Centre for Medieval Studies

Centre for Medieval Studies

The Centre for Medieval Studies provides an attractive physical location as well as a stimulating intellectual milieu for all medieval post-graduate teaching and research in the University, in whatever department.

• Details of forthcoming events

All the English medievalists are also members of the interdisciplinary Centre for Medieval Studies, founded in 1968, which has its own building in the historic King's Manor, close to the heart of medieval York.

An active research community

MA and research students in English who are working in medieval fields of study are automatically members of this large, friendly and very active research community, which currently numbers around ninety staff and students.

King's Manor is a complex of buildings of great character and antiquity. It was originally the medieval lodgings of the abbot of the nearby St Mary's Abbey and in the seventeenth century housed the Council of the North. It now has seminar rooms, a library, computer facilities, workrooms for MA and research students, a staff-student common room and a refectory, as well as easy access to York's many bookshops, coffee-bars and pubs. The Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Archaeology Department are also housed there.

Seminars and events

The Centre for Medieval Studies runs a busy programme of talks and seminars relating to both the early and the late Middle Ages. A diverse range of research groups focused on early medieval studies, the household, medieval religion, text and reality, and medieval literature run alongside the popular cinema club and there are two reading groups, devoted to late Anglo-Saxon texts and Middle English popular romances, that meet regularly throughout the term.

English staff and students have recently organised national or international conferences at York and elsewhere on:

• Wulfstan
• narrative and history
• Viking studies
• Landscape and Ideology
• medieval manuscripts
• Dante in the Middle Ages and beyond
• new approaches to Chaucer
• the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Students are actively encouraged to give conference papers (at York and elsewhere) and to organise research events. A fund set up in memory of Elizabeth Salter, founding professor of medieval literature at York, provides small grants to enable students to travel for the purposes of research.

Staff

Staff

Staff

• Henry Bainton
• Michele Campopiano
  
• Helen Fulton
  
• Nicholas R. Havely
• Linne Mooney (Director)
  
• Nicola McDonald
  
• Elizabeth M. Tyler
  

There are currently seven full-time staff members in the Department's Medieval School whose innovative research crosses linguistic, chronologic and disciplinary boundaries.

They form one of the largest groupings of medievalists in any Department in the UK, and their interests range from Beowulf to Dante, from history to hagiography, from manuscript dissemination to medieval multiculturalism. They engage with topics as diverse as Viking poetry, textual cultures, the French of England, gender, literary theory, urban culture and popular narrative.

They jointly teach the MA in Medieval Literatures which started in October 2001.

Other notable staff connections

• Derek Pearsall, formerly professor of English at York, has returned to become an honorary member of the Centre for Medieval Studies on his retirement from Harvard.
• Elizabeth Tyler is General Editor of Studies in the Early Middle Ages, an interdisciplinary series covering Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the twelfth century - published by the Centre for Medieval Studies in conjunction with Brepols.

Programmes

Programmes

Enquiries

Applicants who would like to find out about research opportunities, or to discuss a research proposal, should contact the School director (Linne Mooney) in the first instance, either by email (linne.mooney@york.ac.uk), or at the address below, who will put them in touch with the appropriate person.

General enquiries should be made to the Administrator, Centre for Medieval Studies, King's Manor, York YO1 7EP (email cms-office@york.ac.uk).

MA in Medieval Literatures

Since 2001 members of the Medieval Research School have been jointly teaching the highly successful MA in Medieval Literatures alongside the interdisciplinary MA offered by the Centre for Medieval Studies.

Research degrees

The Medieval Research School also offers supervision for research degrees on a very wide range of topics from all medieval periods, including comparative topics that relate Old and Middle English to Old Norse, Latin, French and Italian.

The research degrees of PhD, MPhil and MA by Research, full-time and part-time, all entail the writing of a thesis. The PhD (three years full time, six years part-time) is usually open only to those who have already completed an MA. The MPhil is two years full time, four years part-time; the MA by Research is one year full-time, two years part-time. The research and teaching interests of staff listed here are only a brief indication of their range.