Leahey Fellowship 2023-2024 Report: Benjamin Bertrand

“With the funds that I received from the Leahey Fellowship in 2023, I traveled to the United Kingdom to visit the Hampshire Archives, where I conducted research on the Winchester Pipe Rolls, some of the most extensive records of English manorial estate management because they survive in a nearly unbroken series from 1208/09 to 1710/11. These rolls provide detailed insights into the economic and agricultural history of the estates of the bishop of Winchester, as well as offering a glimpse into the lives of the diocese’s medieval residents and their relationship with the bishops.  The bishops of Winchester were some of the wealthiest landlords in medieval England, overseeing massive estates throughout Hampshire and Surrey. My interest in the Pipe Rolls is directly related to my research into Bishop Henry of Blois (d. 1171), who is the subject of my dissertation. 


While Henry died some thirty-seven years before the creation of the earliest surviving rolls, he was known for his administrative genius. Appointed abbot of Glastonbury Abbey in 1126, he restored the monastery’s finances and was fondly remembered by later members of his community, such as the thirteenth-century chronicler Adam of Damerham. Elevated to the bishopric of Winchester in 1129, Henry became one of the richest and most influential prelates in the country. In 1148 He oversaw the creation of the Winton Domesday, a survey of episcopal properties in Winchester. He similarly reformed the finances of Cluny, the Burgundian abbey where he first became a monk, when he spent several years in exile there during the 1150s Henry’s flare for administration was well attested. The author of the Dialogue of the Exchequer, Bishop Richard FitzNigel, claimed to have heard the story of the Domesday Book’s creation from Henry himself. While his reputation for administrative prowess is legendary, no records from his time provide the level of detail that the Pipe Rolls give regarding the financial management of the diocese. 

For this reason, I spent two weeks at the Hampshire County Records Office examining the Pipe Rolls. My goal was to acquire a better understanding of the realities of life in Winchester during the reign of Henry’s successors and to gain a frame of reference for the challenges that Henry faced during his career. Examining the rolls stretched my paleographical skills as I became better acquainted with the thirteenth-century script and format of these financial records. I made extensive use of Hubert Hall’s edition of the first roll from 1208-1209 to make sense of the abbreviations which the bishops’ scribes employed, allowing me to decipher the contents of later rolls that relied on similar language. I also explored the rest of the archive’s collection to inspect other materials relevant for Henry’s life and career. I studied a copy of the St. Swithun’s Cartulary, which included a number of charters issued by the bishop to the cathedral priory, including his final bequest to them. I also stumbled upon a nineteenth-century lecture given by Rev. W. A. Fearon to the students at Winchester College on “The Life and Times of Henry de Blois,” which provided some fascinating insights into the bishop’s long legacy. At the end of my research at the Hampshire County Records Office, I had made a strong start in my work on the rolls and used the generous funding of the Leahey Fellowship to purchase digital copies of relevant rolls for future consideration.

Because the Hampshire Archive is only open for a portion of the week, I used the rest of my time to explore other aspects of Henry of Blois’ episcopal career in Winchester. The librarian and archivist at Winchester College were kind enough to allow me to access their collections, and I examined manuscripts copied at Winchester during Henry’s episcopacy and charters that provided insight into his administration of the diocese. I walked up St. Giles’ hill, where the bishops held a yearly fair that brought merchants in from across Europe, to look over the city and imagine it as it had been during Henry’s time. I also visited Wolvesey Palace, an episcopal residence that Henry built up through extensive construction projects during his career. While only ruins survive today, they communicate something of the grandeur of the structure that archaeologist Martin Biddle called a “mirror to [Henry’s] own ecclesiastical and essentially political aspirations.” I visited the final resting place of Henry before the altar at Winchester Cathedral in a tomb of Purbeck marble, a material whose use he popularized in his many buildings. These experiences enriched my understanding of Henry and his career, providing me with a fuller understanding of his impact upon the city and diocese of Winchester, knowledge that will help me profoundly as I continue to work on my dissertation.”

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Michael J. Sanders, PhD Candidate, presents at 2023 conference in Israel and researches in Spain with support of History Department, GSAS, and Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Institute

The History Department’s Leahey Fellowship and O’Connell Initiative Graduate Travel Grant as well as a Student Support Grant from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and travel aide from the Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Institute allowed PhD Candidate Michael J. Sanders to spend most of July 2023 abroad in Israel and Spain. In Israel, Michael presented a paper in Jerusalem at the Ben-Zvi Institute’s international conference, “Jerusalem: From Umbilicus Mundi to the Four Corners of the Earth and Back.” Encouraged to apply by one of the New York Public Library-Fordham Fellows in Jewish Studies, Prof. Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, Michael was one of the few graduate students chosen to participate in the conference. Michael’s paper, “From Santiago to the Holy Land: Itinera per Hispaniam to Jerusalem in Iberian Political Culture (1100–1300),” examined the origins of the Spanish Route—various itineraries proposed throughout the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period that took crusaders from the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Spain and Portugal) across North Africa or the Mediterranean Sea to Jerusalem. This little-known idea initially arose from the minds of Santiago de Compostela’s first archbishop, Diego Gelmírez, and the Aragonese king, Alfonso the Battler. Michael’s presentation, available to watch at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK7mKRMojL0, argued the translation story of the Arca Santa, a famous chest of relics, from the Holy Land to Iberia by Bishop Pelayo of Oviedo, a contemporary of Gelmírez and Alfonso, attested to the Spanish Route’s proliferation throughout twelfth-century Iberia.

Michael Sanders atop Tower of David in Jerusalem

The Spanish Route forms an important part of Michael’s dissertation, “Forgotten Roads: Jerusalem in Iberian Political and Religious Culture from Medieval to Modern Times.” This project explores the significance of the city, especially regarding identity, kingship, and empire, for Iberians, chiefly in the kingdoms of León-Castile and Catalonia-Aragon, from 1123 until 1516. After the conference in Israel, Michael traveled to Spain to conduct research for this project, which had been delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. First, he visited the city of Valencia to examine medieval and modern material culture that featured bat heraldry. During the Middle Ages, the bat became an apocalyptic symbol for an Iberian king who would usher in the end times by conquering Jerusalem. Second, Michael traveled to Córdoba and looked at manuscripts within the library of the city’s beautiful Mosque-Cathedral. In particular, he was interested in a manuscript compiled by Pedro de Casis, a royal agent at the papal court in Avignon, which demonstrated Castilian designs on Jerusalem during the early fourteenth century. Finally, Michael ended his trip in Madrid, where he analyzed a little-known chronicle by Bishop Gonzalo de Hinojosa at the Royal Library of the Monastery of El Escorial, viewed more bat heraldry in the Royal Armory of Madrid, and consulted some of the holdings in the National Library. Such a wonderful trip, which will help him to complete his dissertation next year and has already enhanced his teaching (as his students last year in UHC: Renaissance to Revolution in Europe and Between Conquest and Convivencia: The Spanish Kingdoms will attest) would not have been possible without the Leahey, O’Connell, Student Support, and Ben-Zvi grants. Michael would like to thank the History Department, GSAS, and Ben-Zvi Institute for all of their support.     

Bat Heraldry in Mercat de Colom

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Patrick C. DeBrosse, PhD Candidate, publishes an article entitled “The First Draft of a Saladin Legend: Saladin’s Reputation in the Latin West prior to 1187”

Patrick C. DeBrosse, PhD Candidate, published his article entitled “The First Draft of a Saladin Legend: Saladin’s Reputation in the Latin West prior to 1187” in Viator 54, no. 1 (2023): 141-73.

Below is the abstract:

In 1187 the sultan Saladin (1138–93) famously won a victory at the Battle of Hattin that enabled him to conquer most of the territory of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In response, the rulers of the Latin West launched the Third Crusade (1187–92), one of the largest and most elaborate expeditions in the history of the crusades. Scholars of the period have explained the intensity of crusader sentiments in the Latin West through reference to the sense of trauma that gripped Europe after the news of Hattin, and they have shown how Saladin himself became the focal point of polemical crusade propaganda. But Saladin’s reputation in the Latin West prior to 1187 remains a relatively unexplored topic of scholarly inquiry. This essay offers an analysis of three Latin chronicle accounts composed between circa 1170 and 1186, in order to ascertain the sorts of claims Latin Europeans made about Saladin and his family before Hattin. These three chronicles (by Lambert of Wattrelos, Geoffrey of Vigeois, and Robert of Torigni) offered salacious accounts of events in the East, which made use of the same exotic storytelling devices that we can find in contemporary epic and romance. The independence of these accounts suggests that gossip about Saladin had, after crossing the Mediterranean, coalesced into an international set of recognizable tropes. Many of the chroniclers’ details about Saladin and his family anticipate the polemical claims that promoters of the Third Crusade advanced about the sultan after Hattin. Such echoes are significant because they suggest that preexisting perceptions about Saladin helped shape the reaction to Hattin, encouraging disdain and contempt for the sultan among the inhabitants of the Latin West. Scholars should therefore regard the culture of exotic storytelling about “Saracens” in the East as being among the long-term causes of the crusade. At the same time as these early rumors about Saladin encouraged outrage in the West and violence in the East, they also established literary themes about the sultan’s life that would persist in the literature of later centuries, by which time Latin European authors had reimagined Saladin as a chivalric hero.

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Leahey Fellowship 2023-2024 Report: Maria Carriere

With funding from the History Department’s 2023-2024 Leahey fellowship, Maria Carriere spent two weeks in France visiting departmental archives in Blois and Chartres. The visit was part of preliminary research for Maria’s dissertation, which focuses on the activities of Alix of Brittany, the countess of Blois, who gathered a large number of troops and traveled to the Holy Land after her husband Jean’s death in the late thirteenth century. There, Alix erected two towers at Acre and was involved in the commissioning of a Histoire Universelle, a “history of the world.” Maria spent a week in Blois, gathering archival material related to activities of Alix and her husband Jean, including evidence of Alix’s burial from the cartulary of a house of Poor Clares. She spent an additional week in Charters, where she gathered further archival evidence for Alix and Jean’s administration of their county and their religious patronage. While in France, she made time to visit the famous Chartres cathedral, tour Saint-Denis, and view the Tour de France parade. Maria now has collected seventy-seven archival documents from which she can begin to reconstruct the movements of Alix and Jean during their time as the counts of Blois and upon which portions of her dissertation will be based. She looks forward to cataloging, organizing, and translating the material she gathered.

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Patrick C. DeBrosse, PhD candidate, publishes a blog post, “A Note on Names”

Patrick C. DeBrosse, a PhD candidate in History, has published an essay online for Medievalist Toolkit. His essay, “A Note on Names,” explores the challenges that historians of the premodern world face in deciding how to translate personal names into modern English, including the problem of historiographical biases that lead to different conventions for different groups of people.

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History Department to present “Sudan: Violence, Political Economy, and Environmental History” at Lincoln Center.

Fordham’s Department of History will, with the co-sponsorship of the Chief Diversity Officer, African and African American Studies, and the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, present talks by Dr. Khalid Mustafa Medani and Dr. Alex de Waal as part of its O’Connell Initiative on the Global History of Capitalism. The talks, entitled “Sudan: Violence, Political Economy, and Environmental History,” will provide context for the ongoing war in Sudan, and are part of a larger O’Connell series on armed violence and forced displacement around the world. Amir Idris, Professor of History, will serve as moderator. All are welcome to the event, which will take place on Wednesday, April 17 at 5:00PM in the South Lounge of the Lowenstein Building at the Lincoln Center Campus.

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Amir Idris, Professor of History, publishes an op-ed entitled “Recognizing and Mitigating the Risk of Expansion of Sudan’s Conflict to South Sudan”

Amir Idris, Professor of History, has published an op-ed entitled “Recognizing and Mitigating the Risk of Expansion of Sudan’s Conflict to South Sudan” in Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker. You can find the op-ed at this link.

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Fordham to host “Catholicism As Cultural History: The Enduring Legacy of John O’Malley, S.J.” at Lincoln Center

Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture, with the support of the History Department, will host a conference to honor the legacy of the historian John O’Malley. The event will take place in the 12th-floor Lowenstein lounge on Saturday, February 3, 2:00–6:30 p.m. Thomas Worcester, S.J., will be among the contributors to the conference. Those who wish to register can find the link here.

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Scott G. Bruce, Professor of History, and W. Tanner Smoot, PhD Candidate, publish an article entitled “The Social Life of an Eleventh-Century Shrine in the Miraculorum sancti Maioli libri duo (BHL 5186)”

Scott G. Bruce, Professor of History, and W. Tanner Smoot, PhD Candidate, published their article entitled “The Social Life of an Eleventh-Century Shrine in the Miraculorum sancti Maioli libri duo (BHL 5186)” in Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies 12 (2023): 27-51. Congratulations, Scott and Tanner!

Below is the abstract:

The early eleventh-century Miraculorum sancti Maioli libri duo narrated accounts of more than four dozen miracles that took place at the shrine of Maiolus of Cluny in the town of Souvigny, where the abbot died in 994. This article examines the evidence of this little-known source to reconstruct the social life of a popular pilgrimage destination at the turn of the first millennium. It presents a profile of the kinds of people who visited Maiolus’s tomb, including their names, genders, and occupations. Next, it analyses the maladies for which these pilgrims sought relief through the healing power of the saint. Finally, it explores the social networks that facilitated the movement of pilgrims with motor and sensory disabilities from their homes to the abbot’s shrine.

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HGSA hosts “Historic Horror Stories” for Halloween.

On October 31, the History Graduate Student Association (HGSA) hosted “Historic Horror Stories,” a reading of primary sources appropriate for Halloween. The event, held in the History Department, included readings of Walter Map, Orderic Vitalis, and William of Malmsebury.

Graduate students read horror-themed primary sources aloud.
Douglass Hamilton strikes terror into his fellow grads!

To find out about more upcoming HGSA events, contact Benjamin Bertrand and Owen G. Clow!

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