About
I am Emeritus Professor of History and Archival Stuides. My research focuses on the social and economic historyof late medieval England, especially on daily life; and on editorial work. I have published on many aspects of daily life, including the great household, food and sensory perception; and on forms of documentation and communication from the medieval period onwards.
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Daily life in the later middle ages
- Material culture
- Testamentary records in the later middle ages
- The household of Queen Philippa and its records
- Food and diet
Current research
My current research centres on the objects of daily life, their significance and the meaning of material culture in England in the later Middle Ages, for which I hold a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship. The project focuses on the changes in mentality that came with a long-term social revolution, between 1200 and 1500 in which people’s objects and possessions proliferated. This will lead to a book for Cambridge University Press. I am also exploring the archival record of will-making, and have editorial projects on the register of Bishop Buckingham of Lincoln (with Alison McHardy) and the wills of medieval Southampton.
The medieval great household and medieval accounting records are a long-standing research focus and I am working towards an edition of the accounts for the household of Queen Philippa.
Research projects
Completed projects
Publications
External roles and responsibilities
Biography
I read Archaeology and History at the University of Southampton, before training as an archivist at the University of Liverpool. My archival career saw me working with collections from the twelfth century to the present day, including the archives of two Oxford colleges (Magdalen and Corpus Christi), and the Wellington, Palmerston and Mountbatten papers and the archives of Anglo-Jewry in the University Library at Southampton – where I was archivist from 1982, and Head of Special Collections 1991-2013. I was appointed to a chair in History and Archival Studies in 2007, transferred to the Faculty of Humanities in 2013 and became emeritus in 2021.
I have a keen interest in the history of the everyday, especially in the medieval period, in patterns of documentation and in editorial work. At Magdalen, I discovered some medieval domestic accounts, and subsequently did a doctorate at the University of Durham on the development of these records. Publications on medieval social and economic history include two volumes of household accounts edited for the British Academy’s Records of Social and Economic History series, an edition of the testamentary records of the bishops of England and Wales for the Canterbury and York Society, and three books with Yale University Press: The Great Household in Late Medieval England, The Senses in Late Medieval England, and The Culture of Food in England, 1200‒1500. With Barbara Harvey, I edited The States of the Manors of Westminster Abbey, c.1300‒1422, published by the British Academy in 2020 (Records of Social and Economic History, new series, 57‒58). This prints 75 states and views of account for the properties of one of the greatest landowners of medieval England either side of the Black Death.
I was editor of the Journal of Medieval History from 2009 to 2023.
I was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2020.