The Challenges and Rewards of Medieval Studies in the United Kingdom

Miri Rubin, Queen Mary, University of London

In keeping with the aims of this special issue, I shall trace the areas of research and discussion which inspire intellectual innovation among medievalists working in the United Kingdom. Although most university funding in the United Kingdom is provided by the state, until recently official aims and priorities impinged very little on the intellectual choices of historians and other students of the Middle Ages. Scholars' choices result from a complex mix of personal history and life experience, broad cultural and political trends, and access to materials which are easily imagined into projects for research. The community of scholarship thrives on the haphazard and the incidental, factors that are rarely knowable, but it also engages with issues of the day—which are easier to identify. I shall suggest some of the more knowable relations between scholarship and life in the United Kingdom and shall also suggest that British medievalists enjoy a "special relationship" with their American colleagues.