Confabulating with Prof. Julia Smith

Chichele Professor of Medieval History

All Souls College

She returned to Oxford in 2016 after an absence of more than thirty years and an academic career spanning continents and countries (USA, Scotland, England). Her research interests are equally wide. She specialise in the period from the end of Antiquity to the central Middle Ages, and especially enjoy finding new and unusual angles from which to address seemingly familiar topics. After early work on early medieval frontiers, she developed new specialisms in hagiography and saints’ cults, plus the history or women and gender in the early Middle Ages. She has published two monographs, Province and Empire: Brittany and the Carolingians (Cambridge, 1992) and Europe After Rome: A New Cultural History 500-1000 (Oxford, 2005) and has edited several collaborative volumes, including Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West (Leiden, 2000); Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300-900 (co-edited with Leslie Brubaker, Cambridge, 2004) and The Cambridge History of Christianity, volume III: Early Medieval Christianities AD 600-1100 (co-edited with Thomas F X Noble, Cambridge, 2008).

Research Interests

Late antique and early medieval history c.400-1100

Medieval saints, hagiography and relics

Women and gender in the early Middle Ages

Her current research addresses the materiality of Christian experience in the Middle Ages. She is concerned with ‘things which do things’, and use an ethnographic approach to exploring how, why and in what social contexts a wide range of material substances acquired a sacred aura, serving as mediators between humans and the divinity. The result will be a book (or possibly two books) on the emergence and development of the cult of relics from the 4th to the 11th centuries. This research draws heavily on approaches and methodologies derived from my earlier publications on the history of women and gender in the early Middle Ages (a field in which she retains a strong interest) but also has a strong cross-cultural dimension. Beyond that, she is interested in developing interdisciplinary approaches to studying the abundant material remains of late antique and early medieval relic-objects which she has discovered while undertaking field work in the treasuries of some of Europe’s oldest churches.

Please check her book "Europe after Rome: A New Cultural History, 500-1000"