Staff Members

Marianne Ailes

Honorary Professor, Department of French

Marianne Ailes’ research interests are in Medieval French literature, including French literature of medieval England. She has a particular interest in the chansons de geste and early vernacular chronicles, focussing on crusade narratives. She is actively involved in editing and translating as well as interpretative studies. She is currently leading ‘Charlemagne: A European Icon’, a Leverhulme Trust funded international network project on the appropriation of Charlemagne material in different lingusitic cultures in the Middle Ages. This followed a collaborative project on Charlemagne in England with Phillipa Hardman (Dept of English, University of Cambridge).

Anne Ismay

Senior Lecturer in English, Department of English

Anne Baden-Daintree’s teaching and research is focused on Medical Humanities (particularly grief, ageing, and HIV/AIDS), poetry, and Medieval Studies; my current work is in two main areas: Medieval Reception of the Old Testament Song of Songs; and The Domestic Spaces of HIV/AIDS in literature and visual culture from 1980s to the present. She has also published on various aspects of medieval poetry, including religious lyrics, Pearl, the alliterative Morte Arthure, and the English poems of Charles d’Orleans, and have ongoing research interests in literature and visual art of grief and bereavement, from the Middle Ages to the present day; poetic form and genre, particularly sonnets, sonnet sequences and elegy; and late medieval representations of ageing in lyric poetry.

Mary Bateman

Lecturer, Department of English

Mary Bateman specialises in the literature and culture of late medieval and early modern England, and especially on the continuities between the medieval and the early modern. In addition to cross-period work, she also takes a transnational approach: she has previously published on Bevis of Hampton narratives in European manuscript contexts, and she is currently working on a project concerning the print reception of British foundation myth across early modern Europe.

Luciana Cordo Russo

Research Associate, Department of English

Luciana Cordo Russo is a literary scholar specialising in medieval Welsh literature, especially in translations of French and Latin narratives. She is interested in the circulation of texts across Europe and medieval Britain, and in the interactions between Welsh, Latin, French, and English literary cultures. She is currently a Research Associate on the Mapping the March project (ERC-UKRI, PI Helen Fulton). She was previously a British Academy Newton International Fellow. She is preparing a monograph with the results of this project: The Reception of the Charlemagne Legend in Medieval Wales, to be published by University of Wales Press. She is also editing the volume The French of the Celtic Worlds with Matt Lampitt (Boydell & Brewer).

https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/persons/luciana-m-cordo-russo

Leonardo Costantini

Senior Lecturer, Department of Classics & Ancient History

Leonardo is a Senior Lecturer in Classics, and directs the Medieval Studies Summer School. His interests involve the literary and textual aspects of the works of several Latin authors and their medieval reception. His first two books focused on the second-century Latin orator Apuleius of Madauros. He also published a co-edited volume entitled Middle Platonism in its Literary Context (2023, OUP). He is currently collaborating with Dr Mary Stuart (Derby) and PyrOptik for the testing of a new hyperspectral imaging device to enhance the legibility of damaged manuscripts. Furthermore, he the principal investigator of the Fragmenta Iguvina project, which aims to study the unidentified manuscript fragments from the archives in Gubbio (Italy).

Rhiannon Daniels

Associate Professor in Italian, Department of Italian

Rhiannon works on Italian medieval and Renaissance literary culture, with a particular interest in the reception of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375). As a book historian, she is interested in the material presentation, paratexts, and page design of both manuscripts and early printed books, book makers and their contexts (scribes, rubricators, illuminators, compositors, editors, publishers, printers etc), and reading publics between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. In 2021, she established Bristol Common Press with colleagues in English Studies as a working historical print shop and collaborative laboratory, in order to explore practice-based research and develop co-created projects which reach beyond academia.

Steve De Hailes

Lecturer, Department of English

Steve is a Lecturer in English. He works primarily with Middle English and Modern English literatures from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. His interests include liminality and the otherworldly, fairy and supernatural encounters, romance convention, and representations of landscape. Steve’s current research focuses on mountains in the medieval imagination. He is interested in exploring the intersections between literal and metaphorical interpretations of mountains; the inherent complexity of mountain landscapes as spaces associated with (to give a few examples) defence, danger, outlawry, monstrosity, trade, agriculture, worship, and pilgrimage; and the relationship between lived experience and inherited knowledge of mountainous terrain.

Peter Dent

Senior Lecturer, Department of History of Art (Historical Studies)

Peter Dent is Head of Subject for History of Art at the University of Bristol. He is a specialist in late medieval and Renaissance sculpture and also works on Italian literature of the period, Dante in particular. He was previously an editor of the Sculpture Journal and has most recently contributed an essay to the catalogue for the exhibition Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350. He has just been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for a project called ‘What Lies Within? The Hidden Interior of the Sculpted Body’.

Lucy Donkin

Senior Lecturer in History and History of Art, Department of History of Art (Historical Studies)

Lucy Donkin is a Senior Lecturer in History and History of Art. She works on the visual and material culture of medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, especially as this was informed by faith and the environment. She has published on the creation, depiction and decoration of sacred space, including Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages (Cornell, 2022). Her current project on the materiality and portability of place traces a network of cemeteries connected through the symbolic movement of soil. She is also interested in the visual culture of premodern mining and extraction.

Helen Fulton

Chair in Medieval Literature, Department of English

Helen Fulton is Chair of Medieval Literature, with research interests spanning medieval Welsh and English literatures, Arthurian literature, political and prophetic writing, urban culture, and the politics of identity in transnational contexts. She is the Principal Investigator in a major project selected for funding by the ERC Advanced Grant scheme and funded by UKRI, ‘Mapping the March: Medieval Wales and England, c. 1282–1550’, which runs from 2023 to 2028. As part of her interest in mapping, community building, urban culture, and spatial identities, Helen works with the Historic Towns Trust to produce historical maps of British cities and has so far worked on the ‘Map of Bristol in 1480’ and maps of medieval and industrial Swansea in both English and Welsh. Helen is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, and a Trustee of the Historic Towns Trust.

Eileen Gardiner

Honorary Research Fellow, School of Humanities

Eileen Gardiner, a research fellow at the University of Bristol, specializes in medieval otherworld visions. She is the author of Visions of Heaven and Hell Before Dante and Medieval Visions of Heaven and Hell: A Sourcebook. She has published five volumes on hell in various religious traditions. The final volume: Jewish, Christian and Islamic Hell is due for publication in 2026. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature and Medieval Studies. With Ron Musto, Eileen is co-publisher of Italica Press, the former co-director of ACLS Humanities E-Book and of the Medieval Academy of America and co-editor of its journal, Speculum.

Rachael Harkes

Research Associate, Department of History (Historical Studies)

Rachael Harkes is a postdoctoral research associate on the ‘Mapping the Medieval March: Wales and England, 1282-1550’ project. Her current research interests include the political and economic culture of the Welsh Marches, particularly the relationship between the Council of the Marches and local governors. Her previous research has centred on medieval religious guilds in England and Wales, exploring processes of decision-making through the prism of guild membership. The product of this research was her first monograph, Forging Fraternity in Late Medieval Society, which explored how entire households, political communities, and both upper and lower echelons of society became part of the Palmers’ Guild of Ludlow.

Anna Havinga

Senior Lecturer in Sociolinguistics, Department of German

Anna Havinga’s research is centred on historical sociolinguistics. She is generally interested in language variation and change, more particularly in language policy, language standardisation, and language attitudes. Her research specialisms are linguistic developments in 18th- and 19th-century German on the one hand, and the vernacularisation of late medieval documentary legal texts on the other.

Anke Holdenried

Senior Lecturer in Medieval History, Department of History (Historical Studies)

Anke Holdenried’s work explores medieval Europe’s rich and diverse cultural and intellectual history, especially in relation to two broad areas: (1) the study – within cultural frameworks – of approaches to the future and (2) study of the migration and transmission of ideas across different cultures. 

The following are particular research interests of hers: Manuscript studies; ideas about time, apocalypticism, and prophecy; intellectual, literary, religious cultures to c.1300; history of scholarship (medieval to early modern)

Emma Hornby

Professor of Music, Department of Music

Emma Hornby’s research is focused on medieval western liturgical chant. She is currently working on Old Hispanic chant in collaboration with Professor Rebecca Maloy (University of Colorado at Boulder). Their first joint monograph is Music and Meaning in Old Hispanic Lenten chants: Psalmi, Threni and the Easter Vigil Canticles (Boydell & Brewer, 2013). They are now working on Iberian Saints, in an AHRC-funded project with colleagues from Spain, the UK and the Netherlands. Hornby leads a Leverhulme-funded Iberian processions project, and a Leverhulme/BA funded project on comparative computer-assisted analysis of Georgian and Old Hispanic chant. Emma also has research interests in the transmission of western liturgical chant (including aspects of orality), analysis of formulaic chant, and the relationship between words and music in the Middle Ages.

Cathy Hume

Associate Professor in Medieval Literature, Department of English

Cathy Hume specialises in late medieval English poetry and its social and cultural contexts.  Her first book was Chaucer and the Cultures of Love and Marriage (2012); more recently she has written about biblical poetry, including in her 2021 book Middle English Biblical Poetry: Romance, Audience and Tradition. In 2024-5 she was awarded an AHRC fellowship to edit an anthology of biblical poems for TEAMS Middle English Texts Series and stage a performance of ‘The Life of Job’.  She is also interested in cognitive and environmental approaches to medieval poetry, and in reading and book cultures.

Ronald Hutton

Professor of History, Department of History (Historical Studies)

Ronald Hutton is Professor of History in the University of Bristol, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Antiquaries, the Learned Society of Wales and the British Academy. He has published nineteen books and ninety-six essays on a wide range of subjects including British history between 1400 and 1700, ancient and modern paganism in Britain, the British ritual year, and the history of witchcraft and magic. In all of those different fields he has at times dealt extensively with medieval material. His latest book, on goddesses associated with both love and war, uses both Irish and Norse medieval literature.

Evan Jones

Associate Professor in Economic History, Department of History

Evan Jones specializes in late medieval – early modern economic and social history, particularly in relation to Bristol. His research interests include:

• Bristol’s fifteenth-sixteenth century exploration voyages

• The illicit trade of early modern England

• The trade and shipping of the Severn Sea

• Irish overseas trade and economic development in the sixteenth century

Tristan Kay

Associate Professor in Italian Studies, Department of Italian

Tristan Kay specializes in medieval Italian literature and culture, with a focus on Dante and his modern reception. His first book, Dante’s Lyric Redemption (OUP, 2016), explores Dante’s engagement with vernacular lyric traditions and his vision of eros as a redemptive force. He has published widely on Dante in relation to concepts of love and desire, politics, and on aspects of his modern reception. His current book project, which has been supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, examines the persistence and the limits of the idea of Dante as a ‘national’ figure, from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Sophie Kelly

Lecturer in Visual Arts and Cultural Heritage, Department of History of Art (Historical Studies)

Sophie Kelly is a specialist in the art and visual culture of medieval England. Broadly, she is interested in the relationship between the visual arts and medieval religion, from the role of the role of images in the performance of the liturgy to the function of material culture in devotional practice. She also has a background in museums and curating and have worked on several major exhibitions, most recently Thomas Becket: Murder and the Making of a Saint at the British Museum and Making History: Church, State and Conflict at Canterbury Cathedral. 

Matt Lampitt

Research Associate, Department of English, Department of English

Matt Lampitt is a Research Associate working on the Mapping the March project. Alongside data collection for the project, I recently published Literary Culture in the Medieval Welsh Marches: Networks, Places, Politics (OUP, 2025) and am now working on a co-edited volume, The French of the Celtic Worlds (Boydell & Brewer, forthcoming). My other research project, Mudbound, analyses representations of mud/earth in medieval literary texts in dialogue with contemporary eco-theoretical philosophers. My wider research interests include: the multilingual literary cultures of premodern Britain, France, and Occitania; manuscript studies; digital and environmental humanities; Arthurian literature; medieval literature and critical theory.

Kate McClune

Senior Lecturer, Department of English

My primary research focuses on Older Scots literature and book history; I have published widely on sixteenth-century Scots poetry, Arthurian literature, and border territories. More recently, I have been working with conservationist colleagues at the Zoological Society of London to examin the ways in which medieval archival material can aid and complement our understanding of modern approaches to animal conservation, extinction, and rewilding. Along with Professor Sam Turvey (ZSL) I have published on the relationship between these non-traditional approaches and mammal extinction, and we continue to investigate how we can best deploy medieval materials to support modern efforts to preserve natural habitats and environments.

Carolyn Muessig

Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Department of Religion and Theology

I am currently working on a monograph addressing the history of premodern female preaching in Western Europe. My recent publications include: ‘Hidden Marks of Leadership: Holy Women and Invisible Stigmata in the Late Middle Ages’. In John Arblaster and Rob Faesen, eds. New Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Mystical Women: Beatrice of Nazareth Past and Present (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025), pp. 58–82; ‘Women and Preaching in Premodern Europe Part One: The Early Middle Ages to the Twelfth Century’. Medieval Sermon Studies 68 (2024): 37-63; ‘Women as Performers of the Bible: Female Preaching in Premodern Europe’. In Carla M. Bino and Corinna Ricasoli, eds. Performing the Sacred: Christian Representations of Art (Leiden: Brill, 2023), pp. 116–139; The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Ronald Musto

Honorary Research Fellow, School of Humanities

Ronald G. Musto specializes in late medieval Rome and Naples. His works include Apocalypse in Rome: Cola di Rienzo and the Politics of the New Age (AHA’s Marraro Prize 2004); Medieval Naples: A Documentary History, 400—1400 (2013); and Writing Southern Italy before the Renaissance: Trecento Historians of the Mezzogiorno (rev., 2022).

He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, founding co-director of ACLS Humanities E-Book, former co-executive director of the Medieval Academy of America and editor of Speculum, and is co-publisher of Italica Press and general editor for its six-volume Documentary History of Naples.

Simon Parsons

Lecturer in Medieval History, Department of History

Simon Parsons is writing a monograph on the body of medieval texts which describe the events of the First Crusade (1096-99), and their interrelation and connection to traditions of oral epic narration. He co-edited, with Linda Paterson, Literature of the Crusades (2018, Boydell & Brewer), and he’s co-editing and translating, with Linda Paterson, Carol Sweetenham, and Lauren Mulholland, the Anglo-Norman Siège d’Antioche, a lengthy epic text about the First Crusade.

Benjamin Pohl

Professor of Medieval History, Department of History (Historical Studies)

Benjamin is Professor of Medieval History in the Department of History. Having received his PhD from the University of Bamberg, he held academic positions at Bamberg, Cambridge, and Ghent before coming to Bristol in 2015. His research interests are medieval European history and historiography, with a focus on manuscript studies, palaeography and codicology, and cultural memory. Benjamin’s current research focuses on professional scribes and their networks in the medieval English countryside, c.1100–1350. He has been elected a Visiting Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford for the spring/summer of 2026 (Trinity Term). Benjamin co-edits the series Bristol Studies in Medieval Cultures.

Stuart Prior

Professor of Archaeological Practice, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology

Stuart Prior is based in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology. His research focuses on Castle Studies, the 12th century Anarchy period, and Death, Burial and the Funerary Industry. His PhD focused on early Norman castles, strategy, tactics and landscape archaeology, and in a former career he was a gravedigger, hence his interest in death and burial. He is a broadcaster specialising in heritage, castles, landscapes, ancient technology, and death and burial, and regularly appears on BBC 2’s ‘Digging for Britain’ TV program. He is open to emails from potential students wishing to discuss or develop PhD/MPhil ideas with him.

Ad Putter

Professor of Medieval English Literature, Department of English

Ad Putter is Professor of Medieval English at the University of Bristol and Fellow of the British Academy. He has published widely on philological topics and on medieval literature in a range of languages, and he has edited a number of medieval texts, including (with Myra Stokes) The Works of the Gawain Poet (Penguin, 2014) and Medieval Love Letters: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge University Press, 2025). His recent and current work has focused on Anglo-Dutch relations and on medieval multilingualism. His publications in this area include The Dutch Hatmakers of Medieval and Tudor London, co-authored with Shannon McSheffrey (Boydell and Brewer, open access, 2023), The Literature and History of Anglo-Dutch Relations, co-edited with Elisabeth van Houts et al. (Oxford University Press, 2024), and various chapters on the influence of Dutch on the language of William Caxton.

John Reeks

Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History, Department of History

John Reeks specialises in early modern political and religious history, particularly in relation to the history of the English parish church. His current research interests lie in three main areas:

•  The English Civil War, with a particular focus on the role played by Bristol and its governors.

• The seventeenth-century Church of England, with a particular focus on parish and administrative histories

• The history of the University of Bristol and, in particular, historians working at the university in the period from the foundation of the College (1876) to the retirement of Professor Charles M. MacInnes (1957).

David Scott-Macnab

Honorary Professor, Department of English

David Scott-Macnab has a wide range of interests in medieval English literature and medieval culture generally. He has published on, inter alia, Augustine, Chaucer, Caxton, the Très Riches Heures, medieval weapons, Middle English linguistics, medieval practical texts of several kinds, and the history of the book. He has a special interest in anything relating to the sports of hawking and hunting, and is currently working to complete a new edition of Edward, Second Duke of York’s treatise Master of Game for the Early English Text Society, as well as an edition of The Kerdeston Book of Hawking for the Middle English Texts series. In 2024 he spent three months as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol. He currently resides near Pretoria, South Africa.

Gwen Seabourne

Professor of Legal History, University of Bristol Law School

Gwen Seabourne is Professor of Legal History, based in the University of Bristol Law School. Her main research interest is medieval legal history, and she has written on topics including: economic regulation, suicide, property and women/gender. Her current research projects are on the offence of mayhem and ‘legal medievalism’. 

Brendan Smith

Professor of Medieval History, Department of History (Historical Studies)

Brendan Smith specialises in the history of the British Isles from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, with a particular interest in Ireland. More generally, medieval colonial societies and frontier societies are areas of research. The financing of English rule in medieval Ireland is a topic he has explored in recent years, and he has received grants from the university’s Jean Golding Institute to assist with the data-capture and presentation aspects of this subject. His main research focus at the moment is medieval migration, with particular reference to Britain and Ireland.

Sig Sønnesyn

Lecturer in Medieval Christianity, Department of Religion and Theology

Sig Sønnesyn is a historian of European high medieval religious and intellectual culture, its antecedents and wider intellectual geographies, specialising in the religious, moral, and scientific thought of European Latin culture and in cross-cultural relations between Christian, Islamicate and Jewish thought. His main research interests focus on the intellectual culture of Western Europe in the 12^th and 13^th centuries. He is particularly interested in the ways in which Christian intellectual culture in the Latin-dominated part of the Christian world absorbed influences from classical philosophy and Jewish and Islamicate learning

Hattie Soper

Lecturer in Medieval Literature, Department of English

Hattie Soper is interested in bodies and time in medieval literature. She specialises in Old English poetry, but her interests are wide-ranging and include also Old Norse and Middle English poetry and prose. Much of her research is situated between the medical and environmental humanities, investigating how human bodies are drawn into intimacy with their surroundings through their experience of time. She has a strong interest in representations of ageing and the life course, culminating in her first monograph; she is currently working on a study of medieval play and playtime, as well as an exploration of echoes in material landscapes and in Old Norse poetic form.

Leah Tether

Professor of Medieval Literature and Publishing, Department of English

Professor Leah Tether works on medieval French and English literature, with a particular interest in the book and publishing history of Arthurian literature. She has published widely on the works of Chrétien de Troyes and Grail literature more generally. Her most recent monograph is The Bristol Merlin: Revealing the Secrets of a Hidden Fragment (ARC Humanities Press, 2021). She is the International Vice-President of the International Courtly Literature Society and Director of the Vinaver Trust. Her current research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, is called ‘Unpublished: Medieval Literature and the Early Modern Publisher’. Professor Tether also serves as co-editor of the Centre for Medieval Studies’ book publication series, Bristol Studies in Medieval Culture.  Photo © Jooney Woodward.

Sebastiaan Verweij

Associate Professor in Scottish and English Premodern Literature, Department of English

Sebastiaan Verweij’s research interests are in premodern (late-medieval and early-modern, c. 1350-1700), Scottish and English literatures, especially poetry and poetics. As a practitioner of book-history, he is interested in the intersections between the book as material text and as literary artefact. He also continues to be engaged with Digital Humanities projects. Over the last year he has also become active in the spatial humanities: for instance the relationship between literature and geography, and how literary texts frame our experience of space and place. 

Ian Wei

Associate Professor in the History of Intellectual Culture, Department of History (Historical Studies)

Ian Wei works on intellectual culture and the social history of ideas in Western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. His published work chiefly explores the role of intellectuals in medieval society, especially the authority and status of the masters of theology at the University of Paris in the late thirteenth century. He also writes about the different ways of knowing developed by learned men and women in various social contexts, and the political and social views that they put forward, especially with regard to money, sex and politics. Since 2004 he has also co-coordinated a collaborative project entitled ‘Ideas and Universities’ for the Worldwide Universities Network. The aim is both to enrich understanding and to have an impact on contemporary policy-making by looking comparatively at the ways in which ideas have found institutional expression in universities in different cultures and periods. 

Beth Williamson

Professor of Medieval Culture and Chair in the History of Art, Department of History

Beth Williamson’s current research interests include medieval religious and devotional practice, especially in relation to visual and aural culture. She concentrates particularly on the forms and functions of religious imagery, the relationships between liturgy, devotion, and visual culture, materials and materiality, and on sensory and bodily experience. The primary geographical areas on which she has focussed are Italy, Northern France and the Netherlands, and England. Particular research at the moment involves aspects of religious devotion in medieval England in the late medieval period, including the ways in which devotional practice intersects with the concepts of time and space, sight and sound, and distance and difficulty. From September 2020 Prof. Williamson will be engaged in a three-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship focussing on this material, working towards a book entitled Describing Devotion.