Reflections on the International Medieval Congress in Leeds

So, it is done. I attended my first big history conference, and managed to give a paper! My main aim for the conference was to meet and chat with the various (Polish) medievalists working on Poland, since this was such a great opportunity for this. And I managed to do so! It was really important …

Academic Summer

'Academics get the summer off.' As if. Even we, the baby PhD students, know this is not true. The first hint of this is the flurry of conference calls for papers that make it into your inbox around Springtime. Then, come Summer Term, everyone's talking about 'Conference Season.' My fellow UCL History PhD students and …

Archbishops, Bishops, and Prelates

Moving away from writing about legates and nuncios, I've now switched to looking at the local clerical elites. This is proving interesting, if just in terms of how to engage with the material. There is definitely a lot more scholarship that exists - both on the clergy as a group as well on individuals and …

Archives: An Update

So I've been to two archives in the past weeks: The Archdiocesan Archives in Wrocław and Poznań. Though I was slightly apprehensive first, all was fine and I came out alive. 😉 I knew there wouldn't be huge amounts available for me to work with - the Partitions of Poland and especially World War 2 …

Archives!

With Spring Break coming up (already!), I decided to plan some research trips for when I'm in Poland for the holidays. As all the archival training sessions have stressed, I contacted the three archives I'm going to visit - Archdiocesan Archive in Wrocław, Archdiocesan Archive in Poznań and the Archive and Library of the Cracow …

Writing

I should be writing, or rather, editing that 'chapter' that I mentioned in the previous post. However, I've switched to writing this blog post, instead. I once had a conversation about writing with my cousin, who at that time was agonising over an essay she had to submit. She really was agonising, because, as she …

Baby Steps

So, as an update: I've started writing. To be specific, I started what I shudder to call a 'chapter' on papal nuncii. It seems like the most logical place to start gathering thoughts into words, as it stems directly from my MA Thesis on papal legates. It is an interesting exercise because writing about these nuncios …

Conferences, Conferences, Conferences

This past weekend I attended a conference organized by Professor Nora Berend in St. Catharine's College, Cambridge, titled 'Minority Influences in Medieval Society'. It was GREAT. Although at the beginning I was somewhat nervous and reluctant to chat to all these senior scholars who were there to give papers, once I started, it got a …

A Little Pick-Me-Up: Bickering Bishops

One of the recurring frustrations that I encounter is not the lack of sources, per se, but the unhelpful citing habits of some historians. Most of the historiography I use is quite dated (although there are great recent works, as well) and it seems to me that the fashion of the time was to assume …

Online beginnings

So, I've created this blog to help me get my head around the research that I'm doing for my PhD, and hopefully share interesting bits of it with a (future) audience. We'll see how that goes! To bring the topic of my research closer: I will be looking at papal government in the Kingdom of …