Dr Robert Gallagher

Dr Robert Gallagher studied at the Universities of York and Cambridge and has since held postdoctoral positions at the Universities of Cambridge, the Basque Country, and Oxford. He joined the University of Kent in January 2019. is a historian of early medieval Britain, particularly the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Much of his current research focuses on uses of the written word, multilingualism, and cultural and political identities in early medieval societies. These themes lie at the heart of his forthcoming book, The Written Word in Early Medieval England: Kent, Mercia and Wessex, c.830-920 (Cambridge University Press), which examines how lay and religious communities used writing during a period of Viking incursions and major political upheaval.

About the event

Letter-writing was an important way of communicating across distances in and beyond Britain in the early medieval period. Surviving examples demonstrate that people sent and received letters for a variety of personal, political, social, legal and spiritual reasons, be it the eighth-century Northumbrian women ensuring safe travel for pilgrims; the ailing Alfred the Great receiving remedies from Jerusalem; or the layman Ordlaf complaining about cattle theft in early tenth-century Wiltshire.

It is clear, however, that much has been lost - that, in other words, letters were rarely preserved for future generations to study. How can we reconstruct this lost world of letter-writing? And what can letter-writing tell us about the communities that lived in Britain in the so-called Dark Ages? In this paper, Dr Robert Gallagher will introduce an on-going, Leverhulme Trust-funded project to investigate and answer these questions.