Dr John Merrington

john.merrington@all-souls.ox.ac.uk

I am a social and intellectual historian of medieval Europe. Between 2018 and 2025, I was an Examination Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. I have also held research positions in Princeton, Durham, Vienna and Berlin.

My first book (forthcoming with Oxford University Press) considers why the five senses became focal points of moral anxiety in early medieval Europe. The book will be titled Morality and the Five Senses in Early Medieval Europe: the Windows of the Soul.

My second book project addresses a remarkable paradox in the intellectual history of medieval Europe. Although we often imagine the Middle Ages as an era of social and cultural stagnation, the men and women of the period were in fact intensely preoccupied with the notion of progress. What were the foundations of medieval ideas of progress, and what were their social and political consequences?

Another strand of my research explores the development of a distinctly Christian historical sensibility in early medieval Europe. My three articles on this subject have addressed the emergence of the genre of Church History from the sixth to the tenth centuries. Most recently, this has involved studying the diffusion of the ‘Martinelli’, a family of Carolingian manuscripts that contains texts related to the cult of Martin of Tours (d. 397). These manuscripts attest to the agency of scribes in editing, combining, and reworking late antique sources to construct an account of the past suited to the demands of a new political order. My earlier articles in The English Historical Review and Early Medieval Europe offered fresh readings of the Church Histories of Bede (d. 735) and Gregory of Tours (d. 594).