Professor
Research Interests
Politics and ritual in late Carolingian and Capetian France; Carolingian and post-Carolingian monasticism; political power and religious discourse; diplomatic (the study of charters and diplomas); historiography.
Undergraduate Teaching Interests
Just about anything to do with northern European culture from the Merovingians to the eve of the Hundred Years' War, but especially kingship, historiography, archaeology, women, monasticism, the cult of saints, ritual, liturgy, propaganda, political theory, and the transformation of political communities from kingdoms to states. Also contemporary political mythologies of medieval history.
Education
AB, Princeton University, 1973
MA, Stanford University, 1976
PhD, Stanford University, 1982
Positions Held
2007-present: Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley
1992-2007: Associate Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley
1989-1992: Assistant Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley
1985-1989: Assistant Professor of History, Harvard University
1982-1985: Assistant Professor of History, Hamline University, St. Paul, Minnesota
1980-1982: Lecturer in Western Culture, Department of History, Stanford University
1994-1996: Chair, Committee of Medieval Studies (UC Berkeley)
Courses
History 4B: Western Civilization: The Middle Ages
History 100P: Gnostics, Templars, Wiccans, and Other Standbys of Popular Medieval History
History 155A: Europe in the Early Middle Ages
History 155B: Europe in the Later Middle Ages
History 156C: The Justice of the State in the Middle Ages
History 103B: Crime, Punishment, and Peace-Making in the Middle Ages
History 103B: Violence and Feud in the Middle Ages
History 103B: Monks, Women, and the Otherworld
History 103B: How Does a Ritual Mean?
History 103B: Bodies Politic, Eucharistic, and Heretical in the Later Medieval Europe
History 103U: Biography from the Greeks to VH1
History 275B: Graduate Proseminar: Medieval Europe
History 280B: How Does a Ritual Mean?
History 280B: Archaeology and History
History 283: Writing through History; The Stakes of History
History 285B: The Christianization of Early Medieval Europe
History 285B: The Re-formation of Europe: Monastic Reform between Benedict of Aniane and Bernard of Clairvaux
History 285B: The Carolingians
History 285B: Diplomatic with a Human Face
History 285B: Ethics and Political Practice under the Carolingians
Medieval Studies 200: Introduction to Materials and Methods: The Objects of Study
Books
 |
The Peace of God (ARC Press, 2018) |
 |
The Politics of Memory and Identity in Carolingian Royal Diplomas: The West Frankish Kingdom (840-987) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012) |
 |
Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992) |
Select Articles
"Peace as Integration," in A Cultural History of Peace in the Medieval Age, ed. Walter Simons (Bloomsbury, forthcoming)
"Flothilde's visions and Flodoard's histories: a tenth-century mutation?" Early Medieval Europe 24/2 (2016): 160–84
"Christian Political Discourses," in The Oxford Handbook to Medieval Christianity, ed. John Arnold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 473-89
Preface to Marc Blcoh, Feudal Society (Routledge, 2014)
"The Conquest of Burgundy, the Peace of God, and the Diplomas of Robert the Pious," French Historical Studies 37/2 (2014): 173-214
"What ever happened to wisdom? Why we have Mirrors for Princes but none for Presidents," in Why the Middle Ages Matter, ed. Celia Chazelle et al. (New York: Routledge, 2012), 183-198
"Is Robert I in Hell? The diploma for Saint-Denis and the mind of a usurper (January 25, 923)," Early Medieval Europe 14/3 (2006): 233-267
"The Dangers of Polemic: Is Ritual Still an Interesting Topic of Historical Study?" Early Medieval Europe 11/4 (2002): 367-388
"Political Culture," in France in the Central Middle Ages, 900-1200, ed. Marcus Bull, The Short Oxford History of France, gen. ed. William Doyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 43-76
"England, France, and the Problem of Sacrality in Twelfth-Century Ritual," in Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. Thomas N. Bisson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 124-148
"Monks, Feuds, and the Making of Peace in Eleventh-Century Flanders," in The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response, ed. Thomas Head and Richard Landes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 239-259
Non-Scholarly Interests
Fishing, camping and backpacking, tennis, roller-blading, skiing (downhill), good novels, really good poetry (but it's hard to find), and a somewhat embarrasing love of murder mysteries.
