Professor Matthew Innes

Research interests* Teaching interests* Publications* Areas of research supervision* Contact details

Research interests

Matthew Innes has published widely on the history of Europe in the late antique and early medieval periods, that is from the fifth to the eleventh centuries CE. Geographically, his research has focused on north-western Europe, especially the Frankish kingdoms in modern France, Germany and the Low Countries, but is also encompasses the western Mediterranean, Britain, Scandinavia and east-central Europe. Published work has concentrated on two major issues. A series of articles and chapters have explored the ‘uses of the past’, that is the process whereby understandings of the past were reshaped so as to explain or interpret the present. Another strand of work has studied on the social relationships between aristocratic and ecclesiastical elites, royal courts and peasant communities, which determined cultural, economic and political dynamics; the resulting reinterpretation of the processes of ‘state-formation’ in post-Roman Europe has been a focus of international debate.

Matthew’s contribution to the field was recognized by the award of a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2004 ( http://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/news/past_prizes/2004 ) and his case-study of society and politics in the Rhine valley under Carolingian rule was awarded the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone History Book Prize in 2000. His current research investigates the structures of early medieval society as revealed by documentary evidence, and in particular the relationships between property ownership, legal freedom and public power. A series of studies on ‘practices of property’, embracing not only the rich evidence from the Carolingian Empire which was the mainstay of his earlier work, but also the surviving material from the barbarian successor states which emerged in the immediately post-Roman west, have been facilitated by the support of the Leverhulme Trust.

Matthew is also co-convenor (with Warren Brown of UCLA, Adam Kosto of Columbia and Marios Costambeys of Liverpool University) of an international Anglo-American network that has been meeting regularly since 2003, which has been supported by the British Academy and a number of other institutions. The ‘lay archives’ group investigates the ways in which lay landowners used, stored and accessed documentary records in late antique and early medieval Europe and the Mediterranean; its work is posing fundamental questions about the function and survival of the records from which students of the period work. For a brief c.v. click here

Teaching interests

Matthew contributes to the BA progammes in History, and History & Archaeology, and plays a central role in two MA programmes, those in Medieval History and Medieval Cultures.

Publications

Books

• State and Society in the Early Middle Ages: the middle Rhine valley, 400-1000 (Cambridge, 2000). Reissued  in paperback 2006. Won Gladstone History Book Prize 2000.

• (Co-edited, with Yitzhak Hen) The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: CUP, 2000). Contributors from Austria, Holland, Israel, Italy and UK.

• The Sword, the Book and the Plough: An Introduction to Early Medieval Western Europe, 300-900  (London: Routledge, 2006).

• (Co-authored with Marios Costambeys and Simon Maclean) The Carolingian World (Cambridge: CUP, 2007).

• (Co-edited with Warren Brown, Marios Costambeys and Adam Kosto) Laypeople and Documents in the Early Middle Ages (currently in preparation for publication 2008)

• Matthew has also been an editor of the journal Early Medieval Europe since 1997.

Articles and chapters (selected):

• ‘Land, freedom and the making of the early medieval west’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 16 (2006), pp.39-73.

• ‘Practices of Property in the Carolingian Empire’, in J. Davies and M. McCormick, eds., New Directions: The Early Middle Ages Today (forthcoming)

• ‘Charlemagne's government’, in J. Storey, ed., Charlemagne: Empire and Society (Manchester: MUP, 2005), pp.71-88.

• ‘”He never even bared his teeth in laughter”: the politics of humour in the Carolingian renaissance’, in Humour, History and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2002), pp.131-56.

• ‘”A place of discipline”: aristocratic youth and Carolingian courts’, in C. Cubitt, ed., Court Culture in the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2003), pp.59-76.

• ‘Danelaw identities: ethnicity, regionalism and political allegiance’, in D. Hadley and J. Richards, eds., Cultures in Contact: Scandinavians and Natives in the Danelaw (Turnhout, 2001), pp.65-88.

• ‘Keeping it in the family: women and aristocratic memory, 700-1200’, in E. van Houts, ed., Medieval Memories: Men, Women and the Past, 700-1300 (London, 2001), pp.17-35.

• ‘People, places and power in the Carolingian world: a microcosm’, in M. De Jong and F. Theuws, eds., Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages (Leiden, Boston and Cologne, 2001), pp.397-437.

• ‘Introduction: using the past, interpreting the present, influencing the future’, and ‘Teutons or Trojans ? The Carolingians and the Germanic past’, in The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (as above), pp.1-9, 227-49.

• ‘Memory, orality and literacy in an early medieval society’, Past & Present 158 (1998), pp.3-38.

• ‘Kings, monks and patrons: political identity at the abbey of Lorsch’, in R. Le Jan, ed., La royauté et les elites dans l’Europe carolingienne (Lille, 1998), pp.301-24.

• ‘Charlemagne’s Will: inheritance, ideology and the imperial succession in the early ninth century’, English Historical Review 112 (1997), pp.833-55.

• ‘The classical tradition in the Carolingian renaissance: ninth-century encounters with Suetonius’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 3 (1997), pp.265-82.

• (with Rosamond McKitterick) ‘The writing of history’, in R. McKitterick, ed., Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation (Cambridge, 1994), pp.193-220.

Areas of research supervision

Matthew would be interested in supervising proposals on any aspect of late antique or early medieval western European history. He is currently supervising five doctoral students, and a number of current and former students have published work in internationally recognised journals. Matthew has successful experience of gaining postdoctoral studentships from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and can also offer advice on the various sources of support available from Birkbeck’s School of History.

Contact details

Email: m.innes@bbk.ac.uk

Tel: 020 7631 6555

Room: 318 (Malet Street)