Dr Diana Webb PhD
Senior Lecturer in
Medieval History Diana Webb's doctoral research was on Italian
renaissance
historiography in both Latin and Italian, but this was
rapidly overtaken by an interest in the history of
religion,
in both the Italian and the wider medieval European
setting.
Earlier
interests fused with the newer in a book on the
political aspects of the cults of the
saints in the
Italian
cities (Patrons and Defenders: the saints in the Italian
city-states, I.B. Tauris, 1996).
From here it was but a step to a growing interest in
pilgrimage, and this resulted first in Pilgrims and
pilgrimage in the Medieval West, Tauris 1999, which
presented translations of a
wide range of sources for
the
subject. Then came Pilgrimage in Medieval England, to
her
own surprise, as she had never expected to find herself
writing about her own country (Hambledon & London, 2000)
. A
third book in this general area, Medieval European
Pilgrimage, has just been published by Palgrave. As the
title suggests, this is once again geographically
wide-ranging, and makes an effort to say at least
something
about pilgrimage in Scandinava and other regions which
tend
not to get their due in the mainstream literature in
English. Meanwhile older interests persist - she is also
currently completing a collection of translations of
thirteenth-century Italian saints' lives.
Having lived for thirty years in the incomparable county
of
Kent, prime pilgrimage territory, she has also latterly
begun to get interested in the history of the county and
has
published in Archaeologia Cantiana an article on an
exceedingly obscure local saint. Pilgrimage is,
obviously,
religious history, but it is also social history and
that is
another direction in which Dr Webb's interests have been
developing. A long-standing interest in solitude and
privacy
and the way medieval people conceived of them (if they
did)
is now scheduled to bear fruit in a study to be written
for
Hambledon and London under the provisional title Private
Life in the Middle Ages
More summaries about the Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in the Medieval West