Professor Julia Smith
Edwards Professor of Medieval History
Department of History (Medieval)
10 University Gardens, Room 8
Tel 0141 330 5139
Fax 0141 330 2348
Email: jmhs@arts.gla.ac.uk
Office Hours: Tuesday 11.30am - 12.30pm
Research Day: Monday
Teaching
- Sub-honours: Contributions to level 1A and 2Med.
- Honours:
- Modules:
- Beowulf in context
- Making Saints in the early Middle Ages
- Special subject: Saints and Society in early England
- Modules:
- Postgraduate:
- Contributions to Writing the Middle Ages
- Violence, Religion and Ritual in the Medieval World
- Medieval Palaeography
Research interests
I have wide-ranging research interests in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, c400-1000CE. I am especially interested in gender orders and in religion, notably saints’ cults and hagiography, and have supervised many PhD students in these and other areas of early medieval history.
I am currently finalising The Cambridge History of Christianity, III: c600-c1100, which I have co-edited with Thomas F X Noble. It is due to be published in 2008 by Cambridge University Press.
My next research project, Roman Martyrs in the Medieval Imagination, will offer a fundamental, interdisciplinary reappraisal of the cult of saints from its origins to the high Middle Ages, grounded in the premise that gender and sanctity were two complementary, but fundamentally different ways of organising, expressing and debating power relations. Using the development and reception of the cults of the martyrs of the city of Rome as its leitmotif, it will pay particular attention to the comparative development of selected cults in Anglo-Saxon, Merovingian, Carolingian and Ottonian contexts. Exploiting art historical, liturgical, literary and archaeological as well as historical and hagiographical sources, it will assert the importance of martyr cults as the matrix out of which the cults of other saints was moulded, and will emphasise their significance as carriers of such central cultural values as virginity, the criticism of tyranny and a Rome-centred view of Christian history.
I am a member of the Glasgow Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Centre for Gender History.
Publications
Recent publications
- Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300-900, co-edited with Leslie Brubaker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
- Europe After Rome: A New Cultural History 500-1000, pp. xiii+384 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
- 'L'accès des femmes aux saintes reliques durant le haut moyen âge', Médiévales, 40 (2001), pp. 83-100
- 'Aedificatio sancti loci: the making of a ninth-century holy place', in Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages, ed F. Theuws and M. de Jong, (Leiden, 2001), pp. 361-96
- 'Women at the tomb: access to relic shrines in the early Middle Ages' in The World of Gregory of Tours ed. K. Mitchell and I. Wood, (Leiden, 2002), pp. 163-80
- 'Confronting identities: the rhetoric and reality of a Carolingian frontier', in Integration und Herrschaft. Ethnische Identitäten und kulturelle Muster im frühen Mittelalter, ed. W. Pohl and M. Diesenberger (Vienna, 2002), pp 169-82
- '"Emending evil ways and praising God's omnipotence": Einhard and the uses of Roman martyrs', in Seeing and Believing: Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, eds K. Mills and A. Grafton (Rochester NY, 2003), pp. 189-223
- 'Einhard: the sinner and the saint', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser. 13 (2003), pp. 55-77
Other publications
Books
- Province and Empire: Brittany and the Carolingians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
- Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West (Leiden: Brill, 2000)
Selected Articles
- 'Oral and Written: Saints, Miracles and Relics in Medieval Brittany, c.850-1250', Speculum, 65 (1990), pp. 309-43
- 'Early Medieval Hagiography in the Late Twentieth Century', Early Medieval Europe, 1/i (1992), pp. 69-76
- 'The Problem of Female Sanctity in Carolingian Europe, 750-920', Past and Present, 146 (February 1995), pp. 3-37
- 'Fines imperii: the Marches' in New Cambridge Medieval History, II: (700-900), ed. R. McKitterick (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 169-89
- 'Religion and Lay Society', ibid, pp. 654-78
- 'The Hagiography of Hucbald of Saint-Amand', Studi Medievali, 3rd ser. 35 (1994), pp. 517-42
- 'Gender and Ideology in the Early Middle Ages', in Gender and Christian Religion, ed. R.N. Swanson, Studies in Church History 34, (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 51-73
- 'Old saints, new cults: Roman relics in Carolingian Francia', in Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West, ed. J.M.H. Smith (Leiden, 2000), pp. 317-39
- 'Did Women have a Transformation of the Roman World?', Gender and History, 12 (2000), pp. 552-71 and reprinted in Gendering the Middle Ages, eds. P. Stafford and A. Mulder-Bakker (Oxford, 2001), pp. 22-41
Research students
- Charles Hammel (University of Glasgow), “Narrating Early Medieval Iberia: History, Text and Identity, c409-586”.
- Colette Bowie (University of Glasgow), “The Daughters of Eleanor of Aquitaine: a study in comparative queenship”.
- Jennifer McRobbie (University of St Andrews): “Gender and Violence in the Histories of Gregory of Tours”.