Contact Details

Biography and Research Overview

Helen Foxhall Forbes studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Theology at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg-im-Breisgau. Her doctoral research, completed in 2008, explored ideas about penance, purgatory and the afterlife in Anglo-Saxon England. She was a Temporary Lecturer in Insular Latin Language and Literature at the University of Cambridge before being awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Leicester. This project ("Heaven and Earth in Anglo-Saxon England: the social context of theology") explored how the theological ideas debated and discussed by early medieval scholars permeated into the wider world and influenced daily life, and how theological discourse itself was informed by the beliefs of the people who made up early medieval English society.

Her current research ("Home and Away in Anglo-Saxon England") investigates how local, national and global contexts affected ideas of space and place, and regional and spiritual identities, and how these ideas could be carried from one context to another. See the project description for more information...

She is also the PI for Manuscripts as networks: transmitting texts and information in early medieval England, funded by the British Academy. More information...

Selected publications (see also here for more...)

1. 'Squabbling siblings: gender and monastic life in late Anglo-Saxon Winchester', Gender & History 23:3 (2011), 653-684
   
2. ‘ “Diuiduntur in quattuor”: the Interim and Judgement in Anglo-Saxon England’, Journal of Theological Studies 61:2 (2010), 659-84