paper attempts to look at the evidence for English ideas about their own national origins in the period before Bede.

This short note cautions against essentialist ways of thinking about the Picts and reminds readers that the term itself is an exonym and that there is little or no evidence that the people we call Picts had any self identification as a group.

A discussion of the educational context of Columbanus in and around Bangor and Moville in the sixth century.

A chapter in volume 1 of the Cambridge History of Ireland

In 1234, Pope Gregory IX (1227-1241) called for a crusade to exterminate heretics in Bosnia, a call that he would repeat in 1238. In this chapter, I argue that the Bosnian crusade(s) of the 1230s was/were launched not against the adherents of a particular doctrine but against a place, one which was thought to be an especial incubator of heretical…[Read more]

This chapter examines how historians of the Franciscan order have created androcentric and teleological histories of the order based on hagiographic narratives of origin, and shows how we might better understand these hagiographic texts as products of the contexts in which they were produced.

In this chapter, I complicate the image of women religious as either authoritative and agentive or submissive and oppressed, with reference to the relationships between royal women, the papacy, and the Franciscan order in Bohemia and the Polish duchies. Using the thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century evidence for these relationships, I argue…[Read more]

Available online at http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/2019

Review of Bouldin, Women Prophets and Radical Protestantism in the British Atlantic World, 1640–1730. Available online at https://historywomenreligious.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/bouldin_temple_final_may20161.docx

Book review of ‘Mysticism and Reform, 1400-1750 ed. Sara S. Poor and Nigel Smith’

The conceptualization of a group of “medieval English mystics” has caused significant controversy in recent decades. A product of scholarly accounts of the Reformation dominated by confessional bias, the concept of a group of uniquely English authors who existed outside of their wider English and continental contexts has been steadily eroded by…[Read more]