Debra Parish has recently published a new monograph with Routledge: Prophets and Witches: Witchcraft, Gender and Politics in Revolutionary England. The book is currently available at a 20% discount on the Routledge website with code 25AFLY1.

Debra will be launching her book at Avid Reader, Brisbane, at 6.00pm on August 28th.

Prophets and Witches offers an exploration of female prophecy and witchcraft during the political and religious upheavals of the English Revolutionary period from 1640 to 1660.

The religious fervour and End of Days enthusiasm precipitated by the Civil War opened the door for unprecedented numbers of women to achieve visibility and spiritual authority as prophets. However, as self-proclaimed instruments for God’s spirit, these women were also exposed to the charge of demonic possession or witchcraft. This book explores both the gender and political elements at work in the construction of the prophet as a witch. It uncovers the role of witchcraft in the dominant political and religious debates and power conflicts of the times, which provides a crucial framework for the female prophet’s transformation from divine instrument to demonic witch. This study of the early modern prophet and witch reveals the fluidity, and at times close relationship of these assumed opposites.

This book is a valuable resource to students and scholars of early modern England, the English Civil War and all readers interested in female religiosity, prophecy, witchcraft, demonology and early Quakerism.

ANZAMEMS is pleased to celebrate recent member success in attaining the Australian Historical Associations General History Thesis Prize. The Prize, now renamed the Philippa Hetherington Prize, is awarded to the best postgraduate thesis in General History (excluding Australian history), and in 2025 was awarded to:

Elizabeth Burrell (Monash), “Words for Wellbeing: Charms, Caregiving and Health in England, 1300–1550”

Elizabeth Burrell’s thesis is based on reading a wide variety of Latin and medieval English sources on charms, situated in a careful theoretical framing toward her reconstruction of the living performance of caregiving in the practice of medieval charms. She takes seriously, using Latour’s actor-network theory and Gell’s ‘social instruments’ theory, the work of words and their material traces in the lives of medieval people, to show how charms might have come alive for patients at their moment of expression. This is not just a thesis about folk medicines but about the ways in which charms engaged with up-to-date scientific knowledges in their time. We particularly commend the originality of her focus on charm patient perspectives via a history from below with its emphasis on non-elites, and its sophisticated discussion of the materiality of charms. We also commend her comprehensive engagement with a broad array of relevant fields of medieval scholarship on health, medicine, belief, literacy, class, social structures, religious hierarchies, and English cultural variation. She considers literacy not just through individuals but also through communities that included the non-literate, and notes the practices of men in areas of spiritual and physical care-giving that have been considered exclusively female. This is work that is likely to attract the highest degree of scholarly commendation.

Dr Burrell joins fellow MEMS scholars Paige Donaghy (2024) and Freg (James) Stokes (2023) as previous recipients of the award.

ANZAMEMS is pleased to celebrate some of our members’ recent successes in attaining fellowships through the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Humanities Travelling Fellowships enable early-career researchers to undertake research overseas, where they may access materials otherwise inaccessible, connect with international organisations, researchers and forge new networks.

See the AAH press release for the 2025 round of awardees. Among these are two ANZAMEMS members.

Dr Jennifer Nicholson (University of Sydney)
Shakespeare’s False Friends: French English, Early Modern England, and the Stage

False Friends addresses the curiosity of there being no monograph or extended scholarship concerning William Shakespeare’s knowledge of French. Dr Nicholson’s research considers how relationships between the porous edges of French and English in early modern plays, including those by Shakespeare and his contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, generate new readings of theatre’s textual and philosophical uncertainties.

Under the Fellowship, Dr Nicholson will travel to the United States, Scotland and England to access archival sites containing manuscript materials relating to Shakespeare. In addition to her research, Dr Nicholson will co-facilitate a seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America’s 2026 conference and will visit research centres across the United Kingdom.

Dr Mairi Hill (University of Melbourne)
Women, Language, and Labour in Medieval and Early Modern England

Women played an important economic role in medieval and early modern society. However, the profitability of female labour in early capitalist society is rarely discussed. Women’s work and spaces of work are presented as communal and places which encouraged women’s alleged propensity for excessive speech. This project aims to answer questions around relationships between women, spaces of work and how excessive speech may have contributed to language related to “women’s work” and shaped attitudes still prevalent in contemporary society.

Under the Fellowship, Dr Hill will travel to the United Kingdom to access historical records about premodern women’s labour across the UK National Archives, The London Archives and Surrey House Centre. Dr Hill intends for the research completed under this Fellowship to form the foundation of a second monograph.

Dr Nicholson and Dr Hill join a rich tradition of ANZAMEMS success in for Humanities Travelling Fellowships including recent awardees Matthew Firth (2024), Kirstie Flannery (2022), Michele Seah (2022), Frederic Kiernan (2021), and Janet Wade (2021).

Matthew Firth has recently published a new monograph with Routledge: Remembering England: Cultural Memory in the Sagas of Icelanders.

This book provides an in-depth study of depictions of England in the Saga of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur), examining their utility as sources for the history of Viking Age Anglo-Scandinavian cultural contact.

The Íslendingasögur present themselves as histories, but they are difficult historical sources. Their setting is the Saga Age, a period that begins with the settlement of Iceland in the late ninth century and ends along with the Viking Age in the late eleventh century–however, the saga texts are disconnected from this setting, having first been written down in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This book traces the transmission and development of Icelandic cultural memory of Saga Age England across this distance of centuries. It offers case study analyses of how historical time, place, cultures, and events are adapted and conceptualised in the Íslendingasögur and suggests methodological approaches to their study as historical literature.

Remembering England is an interdisciplinary book that will appeal to scholars and students of the history of pre-Norman England, the Icelandic sagas, medieval literature, and cultural memory.

Congratulations to Pippa Salonius and her co-editor, Mike Bintley, whose collection, Trees as Symbol and Metaphor in the Middle Ages: Comparative Contexts, has been awarded the 2024 Best Book in Medieval Art prize by the Association of Friends of the Center for Early Medieval Studies. The judges concluded:

This profoundly researched, well written, and clearly composed book has been deemed outstanding for its stimulating contribution to a nuanced and profound understanding of the nexus between nature and human creativity as expressed through various media in the visual arts and literature as well as theology and cosmology. Although mainly focusing on the European continent, it also comprises analyses of Maori and Islamic cultures for comparison and thereby embraces a ‘global’ approach to its common arboreal focus.

The book is now available in harcover and ebook formats through Boydell & Brewer.

Member Darius von Güttner-Sporzyński has recently published an edited collection in the Brepols series ‘East Central Europe’: The Jagiellon Dynasty, 1386–1596: Politics, Culture, Diplomacy. https://www.brepols.net/products/IS-9782503598970-1

The volume offers a re-examination of the rise of the Jagiellon dynasty in medieval and early modern Central Europe. Originating in Lithuania and extending its dominion to Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia, the Jagiellon dynasty has left an enduring legacy in European history. This collection of studies presents the Jagiellons as rulers with dynamic and negotiated authority. It begins with the dynasty’s origins and its dynastic union with Poland, milestones that have shaped the political and cultural trajectory of the dynasty’s reign. The volume places significant emphasis on the role of royal consorts, thereby broadening traditional gender-focused perspectives. Far from being mere accessories, queens had a considerable influence on governance, economic matters, and diplomacy. The cultural impact of Jagiellon rule is analysed through interactions with humanists and the intellectual milieu of the court. The performative aspects of Jagiellon power, including the use of words, gestures, and even intentional silences, are examined as powerful tools of articulation. Emotional factors that influence governance and intricate dynastic relationships are explored, revealing how political decisions, especially constitutional reforms, are made more rapidly when faced with perceived dynastic vulnerabilities. In Poland, the rise of parliamentary institutions under the earlier Jagiellon monarchs epitomises the concept of negotiated authority, underscoring the growing political role of the nobility. This volume thus provides a multi-faceted and nuanced understanding of the Jagiellon dynasty’s legacy in political, cultural, and gender-related spheres, enhancing understanding of European history.

Member Anna Dorofeeva has recently published a monograph with Arc Humanities Press entitled ‘Reading Nature in the Early Middle Ages: Writing, Language, and Creation in the Latin Physiologus, ca. 700–1000’.

As the recipient of the 2021 ANZAMEMS–ARC Humanities Award for Original Research, Anna’s book has been made available as open access: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/85029

This book is a new cultural and intellectual history of the natural world in the early medieval Latin West. It examines the complex relationships between language, texts, and the physical world they describe, focusing on the manuscripts of the Physiologus—the foundation of the medieval bestiary. The Physiologus helped to shape the post-Roman worldview about the role and place of human beings in Creation. This process drew on classical ideas, but in its emphasis on allegory, etymology, and a plurality of readings, it was original and distinctive. This study demonstrates precisely how the early medieval re-contextualization of existing knowledge, together with a substantial amount of new writing, set the course of ideas about faith and nature for centuries to come. In doing so, it establishes the importance of multi-text miscellanies for early medieval written culture.

Member Georgina Pitt has recently published a monograph with Arc Humanities Press entitled ‘The Persuasive Agency of Objects and Practices in Alfred the Great’s Reform Program’.

As the recipient of the 2022 ANZAMEMS–ARC Humanities Award for Original Research, Georgina’s book has been made available as open access: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/92882

Alfred the Great’s early English kingdom was the only one to resist Viking conquest. His reform program strengthened the kingdom and enabled it to hold fast against the Vikings. But texts are largely silent on the process of reform. There has been a tendency to assume that these reforms would obviously be beneficial, but Alfred’s elites were not to know that in advance. What motivated them to do as their king bid them? This book analyzes how objects and behaviours shaped aristocratic response to the reform program, using assemblage theory and social practice theory. The Alfred Jewel (as shown on the cover) exercised a powerful persuasive agency in Alfredian reform. Broadening the frame of inquiry beyond textual evidence, giving objects and behaviours their due, permits a richer and more nuanced understanding.