Disputes and Disputing in early Medieval Spain – some comparisons with Wales and Brittany

Disputes and Disputing in early Medieval Spain – some comparisons with Wales and Brittany
Professor Wendy Davies from University College London will be at Aberystwyth University on Wednesday 7 May 2008 to deliver the Thomas Jones Pierce Lecture.

The title of Professor Davies' lecture, which takes place in lecture theatre A12 in the Hugh Owen building on the Penglais campus at 7 pm, is ‘Disputes and Disputing in early Medieval Spain – some comparisons with Wales and Brittany'.

Wendy Davies, FBA, is Professor of History Emerita, University College London, and a member of the History Faculty, University of Oxford. Until her retirement in 2007, she taught medieval European history and was also successively Head of UCL's History Department, Deans of Arts and of Social and Historical Sciences, and Pro-Provost for European Affairs. She has been much occupied with Bologna Process issues in recent years and remains a member of the UK Team of Bologna Experts.

In research terms, she has made a point of working in collaboration with others, some of the best-known results being the Bucknell charter group's The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (1986) and Property and Power in Early Medieval Europe (1995), both edited with Paul Fouracre, and written with James Graham-Campbell, John Koch and others, The Inscriptions of Early Medieval Brittany (2000).

She has written books and papers on Welsh, Breton, Irish, Scottish and Spanish social and economic history and has also done much archaeological fieldwork, especially in Brittany. Her current research focusses on northern Spain.

Books include An Early Welsh Microcosm (1978), The Llandaff Charters (1979), Wales in the Early Middle Ages (1982), Small Worlds. The Village Community in Early Medieval Brittany (1988), Patterns of Power in Early Wales (1990), (with G. Astill) A Breton Landscape (1997), Acts of Giving. Individual, Community and Church in Tenth-Century Christian Spain (2007).

The Thomas Jones Pierce Lecture was established in 1990 and made possible by the generosity of Mrs Megan Wyn Jones in memory of her late husband Thomas Jones Pierce, formerly Research Professor in Medieval History (1948-64) in the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth.