The Medieval Research Centre here at Leicester is an interdepartmental collaboration between four Departments within our College of Arts, Humanities and Law. In February and March the Centre presents a series of four public lectures by visiting speakers on topics that range from the influence of medieval thought on the Third Reich to the hagiographic work of Caesarius of Heisterbach.

‘Hagiography’ is mostly used now as a pejorative term to describe an overly fauning or sycophantic description of someone but it literally means an account of the life of a Saint. So it’s no criticism of the Cistercian monk to call him a hagiographer because his greatest work, Dialogus magnus visionum ac miraculorum, records the visions and miracles of numerous Saintly individuals. Dialogus was a bestseller in 13th century (pre-Caxton) Germany and more than fifty manuscript copies survive.

17 February 2011
The Early Middle Ages, from the Ancien Regime* to National Socialism
Professor Ian Wood. University of Leeds

24 February 2011
Stanza Linking in Middle English Verse: Contexts and Associations
Professor Ad Putter, University of Bristol

17 March 2011
People Trafficking in Chaucer
Dr Nicholas Perkins, St Hugh's College, Oxford

31 March 2011
'Gathering up the fragments': Crusading and Crusade Memory in Caesarius of Heisterbach's Dialogus miraculorum
Dr William Purkis, University of Birmingham

All Medieval Research Centre lectures are free and open to the public; they take place at 6.00pm in the Ken Edwards Building, Lecture Theatre 1.

*Not a typo for ‘Ancient’. The Ancien Regime refers to the period of French history from the end of the Hundred Years War in the mid-15th century to the French Revolution 300-odd years later.