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Professor John Arnold

Head of Department

BA (History), D.Phil Medieval Studies (University of York)
Professor of Medieval History

Contact details

Department of History, Classics and Archaeology
Birkbeck, University of London
Room 1.10
27 Russell Square
London
WC1B 5DQ

Email: hodhistory@bbk.ac.uk
Tel: + 44 (0)20 7631 6273

Profile

  • John H Arnold was made Professor of Medieval History at Birkbeck in 2008. He has worked at Birkbeck since 2001, and before that was a lecturer at the University of East Anglia. He primarily works on aspects of medieval religious culture, but has also published on issues in historiography and public history.

Research and Teaching

  • Introduction
  • Whilst never having been a believer in any religion, ‘belief’ has always fascinated me. Why do people believe the things they believe? What does ‘believing’ really mean in practice? These are issues which I pursue through the textual remains of the European middle ages, a period which is often thought of as a simple ‘Age of Faith’ but which, I attempt to demonstrate, was in fact much more complex. These issues are important not only to our understanding of the middle ages but also our current time: ideas about ‘secularity’ depend, in very large part, upon a received story of a believing medieval past, and a sceptical ‘modern’ present. Reworking our understanding of the medieval may better help us to address current intersections of religion, politics and power.
  • Research Interests
  • medieval religion and culture, including heresy, lay piety, and gender
  • subjectivity and power
  • historical theory, epistemology and practice
  • Teaching
  • I convene the MA Medieval History, and teach on a number of modules at both undergraduate and MA level, usually including:
  • The Medieval World (undergraduate group 1)
  • Gender in the Middle Ages (undergraduate group 2)
  • Death, Ancestors and the Afterlife, c.400-1400 (UG group 2)
  • Heresy in the Middle Ages 1000-1300 (MA)
  • Ricardian England (MA)
  • PhD Supervision
  • I am currently supervising dissertations on the following areas:
  • A Comparison of Interrogative Processes: Inquisition, Canonization and Enquetes in Thirteenth-Century France
  • The Te igitur text and Medieval Cahors
  • Bernard Gui, Nicholas Eymerich and fourteenth-century Inquisition
  • Late medieval English courts: culture, space and law
  • Inquisition in early fourteenth-century Italy
  • Political concepts in late medieval English pastoral texts

Publications

  • Books
  • The Oxford Handbook to Medieval Christianity (forthcoming, 2014/15)
  • What is Masculinity? Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World (Palgrave, 2011), co-edited with Sean Brady
  • What is Medieval History? (Polity, 2008)
  • Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe (Bloomsbury, 2005)
  • A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe (Boydell, 2004), co-edited with Katherine J Lewis
  • Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001)
  • History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2000); subsequently translated into 14 languages
  • Articles and chapters
  • 'Heresy and Gender', in J. M. Bennett and R. M. Karras, eds, The Oxford Handbook to Women and Gender in the Middle Ages (Oxford, forthcoming 2013)
  • ‘Medieval Reformations’, in Mary Laven, Alexandra Bamji and Geert Janssen, eds, Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation (Ashgate, forthcoming 2012)
  • (co-authored with Caroline Goodson) ‘Resounding Community: The History and Meaning of Medieval Church Bells’, Viator 43.1 (2012): 99-130
  • ‘The Materiality of Unbelief in Late Medieval England’, in Sophie Page, ed., The Unorthodox Imagination in Late Medieval Britain (Manchester University Press, 2010)
  • ‘Inquisizione medievale’, ‘Archivi e series documentarie, Francia’, ‘Corrado di Marburgo’, ‘Roberto il Bulgaro’, ‘Inghilterra’, ‘Storiografia inquisizione medievale’ and other shorter entries, in Adriano Prosperi, ed., Dizionario Storico dell’Inquisizione (Normale, 2010)
  • ‘Religion and Popular Rebellion, from the Capuciati to Niklashausen’, Cultural and Social History 6 (2009): 149-69
  • ‘Repression and Power’, in M. Rubin and W. Simons, eds, Christianity in Western Europe, c. 1100-1500, The Cambridge History of Christianity vol. IV (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
  • 'Doomed or Disinterested? Did all medieval people believe in God?', BBC History Magazine (January 2009): 38-43
  • ‘Inside and Outside the Medieval Laity; Reflections on the History of Emotions’, in M. Rubin, ed., European Religious Cultures (Institute of Historical Research, 2008)
  • 'Gender and Sexuality' in C. Lansing and E. English, eds, The Blackwell Companion to Medieval Europe (2008)
  • ‘Responses to the Postmodern Challenge; or, What Might History Become?’, European History Quarterly 37 (2007): 109-32
  • ‘The Labour of Continence: Masculinity and Clerical Virginity’, in A. Bernau, R. Evans and S. Salih, eds, Medieval Virginities (University of Wales Press, 2003), 102-118
  • 'A man takes an ox by the horn and a peasant by the tongue'; Literacy, Orality and Inquisition in Medieval Languedoc', in S. Rees-Jones, ed., Literacy and Learning in Medieval England and Abroad (Brepols, 2003), pp. 31-47
  • Co-authored with Andy Wood: ‘“Nothing is Written”: Politics, Ideology and the Burden of History in the Fall Revolution Quartet’, in Andrew M Butler and Farah Mendlesohn, eds, The True Knowledge of Ken MacLeod (Science Fiction Foundation, 2003)
  • 'Inquisition, texts and discourse', in P. Biller and C. Bruschi, eds, Texts and the Repression of Medieval Heresy (York Medieval Press, 2003), pp. 63-80.
  • Lollard Trials and Inquisitorial Discourse’, Fourteenth-Century England vol. II, ed C. Given-Wilson (2002), pp. 81-94
  • 'The Preaching of the Cathars', in C. Muessig, ed, Medieval Monastic Preaching (Brill, 1998), 183-205
  • 'The Historian as Inquisitor: The Ethics of Interrogating Subaltern Voices’, Rethinking History 2:3 (1998):379-386
  • Lectures
  • Extract from inaugural lecture, ‘Writing Heresy, Capturing Dissent’, www.bbk.ac.uk/history/about-us/writing-heresy.doc

Media

Professional membership

  • Social History Society
  • Medieval Academy of America

Current activities

  • I am currently editing the Oxford Handbook to Medieval Christianity which I hope will be published in 2014. My longer term projects return me to a focus on southern France: I am working on a treatise written by Benedict of Alignan, bishop of Marseille, c. 1260; and I am compiling materials for a future book on religion, society and lay piety in southern France c. 1100-1350. In collaboration with Peter Biller at the University of York I am also slowly translating materials to appear in a book of primary sources on heresy and inquisition in thirteenth-century France.

 

Professor John Arnold

Professor John Arnold

 
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