These are the various works, great or otherwise, on which I'm currently engaged, with a few past glories at the end.
Personal Research
My main work has been for years and is still the elucidation of power structures and society in Catalonia over the late ninth, tenth and early eleventh centuries, as this area that had been the very edge of the Carolingian Empire, where Christianity met Islam, became almost by default a new and increasingly prosperous polity that would come to dominate the eastern peninsula and much of the Mediterranean. I do this by tracing connections between the holders of power and their delegates and subjects in the prolific charter evidence.
This work has so far generated one published paper, several more in various stages of review and revision and a rook of conference and seminar papers, all of which are detailed on the Publications page. It has also generated my Ph.D. thesis, "Pathways of Power in late-Carolingian Catalonia", which was submitted at the University of London in September 2005, and passed without corrections in March 2006. I am currently revising this work for publication as a monograph in the Royal Historical Society's Studies in History series.
I currently have in preparation papers on the following related subjects:
- the process of colonisation of waste land on the frontier, and the related tenure known as aprisio;
- the control of such processes by higher authority and the extent to which this was a political strategy;
- the various alleged attempts by the tenth-century Catalan Church to establish an independent metropolitanate, in particular that attributed to Bishop Ató of Osona;
- the identity of the authority used and claimed by those in power on the Spanish March;
- the extent to which pre-documentary structures of authority can be reconstructed in distant frontier areas from the encroaching threshold of record;
- the nature of popular appeal to legal procedures, in partial response to Jeffrey Bowman's recent book Shifting Landmarks;
- the documentary culture of the area and its antecedents.
I am also working on material for three books: firstly the published version of my doctoral thesis, as described above; secondly a biographical study of Borrell II, the Count-Marquis of Barcelona at the time of the last Carolingians, whose career makes a splendid illustration of the changes in society at his time and how those in positions of power might respond to them; and lastly a comparative study of the political and patronage strategies of the various counts and rulers of the Spanish frontier as events came to favour their independence. In the long term I hope to synthesize these works into a wider account of Catalonia's social changes at the turn of the millennium as seen through the interactions and strategies of its holders of power.
I have also broadened my own research westwards and am currently investigating society in the frontier society of Asturias and León, again on the basis of the extensive charter evidence, contrasting this with the conventional depiction drawn from the Asturian chronicles. In 2007 I presented work based on this study at the Institute of Historical Research, and hope to continue this work as a secondary thread, as there are several projects I can think of to expand on it.
For my Masters I spent a year working on the political structures of Northern Britain in the very early medieval period, and I published a paper based on this old work in early 2008. I hope to return to this area at some point and prepare a further paper for publication on the political structure in and kingship of Pictland. I remain interested in early medieval Scotland and have some much-valued contacts in the field.
I also have some familiarity with Anglo-Saxon England and a few ideas for contributions there, but realism suggests that I shouldn't bother listing them after all this little lot...
Employment Projects
I copy-edited several chapters for the ongoing Christianization and State Formation in Northern and Central Europe c. 900-c. 1200 project at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge, which has now published the work as Christianization and the Rise of Christian Monarchy: Scandinavia, Central Europe and Rus' c. 900-1200, ed. Nora Berend (Cambridge: CUP 2007).
I constructed, redesigned and filled a database for a project entitled Mobility and Meetings of Spanish People in the Tenth Century under Professor Wendy Davies at University College London.
I am deeply involved in the ongoing Lay Archives Project, funded by the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust. As well as massing and recording data for other parts of the project, I constructed a database of known pre-900 lay documents in ecclesiastical archives, and will be co-authoring a paper with Professor Matthew Innes based upon this work in the coming year.
I am currently employed in the Department of Coins and Medals at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Here, as well as cataloguing and displaying online the Museum's collection of Korean coins, its Roman Imperial gold & silver coins and the various items in the Watson Medals Collection, Queens College Collection and Wyon Collection, with more to follow, I have also been responsible for copy-editing the forthcoming Spanish volume of the Medieval European Coinage series, and for maintaining, cleaning and updating the Corpus of Early Medieval Coin-Finds and Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles databases, from which I also generated electronically the initial text for the 2006 & 2007 editions of "Coin Register" in the British Numismatic Journal.
Also while at Coins and Medals, although it is not part of any of my specialities, I have catalogued and put online the Lester Watson Collection of Campaign and Gallantry Medals, which the Museum acquired on loan in 2005 for the Department's Imagery of War exhibition. Both the virtual exhibition site for that display and the online catalogue of the Collection were constructed and designed by me, with considerable help from the Museum's Computer Manager Shaun Osborne. This I include not really as an example of my medieval research, but mainly because I found it interesting and hope that the casual browser might do so too. In fact I hope this of all my work, but unlike most of it this is just a click away...