Dr Anne Bailey | Faculty of History

Associate Member

anne.bailey@history.ox.ac.uk

I am a social and cultural historian, specialising in saints’ cults, pilgrimage and hagiography in the medieval Christian West. I completed my doctorate at Oxford in 2010, and from 2010 until 2013 held a postdoctoral research fellowship at Harris Manchester College. Since 2013 I have been researching and teaching at Oxford as an Associate Member of the History Faculty. I teach women’s history and gender, and courses on medieval and modern pilgrimage at the University’s Department for Continuing Education. My published articles cover a wide range of pilgrimage themes and, more recently, have taken an interdisciplinary approach in applying anthropological theory and practice as a way of gaining deeper insight into medieval pilgrimage.

Research

Medieval saints’ cults and pilgrimage
Medieval hagiography (saints’ lives and miracle narratives)
Women’s history and gender
The history and anthropology of pilgrimage

My doctoral research – published in the form of journal articles and book chapters – focused on the depiction of female pilgrims in twelfth-century miracle narratives. My current research looks at pilgrimage more broadly, and combines the disciplines of history and anthropology to explore how pilgrims’ beliefs, practices and experiences have continued, developed and changed from the Middle Ages to the present day. As a social and cultural historian I am particularly interested in the ways in which pilgrimage absorbs and reflects collective ideas, values and anxieties in different times, contexts and places. My research approach includes anthropological fieldwork which has provided me with a greater understanding of pilgrimage as a ‘lived’ practice and prompted new research questions for pilgrimage in the Middle Ages and beyond.

Featured Publication

Publications

‘The Problematic Pilgrim: Rethinking Margery’s Pilgrim Identity in The Book of Margery Kempe, The Chaucer Review, 55.2

‘The Troublesome Relic of a “Troublesome Priest”? Negotiating the Boundaries of Religion, History and Popular Culture in Anglican Canterbury’, Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 31.2 (2019), pp. 153-166

‘Gesta Pontificum Anglorum: History or Hagiography?’, in Discovering William of Malmesbury ed. Rodney M. Thomson, Emily Dolmans and Emily A. Winkler (Woodbridge, 2017), pp. 13-26

‘Miracles and Madness: Dispelling Demons in Twelfth-Century Hagiography’, in Demons and Illness: Theory and Practice from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, ed. Siam Bhayro and Catherine Rider (Leiden, 2016), pp. 235-55

‘Miracle Children: Medieval Hagiography and Childhood Imperfection’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 47.3 (2016), 267-85

‘Anthropology, the Medievalist … and Richard III’, Reading Medieval Studies, 41 (2015), 27-51

‘Richard III: A Medieval Relic?’, History Today, 65.8 (2015), 11-17

‘Gendered Discourses of Time and Memory in the Cult and Hagiography of William of Norwich’, in Gender, Time and Memory in the Middle Ages, ed. Liz Cox and Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 111-26

‘Women Pilgrims and their Travelling Companions in Twelfth-Century England’, Viator, 46.1 (2015), 115-34

‘Peter Brown and Victor Turner Revisited: Anthropological Approaches to Latin Miracle Narratives in the Medieval West’, in Contextualizing Miracles, ed. Matthew Mesley and Louise E. Wilson (Oxford, 2014), pp. 17-39

‘“The Rich and The Poor, The Lesser and The Great.” Social Representations of Female Pilgrims in Medieval England’, Cultural and Social History, 11.1 (2014), 9-29

‘Modern and Medieval Approaches to Pilgrimage, Gender and Sacred Space’, History and Anthropology, 24.4 (2013), 493-512

‘Lamentation Motifs in Latin Hagiography’, Gender and History, 25.3 (2013), 529-44. Also published in Sex, Gender and the Sacred: Reconfiguring Religion in Gender History, ed. Joanna de Groot and Sue Morgan (Oxford, 2014), pp. 135-49

‘Wives, Mothers and Widows on Pilgrimage: Categories of “Woman” Recorded at English Shrines in the High Middle Ages’, Journal of Medieval History, 39.2 (2013), 197-219

‘Representations of English Women and their Pilgrimages in Twelfth-Century Miracle Collections’, Assuming Gender, 3.1 (2013), 59-90

‘Flights of Distance, Time and Fancy: Women Pilgrims and their Journeys in Medieval Miracle Narratives’, Gender and History, 24.2 (2012), 292-309