Past Projects

This AHRC-funded research network (headed in Exeter by Dr. Gregory Lippiatt) brought together emerging and established international scholars, challenging the traditionally Eurocentric approach to the medieval period and reassessing the teleological narrative that has previously explained the rise of modern states.

The story of the medieval barons is commonly a negative one. Because aristocracies have been almost universally eclipsed by centralised states in the modern world, they are often cast as regressive forces whose self-interest held back ‘progress’. Nor is this exclusively a European narrative, though the historiographical attention paid to the ‘rise of the State’ has privileged the Latin Christian experience of political formation and shaped the way in which non-royal élites are seen in other historical contexts. As a result, ‘private’ rulers such as lords, amirs, kshatriya, and samurai are often assumed to have been at odds with the needs of the wider society.

This network challenged this understanding of the role of ‘barons’ in their relation to public good in two important and complementary ways. First, we explored case studies of how these non-royal élites conceived and implemented responsible government, whether for themselves or for others. Second, we compared these case studies in a bold transnational framework, reaching from western Europe to China, that spanned the collapse of major centralised imperial projects in the ninth century to the destabilising experience of the Great Death in the fourteenth.

More information about the project is available on its website.

In the mid-thirteenth century, an Essex knight named Walter de Bibbesworth composed a remarkable French vocabulary in rhyming couplets, known to scholars as the 'Tretiz'. In this work he set out the vocabulary for a variety of topics, including childbirth and infancy, the names of various flora and fauna (which features an entertaining section on animal noises), or occupations such as cart-making and beer-brewing.

The central aim of this project, led by Prof. Thomas Hinton, was to edit all sixteen manuscripts of the text and make these available to scholars and general users in the form of a website. This digital edition (forthcoming) will allow users to engage with the material, by comparing readings from individual manuscripts, isolating the English and French from each other, and searching the textual record by date, place or theme. Editing and studying the complete textual record will make it possible to assemble a detailed picture of the evolving status and role of French in Britain, with each manuscript opening a door onto individual users, whose occupation, social standing or personal interests, for diverging reasons, required mastery of French. Alongside this online edition, additional outputs will offer a definitive account of the Tretiz from start to finish: how it was created, how it was read, and how it influenced later works on the French language. The cumulative result of this research activity will be to place the 'Tretiz' at the heart of debate about the position of French in medieval Britain, a topic of great current interest to scholars.

More information about the project is available on its dedicated website.

The project was supported by a Standard Research Grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and ran between 2019-23. The project conducted the first ever systematic archaeological study of medieval warhorses, and horses generally, in England across the period AD800-1600.

The point of departure for the project was the fact that established understandings of warhorses had been based almost entirely on historical scholarship - hinging on the use of documentary sources - while the archaeological evidence had been largely overlooked, despite its richness, diversity and, through new state-of-the-art methodologies, its capacity to challenge received wisdom and to create new knowledge and understandings. It set out to break new ground by collecting the fullest range of source material available for medieval horses and integrating these otherwise disparate strands of evidence into a new narrative.

The evidence base investigated by the project comprised: the physical remains of horses (‘zooarchaeological’ materials: bones and teeth, including small samples taken from them for various scientific analyses); equestrian material culture (portable items of apparel such as harness pendants, and horse armour); horse breeding landscapes (studs and stables); visual depictions of horses in medieval sculpture and art; and historical documents relating to horse breeding and training.

The overarching aims of the work were not only to create a new and more rounded understanding of the medieval horse, but also to unpick its complex, fascinating and ever-evolving interrelationship with medieval society through the centuries.

This project, led by Professor Yolanda Plumley, represents the first large-scale and sustained campaign to unite scholars from different disciplines in a programme of collaborative research into the works and manuscript sources of fourteenth-century French poet-composer Guillaume de Machaut (c1300–1377). Supported by the Leverhulme Trust, the project brings together an interdisciplinary team of academic partners from the UK, USA and EU:  (PI), Dr Uri Smilansky, Dr Tamsyn Rose-Steel (University of Exeter), Professor Barton Palmer (Clemson University), Dr Anne Stone (City University of New York), Dr Jacques Boogaart (University of Amsterdam), and Dr Domenic Leo (Youngstown State University).

At the heart of this initiative is the making of a complete edition of Machaut's entire oeuvre under the general editorship of Palmer and Plumley. This will be published in print form by the Middle English Text Series (METS) and the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages (TEAMS), University of Michigan Press. The new edition will also be downloadable gratis in digital format. Surprisingly, this initiative represents the first time all the literary and musical works will be edited to modern scholarly standards in a single campaign. The new edition includes introductory studies that synthesise new research with existing knowledge and full English translations, as well as reproductions of images drawn from the base Machaut manuscript used, along with critical notes. This scholarly work will be enhanced by purpose-made recordings of selected musical works and extracts by early music ensembles the Orlando Consort and Le Basile. These, along with materials linked to the project and other resources relevant to Machaut studies, will be presented on a dedicated project website.

Professor Anthony Musson led this Leverhulme Trust funded research project with senior research fellow Dr Nigel Ramsay.

The project addressed a significant gap in English legal history. It used surviving documentary records together with visual and physical evidence (such as stained glass windows, heraldic devices and funerary monuments) to evaluate the development of the Court of Chivalry. The Court's jurisdiction covered military organisation and discipline arising both in England and overseas, including rights to bear heraldic coats of arms, and to spoils of war, such as prisoners and ransoms. The project reconstructed the Court's activities and assess its effectiveness and authority in the key period of its early history, c1340–1500.

Peculiar in using civil law (rather than common law) procedures, it provoked suspicion and opposition in legal and political circles concerning its ambit and business. The project's intrinsic general interest is enhanced by the revival of the Court's jurisdiction in the twentieth century and the continued relevance of its role in making the modern law of arms, the regulation of which is overseen by the College of Arms, which supports the project.

Dr Emma Cayley (now at the University of Leeds) worked on a project in collaboration with a creative economy partner, Antenna International, to create a smart device App. Our App will introduce school age pupils and other audiences to the fascinating world of medieval manuscripts. An initial stage created a prototype based around Exeter Cathedral’s famous Exeter Book (c. 970) which contains the world’s largest collection of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) poetry, and features the Exeter Riddles: a collection of ninety-six literary enigmas.

More information about the project can be found on the University's Digital Humanities webpages.

Professor Oliver Creighton and Professor Henry French co-directed a team of historians and archaeologists working on the AHRC-funded 'Community and Landscape' project, running from 2010-2012. The project investigatesd the gardens, deer park and wider historic landscape of Politmore House and established practices for engaging local people, schools and societies in presenting landscape heritage, while promoting community 'ownership' of research.

As has been recognised by many scholars in recent years, ritualised actions played an important role in medieval religious, social and political life. At the same time there has been an increasing interest in liturgical sources. This AHRC International Research Network brought together historians, musicologists, literary scholars, theologians, palaeographers and art and architectural historians, to discuss the problems involved in studying the surviving evidence for occasional services in three meetings in 2009 and 2010, and also led to an iteration of the Sarum Rite for the Reconciliation of Penitents in a medieval church, videos of which are available on our YouTube playlist here.

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the research network 'Interpreting Medieval Liturgy c500–1500 AD: Text and Performance' was convened by Sarah Hamilton at the University of Exeter and Helen Gittos at the University of Kent.

MARES was a three year, multi-disciplinary, multi-period project focusing on the maritime traditions of the peoples of the Red Sea and Arabian-Persian Gulf. Drawing on ethnography, archaeology, history and linguistics, it sought to understand how people have inhabited and navigated these seascapes in late antiquity and the medieval period, and how they do so today.

The project team was based at the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies (IAIS) at the University of Exeter in South West England. The project was led by Professor Dionisius Agius, Al Qasimi Professor of Arabic Studies and Islamic Material Culture and the research team included post-doctoral research associates Dr John P Cooper and Dr Chiara Zazzaro, and PhD candidates Julian Jansen van Rensburg and Lucy Semaan. Research administrative support came from Beata Faracik. The project was funded by the Golden Web Foundation, based in Cambridge, UK.

This project undertook the first detailed study of citation and allusion in the period c1340–1420 as expressed in the two genres at the cutting edge of musical style at the time, the motet and the chanson. Medieval composers had always demonstrated a readiness to exploit existing material in their creation of new works, nowhere more conspicuously than in the 13th-century motet. Only very recently had musicologists begun to explore citational practice in the 14th-century Ars nova repertory; their findings suggest that citation and allusion continued to occupy a vital place in the compositional imagination albeit in a different guise and in the context of newly modernised genres.

Our aim was to clarify the extent, nature, and significance of such citational practice in both lyrical and musical production in 14th-century France. Focussing on musical works with vernacular texts, citational activity in the musical repertory was be located within the broader context of literary and social practices of the time. This investigation contributed to some pressing topical questions within musicology and to broader interdisciplinary debates: how does the Ars nova repertory intersect with earlier works, and what light does citational practice shed on the emergence of the new polyphonic chanson of this period? To what extent did Guillaume de Machaut, the most famous poet and composer then as now, draw on earlier traditions in his lyrics and music, and how far are his works representative of his own period? What is the relationship between the musical and lyric-only corpus, and is the traditional view of a split between musical and poetic production in this period fully justified? How can citational practice in music and text enhance our understanding of memory and attitudes to remembrance in the Middle Ages?

The project was led by Professor Yolanda Plumley, formerly Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies. Dr Giuliano Di Bacco (Fellow in Medieval Studies), assisted by technical consultant Gary Stringer, developed an online text archive of the corpus of texts of the musical repertory c1300-1420 that includes contemporary lyrics without musical settings. Tamsyn Rose-Steel wrote a PhD thesis and published an essay on citation in the 14th-century motet. It gave rise to a number of conference papers, publications, and workshops, as well as a searchable digital archive of late medieval French lyrics (available here via a University of Exeter IP address).

This AHRC Cultural Engagement Project, entitled: ‘Bishop John Grandisson of Exeter (1327-69): the bishop, the cathedral and the diocese’ took place over three months in spring 2013. With the aim of introducing schoolchildren and other interested audiences to the history of Exeter Cathedral through the life and work of Bishop John Grandisson, this project was the result of a successful collaboration between historians in the History Department at the University of Exeter and the librarians, archivists, educators and volunteers at Exeter Cathedral.

John Grandisson was a very active bishop even though he lived during a time when Exeter was in the grip of the Black Death. Plague ravaged the city from 1348 and caused significant social and economic upheaval, but despite the many challenges that he faced during his long episcopate of forty-two years, Bishop Grandisson was able to make a powerful and lasting impact on both the city and the Church. Grandisson was not only responsible for much of the current cathedral building, including the impressive West Front and the chapel which bears his name, but he also worked diligently to join the cathedral to the wider diocese, visiting local churches and promoting reform while also founding the parish church at Ottery St Mary. Furthermore, Grandisson is also known for compiling a number of books for use in the cathedral which survive to this day and record a liturgy unique to Exeter.

By looking at Bishop Grandisson’s life and legacy – as manifest in stone and parchment – this project explored issues of memory, place and identity in the South West. Taken together, these three themes provided the structure and direction for the research and resulted in the creation of a trail for schoolchildren at key stages 2 and 3 to follow in the cathedral (highlighting Grandisson’s life and times) along with an online exhibition of many of the notable objects associated with Grandisson, such as his gold ring, his books, his letters and the works of art and architecture commissioned by the bishop himself.

Professor Oliver Creighton directeded this joint project between the Universities of Leicester, Exeter and Oxford to excavate three trenches in the market town of Wallingford in Oxfordshire, one of the best preserved Anglo-Saxon burhs in England. The project sought to illuminate urban transformation between c800–1300AD – a crucial period of renewal and growth spanning the Saxon and Norman periods – through excavation, survey and documentary study. It was funded by the AHRC, and led to the co-authored publication, Transforming Townscapes. From Burh to Borough: The Archaeology of Wallingford, AD 800 - 1400.

Between 2007 and 2010 Professor Simon Barton held a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust for this project.

This new study (Lawyers in Society, 1258-1558: The Private Lives of Medieval and Early Tudor Lawyers and their Role in English Society) sought to enhance our understanding of lawyers and complement what we know of the professional legal world they inhabited by examining the social and economic context in which they flourished. It sought to explain the contradictory attitudes towards lawyers revealed in contemporary literary works and in the attacks on judges and lawyers at times of political stress by analysing both their relationships to and in society and the perceptions engendered by activities carried out in their private (as well as professional) lives. It examined evidence of their material culture, cultural pursuits, social aspirations and pretensions, as well as recourse to the law in their private capacity. Their role in local networks and with regard to the balance of power in local society was also assessed. The two-year project (2007–09) was led by Professor Anthony Musson and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.