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Professor Julia Smith

Professor Julia Smith

Emeritus Chichele Professor of Medieval History

All Souls College

01865 279290julia.smith@history.ox.ac.uk I returned to Oxford in 2016 after an absence of more than thirty years and an academic career spanning continents and countries (USA, Scotland, England).  My research interests are equally wide.  I specialise in the period from the end of Antiquity to the central Middle Ages, and especially enjoy finding new and unusual angles from which to address seemingly familiar topics.  After early work on early medieval frontiers, I developed new specialisms in hagiography and saints’ cults, plus the history or women and gender in the early Middle Ages.  I have published two monographs, Province and Empire: Brittany and the Carolingians (Cambridge, 1992) and Europe After Rome: A New Cultural History 500-1000 (Oxford, 2005) and have edited several collaborative volumes, including Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West (Leiden, 2000); Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300-900 (co-edited with Leslie Brubaker, Cambridge, 2004) and The Cambridge History of Christianity, volume III: Early Medieval Christianities AD 600-1100 (co-edited with Thomas F X Noble, Cambridge, 2008).

 

Research Interests

  • Late antique and early medieval history c.400-1100
  • Medieval saints, hagiography and relics
  • Women and gender in the early Middle Ages

My current research addresses the materiality of Christian experience in the Middle Ages. I am concerned with ‘things which do things’, and use an ethnographic approach to exploring how, why and in what social contexts a wide range of material substances acquired a sacred aura, serving as mediators between humans and the divinity. The result will be a book (or possibly two books) on the emergence and development of the cult of relics from the 4th to the 11th centuries. This research draws heavily on approaches and methodologies derived from my earlier publications on the history of women and gender in the early Middle Ages (a field in which I retain a strong interest) but also has a strong cross-cultural dimension. Beyond that, I am interested in developing interdisciplinary approaches to studying the abundant material remains of late antique and early medieval relic-objects which I have discovered while undertaking field work in the treasuries of some of Europe’s oldest churches.

Publications

Material Religion in Byzantium and Beyond
Featured Publication

Material Religion in Byzantium and Beyond

(Routledge, 2025)

Edited By Ine Jacobs, Jaś Elsner, Julia M. H. Smith

Papers from the 54th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies

The theoretical framework known as Material Religion has emerged as a vibrant and profoundly influential approach within religious studies over the past two decades. Originating in the first decade of the 21st century from currents within cultural anthropology, Material Religion challenges a foundational assumption of much modern Western thought: that matter and spirit — materiality and religion — are fundamentally opposed.

DPhil Students

Jamie Chandler

DPhil Student

Broderick Haldane-Unwin

DPhil Student

Clare Whitton

DPhil Student