Dr Veronica West-Harling
I am an Associate Member of the History Faculty and was, until 2014, a member of All Souls College. I am interested in the societies and cultures of the early medieval West, and their transformation from the Late Roman into the Romano-Germanic world from Late Antiquity until the end of the first millenium (7th to the 11th cs) across Western Europe.
I was educated at the universities of Paris IV-Sorbonne and Brasenose College in Oxford, wrote my doctoral thesis at Trinity College, Cambridge, and spent my professional life, first as a JRF and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Oxford, then as a lecturer at the universities of Durham, Wales and Leicester/Northampton, where I was a Senior Lecturer and Editor of the Victoria County History of Northamptonshire until 2009, when I returned to Oxford. During these years, I was involved in university and departmental administration, as well as lecturing and tutoring, running research programmes and seminars, acting as a moderator for new degrees, an examiner, and supervising postgraduate students. I was also much involved with working groups and organisations in the Heritage Industry, especially in outreach, representation, and intangible heritage.
From September 2011 to September 2014, as a Research Fellow in the History Faculty at Oxford, I completed an AHRC-funded project entitled: From Byzantine to Ottonian empires: Venice, Ravenna and Rome, imperial associations and the construction of city identity, c. 750-1000. The monograph arising from this project was published in 2021 by Oxford University Press under the title Rome, Ravenna and Venice, 750-1000: Byzantine Heritage, Imperial Present and the Construction of City Identity. A collection of conference papers linked to the project was published by Brepols in 2015 under the title Three empires, three cities: identity, material culture and legitimacy in Venice, Ravenna and Rome, 750-1000. In the past 10 years, my main publications have included aspects of the history of Venice and Ravenna, as well as that of Rome, and on female monasteries in Italy, including S Salvatore di Brescia and Carolingian Italy. In 2013 I won the Oxford University Research Excellence Award. For details of publications see www.academia.edu.
While remaining based in the History Faculty, I won, in 2015, an EU Horizon2020 award for two years as a Marie Curie Senior Research Fellow, based at the University of Venice, Ca’ Foscari. The project was entitled ‘Family, Power, Memory: female monasticism in Italy, 700 to 1100’. During the course of this project, I set up a database of early medieval Italian nuns, MedItaNunC, presenting the material about individual nuns in relation to their family connections, political and economic presence, patronage and cultural importance. The volume of the conference relating to this project was published as Family, Power, Memory: Female Monasticism in Italy, 700-1100, in the e-journal Reti Medievali as a monographic section in 2019/1; and I am in the process of finishing a monograph, to be published by Brepols in the Medieval Monastic Studies series. I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Centro interuniversitario per la Storia e l’Archeologia dell’Alto Medioevo (SAAME), the SISMED, a contributor on two editorial boards. I am an associate member on the Italian Ministry for Education PRIN (Progetto di Ricerca di Importanza Nazionale) Ruling in Hard Times. Patterns of power and practices of government in the making of Carolingian Italy (Univ. Trento, Venezia, Padova, Pisa).
My research work so far has followed three main lines of inquiry: a. The Anglo-Saxon church and culture b. Medievalism, from political debates, literature, art and architecture to film, detective novels, the Heritage industry, the Internet and re-enactment, on which I wrote the book In Search of the Holy Grail: The Quest for the Middle Ages (2006) c. Late Antique and Early Medieval Italian cultural history, especially in Rome, between the fifth and tenth centuries, which has led to my last two books. The overall line of this work was an examination of the convergences and divergences between political realities and the rhetoric, image and ideology of imperial rule in Early Medieval Italy in the 9th and 10th centuries, and at the way in which these have shaped the identity of the three main post-Byzantine capitals of Rome, Ravenna and Venice. The project entitled Family, Power, Memory: female monasticism in Italy, 700 to 1100, like my past work, is also a comparative and interdisciplinary study: that of Italian female monasteries from 700 to 1100. I approached the study of Italian religious women as a laboratory for exploring the complex relationship between gender and power. To study the evolution of nunneries makes it possible to trace changes in Italian political, social and cultural patterns, with the intermingling of family and politics. Understanding the tensions between early medieval Italian society’s male-controlled political and religious power, and the great influence of noble women as queens and as nuns, is essential for grasping women’s ideological and spiritual power in Italy and their influence within the elite and in society generally, and to recognize the different and changing configurations of medieval Italy.
MedItaNunC (Marie Curie project on Family, Power, Memory: Female Monasticism in Italy, 700-1100 (ITNUN))
I am currently an Associate member of the Faculty and a member of Wolfson College. My main research now focuses on the history of tenth-century Rome, the Rome of Alberic, and aims at studying the relationship between the aristocratic government of the city, its ideological points of reference, and the changes in the social and cultural urban topography of the city in the 10th century.