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The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T +44 (0)1227 764000
Medieval and Early Modern Studies MA, MPhil, PhD
This is a research programme within the Medieval and Early Modern Studies subject area.
Key facts
- Subject area: Medieval and Early Modern Studies
- Location: Canterbury
- School: Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies
- Duration: MA one year full-time or two years part-time, MPhil two years full-time or three years part-time, PhD registration three to four years full-time or five to six years part-time.
- Start: At any time but preferably in September.
- Fees: More info
- Entry requirements: A first or upper-second class honours degree in an appropriate subject or equivalent. Please also check our general entry requirements (including English language requirements).
Outline
We are interested in hearing from students with research proposals covering all aspects of medieval and early modern history, life and culture. Academic staff interests include: early modern material culture; late medieval art history; medieval and early modern religious history; Anglo-Saxon archaeology and liturgy; early modern politics; medieval and early modern drama; and textual editing.
Research students are initially registered for the MPhil, and will typically be expected to upgrade by the beginning of the second year of full-time study. At present, research topics include: the Reformation; visual and manuscript culture; community; the plays of John Lyly; medieval ecclesiastical architecture; female sexuality and transexuality; priory management; deviant and vernacular language; and kingship. You will be part of a vibrant and varied community of researchers from different disciplines.
Programme structure
For further information see the School site.
Funding
Applicants for the MA programme or for a research degree can apply for any of the studentships offered by the School of History or the School of English.
Every school at Kent offers one or two University postgraduate research scholarships, each available for three years, providing fees at the home/EU rate and a stipend up to £13,590 per annum (2011/12 rate).
Many schools offer scholarships in the form of Graduate Teaching Assistantships (GTAs) whereby postgraduate research students receive financial support in return for teaching. The value of awards may vary, but often cover tuition fees at the home/EU rate and a substantial maintenance grant.
All postgraduate research students are eligible to apply for GTAs. See Graduate Teaching Assistantships.
For further details of postgraduate funding, see Postgraduate funding.
Further information:
Resources and facilities
Canterbury Cathedral Archives and Library have unparalleled holdings of manuscripts and early printed books. Kent's Templeman Library holds a good stock of facsimiles, scholarly editions, monographs and journals, and we are within easy reach of the British Library, Public Records Office, and other London research libraries. There are good online computing facilities across campus and, in addition, Medieval and Early Modern Studies students have special access to postgraduate computer terminals and the History Postgraduate Student room provided by the School of History.
Further information:
Staff research
Dr Barbara Bombi: Reader in Medieval History
Ecclesiastical and religious history, 1200-1400; canon law and history of the medieval papacy; crusades and history of the military orders; Anglopapal relations in the 14th century; Latin diplomatic and palaeography. Publications include: Il registro di Andrea Sapiti, procuratore fiorentino presso la curia papale nei primi decenni del XIV secolo, Ricerche dell'Istituto Storico Germanico di Roma 1, Roma 2007; Novella plantatio fidei. Missione and crociata nel nord Europa tra XII e XIII secolo, Nuovi studi storici, Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, Roma 2007; Oliviero di Colonia, I Cristiani e il favoloso Egitto. Scontri e incontri durante la V crociata, trad. Barbara Bombi, Studi di Giancarlo Andenna e Barbara Bombi (ed Marietti), Milano 2009.
Dr Alixe Bovey: Lecturer in Medieval History
Medieval visual culture, focusing especially on Gothic illuminated manuscripts. Publications include: Monsters and Grotesques in Medieval Manuscripts (2002); The Chaworth Roll: A Fourteenth-Century Genealogy of the Kings of England (2005); The Tacuinum Sanitatis: An early Renaissance Guide to Health (2005); Under the Influence: The Concept of Influence and the Study of Illuminated Manuscripts (eds John Lowden and Alixe Bovey, 2007) and The Smithfield Decretals: Tales from a Fourteenth-Century English Law Book (forthcoming).
Professor Peter Brown: Professor of Medieval English Literature
Chaucer and other late-medieval English writers; contextual aspects of medieval culture, including historiography, the visual arts, dreams and space. Publications include (ed and contrib): The Blackwell Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c1350–c1500 (2007); Chaucer and the Making of Optical Space (2007); Chaucer at Work (1994).
Dr Rosanna Cox: Lecturer in English Literature
Political thought, culture and literature in the mid to late 17th century; John Milton; early modern statecraft and diplomacy; gender, politics and reading; education and the English universities from the mid-16th century. Publications include: articles on Milton's politics; neo-Roman liberty in Samson Agonistes; Aristotle and the English universities; constitutional design and utopianism in the Interregnum; and Milton and the Ideal Citizen (monograph in progress).
Professor Kenneth Fincham: Professor of Early Modern History
Early modern Britain, particularly religion; the clergy of the Anglican Church; the era of the Civil Wars. Publications include: Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I (1990); The Early Stuart Church 1603-1642 (1993); Altars Restored: the Changing Face of English Religious Worship 1547-c1700 (2007, with Nicholas Tyacke).
Dr Helen Gittos: Lecturer in Medieval History
Anglo-Saxon England, especially the 10th and 11th centuries; the earlier medieval European Church, especially its liturgy and architecture; the status and uses of medieval vernacular languages; Anglo-Norman liturgy and architecture, and the impact of the Conquest on these topics. Publications include: The Liturgy of the Late Anglo-Saxon Church (co-ed, 2005); Sacred Space in Anglo-Saxon England, Medieval History and Archaeology Series, Oxford University Press (forthcoming).
Dr David Grummitt: Lecturer in Early Modern History
Early modern government and politics, diplomacy and war; particularly Tudor England.
Dr Sarah James: Lecturer in Medieval Literature
Late medieval vernacular theological writings in their historical, religious and political contexts; the pastoral care tradition; interactions between medieval literature and visual culture; dreams and visions; late medieval drama. Publications include: articles on Capgrave's Life of St Katharine and Pecock and the uses of the vernacular; Debating Heresy: An Argumentative World (monograph in progress).
Dr Andy Kesson: Lecturer in Early Modenr Studies
Performance theory, book history, representations of the body and sexuality on and off the stage, reception theory, pedagogy and the history of English as a scholarly discipline. Current projects include a collaborative workshop investigating the relationship between words and action onstage. Forthcoming publications include John Lyly and Early Modern Authorship and a co-edited volume of essays provisionally entitled The Elizabethan Top Ten, exploring the concept of the best-selling work in the early modern period.
Professor Bernhard Klein: Professor of English Literature
Early modern literature and culture, Irish studies, maritime culture and history. Publications include: Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (2001); co-ed, with Andrew Gordon, Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (2001); ed, Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture (2002); co-ed, with Gesa Mackenthun, Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (2004); On the Uses of History in Recent Irish Writing (2007).
Dr Luke Lavan: Lecturer in Archaeology
Everyday use of space in the late antique and early medieval city (AD 300-700), drawing on archaeological, textual and epigraphic evidence from across the Roman Empire. Publications include: a number of articles on space in late antiquity; co-ed, with L Ozgenel and A Sarantis, Housing in Late Antiquity: From Palaces to Shops (Late Antique Archaeology 3.2, 2007); co-ed, with E Zanini and A Sarantis, Technology in Transition AD 300-650 (Late Antique Archaeology 4, 2007); co-ed, with T Putzeys and E Swift, Objects in Context, Objects in Use (Late Antique Archaeology 5, 2007).
Dr Marion O'Connor: Reader in English and American Literature
Theatrical reconstructions and dramatic revivals; iconography; drama as historiography; censorship. Publications include: William Poel & the Elizabethan Stage Society (1987); co-ed. (with Jean Howard) and contrib., Shakespeare Reproduced (1987); editions of The Witch for the Oxford University Press Collected Works of Thomas Middleton (2007) and of The Court Beggar and The Queen's Exchange for the HRI Online Collected Works of Richard Brome (2010); and numerous essays on theatre history and on the staging of classical (especially Shakespearean) texts.
Professor David Ormrod: Professor of Economic and Cultural History
Early modern English and European economic and cultural history. Publications include: The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650-1770 (2003); coed with Michael North, Art Markets in Europe, 1400-1800 (1998); Artists, Dealers and Connoisseurs: The Origins of the English Art Market, 1650-1815 (forthcoming).
Dr David Potter: Reader in French History
Early modern France; the state and local society in the 15th and 16th centuries; the impact of war; the French aristocracy in the 16th century; Renaissance diplomacy. Publications include: Renaissance France at War: Armies, Culture and Society, c1480-1560 (2008); Foreign Intelligence and Information in Elizabethan England: Two English Treatises on the State of France, 1579-84, Camden Society, Fifth Series, 25 (2005).
Dr Catherine Richardson: Reader in English Literature
Early modern literature and drama; language and narrative; material culture, especially clothing and the household. Publications include: Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy (2006); Catherine Richardson ed, Clothing Culture 1350-1650 (2004); C Dyer and C Richardson eds, William Dugdale, Historian, 1605-86: His Life, His Writings and His County (2009); C Richardson and T Hamling eds., Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and its Meanings (2010).
Dr Ben Thomas: Lecturer; Director of History and Theory of Art
Italian Renaissance art; Renaissance writing on the visual arts; 16th- and 17th-century prints. Publications include: Ben Thomas & Timothy Wilson (eds), C D E Fortnum and the collecting and study of applied arts and sculpture in Victorian England (1999); entry on Edgar Marcel Wind in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; and articles on Raphael, Michelangelo and Italian Renaissance art.
Further information:
Contact details
Admissions enquiriesT: +44 (0)1227 827272
E: information@kent.ac.uk
The Canterbury Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Rutherford College, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NX, UK
T: +44 (0)1227 823140
E: c.l.taylor@kent.ac.uk
Further information: