Once a year, as part of our traditional Monday night seminar series, SAIMS welcomes a visiting scholar to give the Annual Lecture.
These are the speakers we have had the pleasure of hosting throughout the years.






2024
Professor Walter Pohl
“Where Rome really fell; the lands along the Danube in the fourth to seventh centuries”
2023
Professor Elaine Treharne
“Scribes, Scribal Practices, and Writing Environments in Britain 1150-1250”
2022
Professor Leslie Brubaker
“The Princess and the Scroll”
2021 – Tuesday 4 May
Professor Maire Ni Mhaonaigh (Cambridge)
“Shaping the Landscapre: Human Agency and Imagination in Medieval Irish Narratives of Place”
2019
Paul Strohm (Columbia University)
“‘May I not stand here’: Criseyede at the Crossroads”
2018
Daniel Smail (Harvard University)
“The Materiality of Credit: Debt Collection as Pawnbroking in Late Medieval Mediterranean Europe”
2017
Professor Rita Copeland (University of Pennsylvania)
“An Affective Anthology of Style: Glasgow, Hunterian MS V.8.14”
2016 – 7th March
Professor David Wallace (University of Pennsylvania):
“A View from St Andrews: The Council of Constance, 1414-1418”
Professor Wallace’s lecture was in a similar vein to his forthcoming edited volume Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418. This work looks at Europe transnationally, using literary sources to determine how Europeans identified themselves during the fourteenth century, following the crisis of the Black Death, and during the early fifteenth century, a period of regeneration. Focussing on the regeneration of Europe, Professor Wallace opened his lecture with the founding of the University of St Andrews, which served as an example of Scotland’s intellectual recovery and realignment with Rome. He then examined the contemporaneous Council of Constance, which he argued was one of the greatest examples of the restructuring of Europe following the catastrophic fourteenth century. He focussed primary on the chronicle of Ulrich von Richental and the journal of Guillaume Fillastre, shedding light upon many details of the Council, from the buying and selling of goods to performances to the condemnation of heretics. Professor Wallace concluded his lecture with a reference to Britain’s EU referendum, arguing that the Council of Constance is still relevant in the modern day.
2015 – 6th April
Professor Jean-Claude Schmitt
“Rhythms in History”
Professor Schmitt is one of the foremost cultural historians of the Middle Ages. He has been a long-time advocate of interdisciplinarity, using insights from anthropology, art history and literature to capture the way that people viewed the world. He is famous for his books The Holy Greyhound (1983), Ghosts in the Middle Ages (1998) and The Conversion of Herman the Jew (2010). He is Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales in Paris.
2014
Professor Robert I. Moore (University of Newcastle)
“The Eleventh Century in World History”
2013
Professor John Lowden (The Courtauld Institute of Art)
“The Gothic Ivories Project”
2012
Dr Tony Hunt (University of Oxford)
“Writing the Future in Anglo-Norman England”
2011
Professor Nicholas Vincent (University of East Anglia)
“William of Newburgh and the New Titus: Richard 1 and the Jews of York”
2010
Professor Mary Carruthers (University of New York)
“Ordinary Beauty in the Middle Ages”
2009
Professor Paul Binski (University of Cambridge)
“‘Working by words alone’: the architect, scholasticism and rhetoric in thirteenth-century France”
2008
Professor Gerd Althoff (University of Münster)
“Forms and Functions of Irony in Medieval Politics”