Blog

Where? St Edmund Hall LibraryWhen? Wednesday, 11 November 2026, 5-6pm What? Careers talk with Dr Natascha Domeisen, Illuminated Manuscripts Specialist at Sotheby’s, and Jake Banyard, Early Career Graduate Trainee Library Assistant at St Edmund Hall Report on the GLAMorous talk 2023 by Heather Barr and Alison Ray The Oxford Medieval Studies Trinity Term lecture on… Read more: GLAMorous work: Pathways in Libraries and Book Trade

Welcome to Week 4 – please find attached the new booklet of events for this term.  Two notes for this week. The first of the E A Lowe Lectures by Prof. Julia Crick takes place on Thursday 5:00 at Corpus Christi College, on the theme of ‘Script and politics: problems in the palaeography of a… Read more: Medieval Matters MT26, Wk 4

Christ Church College, 13 October–16 December Open Tuesday 10am-1pm; Wednesday 1 – 4pm and other times by appointment. Please note that there is no step-free access.  The Bible (from the Greek βιβλίον, The Book) has been the most influential written text ever produced. Portions are available in some 4,000 translations, nearly half of known languages,… Read more: Exhibition: Translating the Bible

Welcome to week 3, and the return of the rain. As always, please find attached the new booklet of events for this term.  We’d like to draw your attention to Mearcstapan, a student medievalist society at Oxford focused on making medievalism more accessible and inclusive. You can find out a little more about the society… Read more: Medieval Matters MT26, Wk3

Thursday, 29 October Habakkuk Room, Jesus College, 5:00pm‘The Networked Court: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Late Medieval Court Cultures’ Presentations by editor Karl Kügle and authors Jane Gilbert, Christophe Masson, and Helen Swift

6–8 October 2027 The German Historical Institutes in London and Washington, D.C., are pleased to announce the fifteenthMedieval History Seminar, to be held in London from Wednesday, 6 October, to Friday, 8 October 2027.The seminar will bring together Ph.D. candidates and recent Ph.D. recipients (2026/2027) in medievalhistory from universities in the United States, Canada, the… Read more: The German Historical Institute Medieval History Seminar

Dr. Jesse Patrick Harrington5pm, Floor Two, Arumugam BuildingSt. Catherine’s College, OxfordMichaelmas 2026 This series of four public lectures re-examines the political and religious history of England and Ireland at the time of the English/Norman conquest of 1169, through the life and afterlife of St. Lorcán Ó Tuathail (Laurence O’Toole, c. 1128–1180): architect of the twelfth-century… Read more: ‘St. Laurence O’Toole and the Anglo -Norman Conquest of Ireland’

Taking the lead from what must surely be seen as the finest medieval community in the world (us), Cambridge has now launched their own interdisciplinary network for Medieval Studies. Those interested in finding out about the range of talks and societies can access their website here, and their booklet of upcoming events here.

SCRIPTORIUM: Understanding the Medieval Page Thursday 29 October, 2-3pmFree, in-person event: Centre for Digital Scholarship, Weston LibraryFind out more and register here What can a videogame teach us about medieval manuscripts? Through original manuscripts and the game Scriptorium: Master of Manuscripts, this session explores how medieval books were planned, decorated, and produced, inviting participants to experiment with… Read more: Centre for Digital Scholarship (Bodleian Libraries) Events in Michaelmas Term

Mearcstapan is a student medievalist society at Oxford focused on making medievalism more accessible and inclusive. Our goal is to bring medieval studies to a wider audience of students and empower students within medieval studies to share their own unique perspectives. We do weekly events in term time, including talks from leading academics in understudied… Read more: Mearcstapan – Come and Join

Welcome to week 2, and another full set of events.  As always, please find attached the new booklet of events for this term.  We are very sorry to have to mark the death, far too young, of Professor Chris Wickham, former Chichele Professor of Medieval History and supporter and friend to medieval studies at Oxford. … Read more: Medieval Matters MT26, Wk2

The Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies (ASPHS) invites youto participate in our 56th Annual Conference which will take place at Exeter College,University of Oxford, between 22 and 25 June 2027. This year’s theme is ‘Unexpected Journeys: New Pathways through Iberian History’.Our theme is intended to inspire rather than delimit submissions and, as in… Read more: CfP: Unexpected Journeys: New Pathways through Iberian History

Chris Wickham who died on 9 October 2026, aged 76, was from 2005 to 2016 Oxford’s Chichele Professor of Medieval History. He was not only a hugely influential medievalist but also the founding father of Oxford Medieval Studies as an interdisciplinary endeavour. He set up the first website for Oxford medievalists from his research funds… Read more: In Memoriam Chris Wickham

It’s a new year! Welcome to all newcomers, and welcome back to the more seasoned members of the community. As always, we have a new booklet of events for this term. Please note the Oxford Medieval Studies Welcome Event this Tuesday at 5, held at Harris Manchester. Tea and Coffee provided, and a chance to… Read more: Medieval Matters MT26, Wk1

This term sees the first event in Dr Laura Varnam‘s John Fell Funded project ‘Creating Medieval Criticism Now’ on Wednesday 28th October at 5pm (3rd week) in the Goodhart Seminar Room at University College. All are welcome, please sign up via this Eventbrite link. Co-sponsored by the Guild of Medievalist Makers, the first seminar will… Read more: ‘Creating Medieval Criticism Now’ event, 28 October

When: Friday, 30 October 2026, 5-6:30pmWhere: Taylor Institution Library, Room 2 Launch of Hans Sachs’ ‘Dialogue on Greed’ 450 years ago, Hans Sachs (1494–1576), one of the most influential German authors intervening in the Reformation debate, died. In 1524, he had published four highly successful polemical dialogues in pamphlet form. The first of these, the… Read more: Reformation Pamphlet Launch

A special seminar series co-organized by Charlotte Denoël (Bibliothèque nationale de France) & Nancy Thebaut (Oxford) // generously supported by TORCH This interdisciplinary seminar will be an interactive forum for thinking about the work of the French author Christine de Pizan (d. 1429/30) in anticipation of a forthcoming exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France… Read more: Christine de Pizan & Gender in the Late Middle Ages

Peter Payne: A Forgotten Great European was an international workshop taking place at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, 30 September – 1 October 2026, co-organised by Elizabeth Solopova, Henrike Lähnemann, Hannah Schühle-Lewis and James Howarth. The workshop was generously funded by a grant from the John Fell Fund awarded to Elizabeth Solopova and Hannah Schühle-Lewis, supported… Read more: Peter Payne: A Forgotten Great European

We are excited to announce preliminary details of the 6th Middle Ages in the Modern World (MAMO) conference! Save the date of Tuesday 22nd – Thursday 24th June, 2027. Our location is Lincoln College, Oxford, UK (https://lincoln.ox.ac.uk/). The 6th international MAMO conference will explore the ways in which the Middle Ages have been imagined, invoked, forged, refashioned, used and… Read more: MAMO 2027: Call for Papers

Blogpost by Julia Lorenz, DPhil student in Medieval & Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. Her research examines the interplay of relationships of love and friendship in Middle High German literature, using a statistical approach and a database to complement her literary analysis. What happens when we stop reading a narrative text the traditional… Read more: Reading Through Patterns: How a Database Supports Literary Analysis

Report by Méryl Vourch: Staging a medieval mystery play in 2026 In Trinity Term 2026, we staged The Harrowing of Hell.26 in two radically differentspaces: the Burton Taylor Studio, a black box venue, and the crypt of St Peter-in-the-East,Oxford’s oldest place of worship. The project grew out of a single question: what can a medieval dramatic text offer… Read more: Harrowing of Hell.26

Thursday 9 July 2026, 6:00 p.m. Lecture Hall of the Museum of Decorative Arts Kulturforum, Potsdamer Platz, Matthäikirchplatz 4/6, 10785 Berlin In a lecture for the Kunstgeschichtliche Gesellschaft zu Berlin (Founded in 1887), Martin Kauffmann (Head of Early and Rare Collections, Bodleian Library, Oxford) will speak on an Ottonian illuminated manuscript in Oxford, and how… Read more: An Ottonian Manuscript in Oxford

At last, week 8! We’d like to put together a survey of all the medieval opportunities and events that have taken place this year. If you’ve run a seminar series, reading group, or workshop, at any point this year, I would be very grateful if you’d send me a short report for inclusion by the… Read more: Medieval Matter TT26, Wk 8

St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and online · 20–22 November 2026 Register at arsinq.com/register If attending in person, we encourage early registration as places are limited.

Welcome to week 7. From Tuesday til Thursday, productions of The Harrowing of Hell.26 continue, now in The Crypt of St Peter-in-the-East. Tickets can be bought here Free tickets are still available for the inaugural Lecture of theologian and medievalist Andrew Davison on Monday, 15 June, 5pm, in the Concert Hall of the Humanities Centre on… Read more: Medieval Matter TT26, Wk7

The 2026 Journal of the History of Ideas Graduate Student Symposium, will be held online on October 17, 2026. The theme for this year’s Symposium is “Prophecy, Prediction, and the Politics of Futurity.” Graduate students at all stages of their program and working on different topics, periods, and regions are invited to submit a 500-word abstract on… Read more: CfP – Prophecy, Prediction, and the Politics of Futurity

Welcome to sixth week! All week, from Tuesday through to Saturday, you can watch The Harrowing of Hell.26, a 2026 experimental and abstract adaptation of the medieval Harrowing of Hell narrative, created from English mystery plays (York Cycle, Towneley Plays, Ludus Coventriae, Chester Cycle) and rewritten into contemporary English. Performances are at 9:30, in the… Read more: Medieval Matters TT26, Wk 6