Medieval and Early Modern Research Group

The Medieval and Early Modern Research Group (MEM) comprises four historians and two hispanists from the Departments of Humanities and Modern Foreign Languages who all share an interest in pre-modern European cultures with key emphases on gender, communication, ethnicity, beliefs and the cultural significance of spaces, supported by our new Visiting Research Fellow, Dr Dorothea Nolde, Associate Professor early modern history at the University of Bremen. We are strongly inter-disciplinary, drawing in literary, art historical, sociological and socio-linguistic approaches and we embrace the study of European history in its widest sense, ranging from the Byzantine Empire through Italy and Spain to England.  Within this context, the team is undertaking research on practices and perceptions of sleep in early modern England, the late Byzantine economy, Irish Women in Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries, gossip and oral communication in early modern Italian urban society, images of the Virgin Mary in 15th Century Spain, and literature and the Spanish court in the 15th and 16th centuries. Recent books include Marriage, Manners and Mobility in early Modern Venice, Visions of an Unseen world: ghost beliefs and ghost stories in eighteenth-century England, and The Serpent and the Rose: the Immaculate Conception and Hispanic poetry in the late medieval period. Please visit the publications page and our sections on MEM members and MEM activities & events for more details.