James Norrie

I studied history and medieval history at the University of Oxford and at University College London, and also spent time as a visiting research student at the University of Padua. Following the award of my doctorate in 2017, I held post-doctoral fellowships at the British School at Rome, the University of Padua, and Columbia University in New York. I arrived at Birmingham as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in 2020.

My research interests include the history of radical social change, cities, religion, and gender in early medieval Italy and the Mediterranean. To this end, I am especially interested in applying the insights of social anthropology and theory, as well as comparative and global histories of the pre-modern world.

To date, my work has studied how urban change remakes material worlds and religion, both during the transformation of the post-Roman world and the growth of citied societies in the eleventh century. My first book, Urban Change and Radical Religion: Medieval Milan, c.990-1140, is to be published with Oxford University Press. It examines the urban transformation of Milan and its hinterland in these years, which sparked popular and religious revolt on a scale then unprecedented in medieval Europe. Forthcoming work also explores the comparative history of urban ritual and processions, and the history of fire and the city from the end of the Roman empire to the twelfth century.

My current project as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow – Re-Coining the Eleventh Century: Value, Religion and Gender in Italy – addresses how and why coin use transformed experiences of religion and gender as well as economic exchange. This was a period when connected anxieties about monetisation, female bodies, and the commodification of religious office drove both furious intellectual debate and popular politics. In the process, this work asks how changes to value remake wider human history.