It never rains but it pours ... with good news.
Congratulations to Dr Rory Naismith, who has just been awarded a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, to work on Anglo-Saxon coinage in the period c. 600 - 1066. Rory outlines his research project here:
This
project is aimed at the preparation of a new volume in the series Medieval European Coinage, published by
Cambridge University Press and inaugurated – with support from the Leverhulme
Trust - in the early 1980s by Professor Philip Grierson (1910–2006) and his
first research assistant Mark Blackburn (1953–2011). Volumes so far published
have dealt with early medieval Europe as a whole, along with parts of Spain and Italy. My own volume will be focused
on England
in the period c. 600–1066. It will
contain a fully illustrated catalogue of some 2,500 coins in the collection of
the Fitzwilliam Museum, as well as a new commentary and
introduction. The gold and silver coins of these centuries illustrate the slow
metamorphosis from sub-Roman gold shillings, made when Christianity was freshly
arrived in England, to the
famously sophisticated late Anglo-Saxon coinage, one of the most impressive
monetary systems in tenth- and eleventh-century Europe.
They show the development of kingship, Christian culture and a dynamic economy,
often more vividly than any other source. The coins therefore constitute a
resource of critical importance to many branches of scholarship, including
archaeology and history as well as numismatics. My goal is to provide a fresh
and authoritative survey of the full range of Anglo-Saxon coinage, embracing
new research and innovative approaches, as well as the impact of numerous new
metal-detected finds. It will be the first survey of the whole period to be
published in several decades, and the first in more than a century accompanied
by such a broad and representative collection.
