Medieval History in the UK in 2011: A Health-Check

The Leeds International Medieval Congress (IMC), convened annually since 1994, has in recent years attracted around 2,000 participants. They come from every European country, from North America and from South America, and from Japan, China and Australia. The most important statistic in the present context is the ratio of junior historians (doctoral students and those in postdoctoral posts) to senior ones (those in more or less permanent or tenured teaching and other posts in universities, galleries or museums). The IMC's own statistics indicate a heavy preponderance of juniors over seniors in 2011, as in previous years - only more so. Not only do juniors give most papers, they take a large hand in organizing sessions too.

The following impressions are the result of my own thoroughly amateur statistical analysis of the 2011 programme, and of my experience, supplemented by information from colleagues and students, of the two days (out of three and a half) which I was able to attend this year. In my table the figures in columns 3 and 4, of historical papers given, and of authors UK-based, are necessarily approximate. Identifying what is historical, as distinct from any other kind of medieval, is partly guesswork. So strong is the congress's tradition of including medieval studies - philosophy, theology, music, archaeology, history of art, and especially languages and literatures, as well as a number of special chronological or geographical areas of history, such as late antiquity, and Byzantium, or thematic, such as the history of medicine or of material culture - and so strong is the drive towards inter-disciplinarity, that it's become increasingly difficult to draw boundaries between disciplines. The tendency of history to be taught as well as researched within centres for the study of medieval culture (also known as medieval studies) has become well established in other parts of the world (China and Japan, for instance, as well as central and eastern Europe). I have judged a paper 'historical' on the basis of topic; approach as implied in the Session title as well as the paper's title; author's departmental and institutional affiliation; and in a few cases my own hearing of the paper and/or knowledge of the author's work. Indeterminacy as to the classification of the paper affects the number of authors identifiable as 'UK-based'. For what they are worth, then, here are the figures, accumulated from the three time-blocks and ninety simultaneous sessions of day one, four time-blocks and 120 sessions of days two and three, and two time-blocks and sixty sessions of the final half day.

Table 1.

Characteristics of speakers at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds, 2011

A warning needs to be registered about how far the 2011 figures are representative. Some Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) where medieval history is in fact strong were for one reason or another (the absence of teachers on research leave, for instance, or a temporary blip in doctoral applicants) somewhat under-represented this year as compared with other recent years. High-quality research students are distributed very broadly, but patchily, in roughly the proportions that a more extended study of departmental websites would indicate. The data provide a health-check on the condition of medieval history in the UK.

At Leeds in 2011 there were strong clusters of junior medieval historians from Oxford, Cambridge, and, among the old University of London colleges, King's (KCL), Queen Mary (QMUL), Royal Holloway (RHUL), and University College (UCL). All attest the existence of thriving MA courses in medieval history, while each institution has particular fortes: crusade studies at RHUL, for instance, and later medieval cultural history at QMUL. All have fine traditions of training doctoral students, and play to these strengths, indeed in recent years, and in 2011, the crops have been more abundant than ever. In Scotland, all four of the ancient universities run good medieval history postgraduate programmes: among them, St Andrews fielded an exceptionally strong contingent of doctoral students in 2011. Well represented too were Durham, the older Welsh universities, Cardiff and...