Profile
The history of the crusades is my primary interest, but I have also developed a specialism in Medieval and Renaissance medicine and I enjoy teaching Latin at all levels.
I have been at Queen Mary for over ten years, following a first career in further and adult education.
Research
Research Interests:
I am interested in most aspects of the history of the crusades and settlement in the Latin East, especially working with primary sources in Latin, Old French, and Greek.
My research interests include:
- the First Crusade and its historiography
- the reign of Baldwin I (1100-1118)
- later crusades, their sources, and and especially previously untranslated ones
- saints’ lives (hagiography)
- the hospital of St John in Jerusalem
- Antioch as an intellectual centre
- ‘crusader medicine’: the interface between Arabic and western European theory and practice
Publications
- ‘Medicine and surgery in the Livre des Assises de la Cour des Bourgeois de Jerusalem’, Al-Masâq, 18 (2005), pp. 87-97
- ‘Administrative Regulations for the Hospital of St John in Jerusalem dating from the 1180s’, Crusades, 4 (2005), pp. 21-37
- ‘Medieval Antioch as an intellectual centre, and its influence on western European medicine’, Proceedings of the 38th International Congress on the History of Medicine (Ankara, 2005), pp. 481-7.
- ‘Antioch, Medieval City of Culture’, in East and West in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean, ed. K. Ciggaar, M. Metcalf, vol. 1, Orientalia Lovaniensa Analecta 147 (2006), pp. 247-259
- Items on Albert of Aachen; Chanson d’Antioche; De Expugnatione Lyxbonensi; Excidium Acconis; Fulcher of Chartres; Holy Sepulchre; Hospital of St John (Jerusalem); Martyrdom, Christian; Medicine; Motivation; Peter Tudebode; Raymond of Aguilers; Teutonic Source; Thadeus of Naples; Walter the Chancellor; Western Sources: for Encyclopedia of the Crusades, ed. Alan V. Murray (ABC-CLIO, 2006)
- ‘A Female Physician on the Fourth Crusade? Laurette de Saint-Valery’, in Knighthoods of Christ: Essays on the History of the Crusades and the Knights Templar, presented to Malcolm Barber, ed. N. Housley (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 77-85
- Albert of Aachen, Historia Ierosolimitana, ed. and tr. (Oxford: Oxford Medieval Texts, 2007)
- ‘Oriental and occidental medicine in the crusader states’, in The Crusades and the Near East: Cultural Histories, ed. C. Kostick (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011)
- La Chanson d’Antioche, translation and commentary, with Carol Sweetenham (Ashgate, 2011)
- ‘Pagans and “Others” in the Chanson de Jerusalem’, in Languages of Love and Hate, ed. H. Nicholson, S. Lambert and E. James (Brepols, 2012)
Forthcoming publications
- Albert the Aachen, translation and commentary (2 vols, Ashgate: Crusade Texts in Translation, 2012)
- ‘D. Afonso Henriques and the Second Crusade’, in The Second Crusade: New Approaches, ed. J. M. Jensen and J. Roche (Brepols, 2013)
- ‘The crusaders write home: the experience of the First Crusade as described in participants’ letters’, Segundas Jornadas Internacionales sobre la Primera Cruzada conference volume, ed. S. B. Edgington and Luis García-Guijarro Ramos (Zaragoza, 2013?)
Supervision
I welcome applications from candidates wishing to undertake doctoral research in the following areas:
- the First Crusade
- the history of hospitals