John Jenkins
Teaching Fellow and Research Associate

Profile

Biography

FRHistS FSA BA (Hons) (Oxon), MA (Lond), DPhil (Oxon)

John is the Director of the Centre for Pilgrimage Studies, which acts as a research hub for scholars and practitioners of pilgrimage across times, places, and discipines. His own research focuses on the relationship between cathedrals, saints’ cults and pilgrimage from the medieval period to the present day. He also has recently been working closely on twelfth and thirteenth century York and particularly its Jewish community. He first came to York in 2014 as a Research Assistant on the AHRC-funded ‘Pilgrimage and England’s Cathedrals: Past and Present’ project. Following that he was a researcher on projects looking variously at the influence of Thomas Becket’s cult in Canterbury and London, and at exploring ways in which understanding historic uses of space could help with visitor engagement in contemporary churches. He was also a researcher on the major Government-funded 'Streetlife' project on the past and future of York's Coney Street.

He was a key member of the planning and organisation committees for ‘Becket 2020’, the anniversary commemorations of Thomas Becket’s birth, death and translation. His work on the digital reconstructions of Thomas Becket’s medieval shrine in Canterbury Cathedral, produced by the Centre for the Study of Christianity and Culture at the University, received international media coverage in 2020. He has made several appearances on the BBC and the Smithsonian Channel discussing various aspects of his work on pilgrimage and medieval history.

Departmental roles

Director, Centre for Pilgrimage Studies

Research

Overview

John's research focuses on the interactions between ecclesiastical institutions and the laity, from the medieval period to the present day. Since 2014 he has been studying the use of shrines in England's major cathedrals and more widely, particularly how in the Middle Ages these sites were managed to suit the needs and expectations of visitors, pilgrims and resident communities. His work is based on extensive archival research and strongly interdisciplinary, working with sociologists, ethnographers, digital archaeologists, and cathedral and heritage practitioners to recreate past experiences and shed light on current practice. He also works on urban history, particularly relating to York in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, reconstructing neighbourhood identities and interactions between Christians and Jews.

Most recently he has published on various aspects of the medieval and post-medieval cult of Thomas Becket,  including the first published transcription and translation of the unique 1428 ‘Customary of the Shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral’. He has also published a 'minigraph' on medieval pilgrimage, as well as editing and contributing to a ground-breaking study of cathedrals and pilgrimage. He contributed the text to the web resource ‘The Becket Story’ and worked with teams at the University of York's Department of Education and Canterbury Cathedral to develop teaching resources for pilgrimage and the Thomas Becket controversy at Key Stages 2 and 3.

Teaching

Undergraduate

•  (first year Period Topic module)

Postgraduate

•  (MA Option module)

Publications

Selected publications

Books

Medieval Pilgrimage (Arc Humanities Press, 2025) 

The Customary of the Shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral: Latin Text and Translation (Arc Humanities Press, 2022) Open Access ebook

Pilgrimage and England's Cathedrals: Past, Present, and Future, (ed. with Dee Dyas) Palgrave MacMillan, 2020

Articles and book chapters

'Becket on a Peacock: The Manufacture of Devotional Toys and Their Use in Civic Devotions' with Eliot Benbow, in Alyce A. Jordan and Kay Brainerd Slocum (eds.), Images of Thomas Becket in the Middle Ages and Beyond (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2025), pp. 85-118 

'Northern Ways? Pilgrimage, Politics and Piety in the Fourteenth-Century Administrative Records of the Archdiocese of York' in Paul Dryburgh and Sarah Rees Jones (eds.), The Church and Northern English Society in the Fourteenth Century (York: York Medieval Press, 2024), pp. 247-67

‘The Hospitaller Preceptory of Slebech, Pembrokeshire: Social Function and Burial Practice in the later Middle Ages’, with Brian Costello, Church Archaeology (2023)

'Who Put the ‘a’ in ‘Thomas a Becket’? The History of a Name from the Angevins to the 18th Century' Open Library of Humanities 9:1 (2023)

'Time, Space, and Mass: The Lay Experience of the Medieval Cathedral' in The Lay Experience of the Medieval Cathedral: Proceedings of the Ecclesiological Society 3, ed. Mark Kirby (2023), pp. 45-65

‘St Thomas Becket and Medieval London’, History 105:367 (2020)

‘Modelling the Cult of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 173 (2020)

'Replication or rivalry? The ‘Becketization’ of pilgrimage in English cathedrals', Religion 49:1 (2019)

'More English than the English, more Roman than Rome? Historical signifiers and cultural memory at Westminster Cathedral' (with Alana Harris), Religion 49:1 (2019)

'Visibly different: continuity and change at Westminster Cathedral' (with Marion Bowman, Simon Coleman, and Tiina Sepp), in D. Goodhew & A-P Cooper (eds.), The Desecularisation of the City: London's Churches, 1980 to the Present, (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 300-328

''Despite the Prohibition of the Lord Bishop': John Grandisson and the Limits of Episcopal Power' in Episcopal Power and Local Society in Medieval Europe 1000-1400, (eds.) P. Coss, C. Dennis, A. Silvestri, & M. Julian-Jones,(Turnhout, Brepols, 2017), p. 208-221

‘Holy Geysers: Oily Saints and Ecclesiastical Politics in Late Medieval Yorkshire’ in Late Medieval Devotion to Saints from the North of England: New Directions, ed. Denis Renevey, Christiania Whitehead, and Hazel Blair (Brepols, 2022), 147-163

‘A Barber-Surgeon’s Instrument Case: Seeing the Iconography of Thomas Becket through a Netherlandish Lens’, with Louise Hampson, Arts 10:3, 49 (2021) (Open Access; online)

'Monasteries and the Defence of the South Coast in the Hundred Years' War' Southern History 32 (2012), p. 1-23