Visiting Staff and Students

Home Institution: University of Vermont

Charles F. Briggs is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Vermont. A specialist in the intellectual and political culture of late medieval Europe, his books include The Body Broken: Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, 1300–1525 (Routledge, 2020), Giles of Rome’s ‘De regimine principum’: Reading and Writing Politics at Court and University, c. 1275–c.1525 (CUP, 1999), and (edited with Peter S. Eardley) A Companion to Giles of Rome (Brill, 2016). His studies and essays have appeared in such peer-reviewed journals as Intellectual History Review, Journal of Medieval History, Rhetorica, English Manuscript Studies, Manuscripta, and Scriptorium, and in numerous collaborative volumes. In addition to receiving research funding from the American Philosophical Society, he has been a Leslie Humanities Fellow at Dartmouth College, a Mellon Fellow at Saint Louis University, and a Starr Foundation Visiting Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. In December 2011 he was named a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Project Title: Reframing Early Humanism: Scholasticism, Classicism, and the Languages of Politics, 1260–1350

This project seeks to construct an alternative framework to the two currently reigning explanatory narratives of the origins of Renaissance humanism, one of which posits that humanism was a literary and cultural ‘movement’ initiated in the mid-fourteenth century by Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) and the other that it was a ‘new aesthetic’ generated by a group of lay notaries and lawyers in late thirteenth-century Padua. I argue instead for a flourishing culture of humanism in the late 1200s and early 1300s, which was not limited to northern and central Italy – although it was most actively developed there – but involved a network extending from England, through Paris and Avignon, down to Angevin Naples. Its assumptions and intentions were as much political (being a response to the challenges posed by state formation and the demands of a rapidly commercializing urban economy and society) as they were literary and linguistic; its advocates included university educated friars and clerics as well as lay notaries and lawyers; and its textual sources were as much Aristotelian as classical Roman. I also contend, however, that this particular culture of humanism underwent profound changes in the mid-fourteenth century in response to the effects of climate change, demographic collapse in the wake of the Black Death, and political and economic turmoil. 

Home Institution: Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen

Bastiaan Waagmeester is a postdoc at the Seminar für Mittelalterliche Geschichte at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. He is part of the joint UK-German project 'Priests in a post-imperial world, c. 900-1050' together with Prof. Charles West (Edinburgh) and Prof. Steffen Patzold (Tübingen). His current research is focused on episcopal handbooks. These books were used by bishops to impose ecclesiastical discipline on their priests, mostly through the organisation of an itinerant synodal court of law (also known as the Sendgericht), and tell us something about how local priests interacted with their superiors. 

In Edinburgh, he worked together with Charles West on writing a book that examines local priests in the tenth and eleventh centuries. It is expected to be published towards the end of 2024 by Cambridge University Press.