Prof Graham A. Loud

Profile

Open Exhibitioner, Merton College, Oxford 1971-4 

BA University of Oxford 1974

Senior Scholar Christ Church, Oxford 1975-8

D. Phil. 1978; Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Leeds 1978-92 

Senior Lecturer 1992-9

Reader in Medieval Italian History 1999-2003

Professor of Medieval Italian History 2003-10

Professor of Medieval History 2010-19

Director of the Institute for Medieval Studies 2011-12

Head of the School of History 2012-15

Leverhulme Major Research Fellow 2017-19.

Research interests

Since retiring in October 2019 I have written a substantial monograph,  The Social World of the Abbey of Cava, c. 1020-1300, research for which was made possible by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, held 2017-19. This was published by Boydell and Brewer in November 2021.  I have used the huge archive of the monastery of S. Trinità di Cava, near Salerno (the largest surviving medieval archive in southern Italy) to write a social and economic history of the principality of Salerno, focussing especially on the period 1050-1250, but continuing aspects of the study through to c. 1300. Cava was a major patrimonial landowner in the principality, and much of that region's social history can be written through a discussion of the abbey's benefactors, tenants and dependents.

The first stage of that project was an edition of selected twelfth-century charters from the abbey, publication of which was delayed by the pandemic, but which has now appeared: Pergamene scelte della badia di Cava, 1097-1200, a cura di G.A. Loud (Centro europeano di studi normanni: Ariano Irpino, Collana medievale 10, 2021). 405 pp. [ISBN 978-88-98028-146, 25 Euros].

My next south Italian project, on which I have already made substantial progress, will be an English translation of the Montecassino Chronicle by Leo Marsicanus and his continuators, one of the most important narrative sources from Norman Italy and also a key text for the history of monasticism in the Central Middle Ages. This will appear in two volumes from Manchester University Press in 2025-6.  As part of this project, I shall return to study a figure whom I first investigated while writing my doctoral thesis over forty years ago: Peter the Deacon, archivist and chronicler of Montecassino in the 1130s and 1140s, perhaps the most prolific, and certainly one of the most shameless, forgers of the Middle Ages, about whose work as a chronicler I have spoken at a conference on Italian historical writing in the twelfth century at Pisa in October 2022. I shall be looking at his career more generally in a keynote paper at the 2024 Battle Conference on Norman Studies. 

My subsidiary interest is in German history during the Staufen period. The Chronicle of Arnold of Lübeck, was published in the Routledge Crusader Texts in Translation series in 2019, and The Origins of the German Principalities 1100-1350, edited with Jochen Schenck, appeared with the same publisher in 2017. I have now just finished a short biography of Frederick Barbarossa, to appear with Reaktion Books, in I hope 2024, while a study of the murder of bishops in medieval Germany (an all too frequent phenomenon in that violent society) has been accepted for publication in English Historical Review.

Qualifications

• BA University of Oxford 1974
• MA University of Oxford 1977
• D.Phil. University of Oxford 1978

Professional memberships

• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society 1982-
• British Society for Byzantine Studies
• Ecclesiastical History Society
• Pipe Roll Society
• Society for the Study of the Crusades

Student education

I have now retired and cannot now accept further research students.