A three-year Project funded by The Leverhulme Trust (2010-2013).  The cults of saints have long been studied as a way of understanding religious history, and in Scotland the poverty of other kinds of evidence from the early medieval period give hagio-toponyms special significance. But there are considerable challenges: understanding the derivation of the place-names themselves, for instance, or difficulties in identifying the individuals commemorated.

In place-names we find both formal processes of naming (reflecting authority, possession and power), and naming as a reflection of local popular devotion, and the stories people told about their landscape. Study of hagio-toponyms must cope with extremes: dedications to saints as expressions of monastic control, and the mistaken creation of saints out of common name-elements (e.g., St Ford, originally Sandford). It was, and is, a dynamic process of forgetfulness and invention.

We hope we will be able to reclaim and understand through our work the landscapes of Scotland's religious past.

Visit the Commemorations of Saints in Scottish Place-Names website

The Scottish Gothic Churches and Abbeys website seeks to promote an appreciation for surviving Gothic monuments in Scotland.

Visit the Scottish Gothic Churches and Abbeys website.

The Centre for Cultural Policy Research is pursuing an evaluation of the Highland 2007 Year of Culture for the Highland Council.

Visit the Centre for Cultural Policy Research website.

John Reuben Davies was awarded £9835 from the British Academy International Partnership and Mobility Scheme to pursue a project with scholars from the University of Calcutta (West Bengal, India). John's co-applicant in Calcutta is Professor Swapna Bhattacharya of the Department of South and South East Asian Studies, the pioneer in the field of comparative diplomatic of early medieval records of property-transfer in Europe and India.

Specialists from Glasgow and Calcutta worked on contemporary sources from both countries, seeking original perspectives, and aiming for a renewed understanding of land-holding, royal power, and the formation of kingdoms.

The University of Calcutta has a memorandum of understanding with the University of Glasgow, and is one the University's priority strategic partners in the 2010–15 South Asia regional plan, and the College of Arts Corporate Plan.

The Scottish Funding Council awarded John Reuben Davies £5674 under the Global Challenges Research Fund for his subsequent project entitled  'The preservation and promotional of historical cultural heritage in the rural communities of Bengal'.

For further information, please contact: John.R.Davies@glasgow.ac.uk

Bridging the Continental Divide was a project funded by the AHRC and based in the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow between August 2012 and July 2015.

The project's main aim was to produce an electronic edition of a selection of the Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum huius aevi illustrium (DPS, Amsterdam, 1637), the largest anthology of Scottish neo-Latin  poetry ever produced, which was edited by the Fife laird Sir John Scot of Scotstarvit and the Aberdonian poet Arthur Johnstone.

The resource provides original scans of the entire 1,272 page text, and a full transcription and translation of 11 of the 37 poets featured within it, totalling 335 pages. Each poem features a full critical apparatus detailing all scriptural and philological references cited, historical and social context, and biographical material on each poet.

The website is open ended so that the remainder of the text not translated now can be added by scholars in the future. This resource will allow scholars to understand more fully when and why Latin was used in Jacobean Scotland, and how it interacted with the Protestant culture that dominated early modern Scottish society.

The website can be found here.

People of Medieval Scotland was produced through a partnership between Education Scotland and the University of Glasgow, and includes contemporary academic research on this topic. It is made up of 32 extensive resources on a range of topics focused on the lives of ordinary people in Scotland during medieval times. This material is for practitioners working with children and young people across the broad general education. It could also be used to support learners researching National 4 Added Value Units and National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher assignments. It is designed to improve the teaching of medieval Scottish history to children and young people. Specifically, the resource aims to make this complex topic more accessible to younger children.

The 32 downloadable resources provide source information for practitioners and the learning journeys include innovative teaching suggestions. These can be found here.

Funded by the AHRC from 2010-2013, this collaborative project involved the University of Glasgow, Lancaster University, the University of Edinburgh, and King’s College London (including the Department of Digital Humanities). The project was concerned with the period which extends from the failure of Alexander II’s short-lived revival of a Scoto-Northumbrian realm in 1216–17 to the formal abolition of cross-border landholding by Robert I in November 1314, following his victory at Bannockburn.

The project built on the work of another project funded by the AHRC, The Paradox of Medieval Scotland (PoMS), and extended the PoMS database to 1314. It will also be linked to a new database, recording interactions between the Crown and people in the three northern counties of England from 1216 to 1307. The project also studied border chronicles as a source both for medieval perceptions of identity and fields of medieval historical interest.

The Breaking of Britain website can be found here.

This AHRC-funded three-year project ran from 2007-2010 and was led by Professor Dauvit Broun (History) in collaboration with Professor Robeard O'Maolalaigh (Celtic and Gaelic), and Professor David Carpenter of King's College London. The team ibuilt a prosopographical database of 11th and 12th century Scotland based on charter evidence.

By reconstructing a picture of Scottish society before the wars of independence, this project sought to explain why and how Scotland became a self-conscious nation of Scots at the same time as it experienced extensive English settlement through Anglo-Norman immigration.

The website can be found here.

Another AHRC-funded endeavour, this place-names project explores how Gaelic expanded from Argyll into eastern and southern Scotland in the early middle ages and receded from these areas by 1500.

The project team is led by Professor Thomas Clancy (Celtic and Gaelic), with Dr. Simon Taylor as lead researcher, Gilbert Markus as research assistant and doctoral student Peter McNiven.

The final volume of this project is currently in press and due out in 2017.

More information on the project can be found here.

This three-year project has been funded by the AHRC from 2017-2020.

The People’s Voice: Scottish political poetry, song and the franchise, 1832-1914 has been funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland from 2016-2018. This project unearths the wealth of political poetry found in the Scottish popular press, and uses its to analyse the roles that poetry and song played in the extensions of the electoral franchise in 1832, 1867-8, 1884 and 1918.

More information can be found here.

For more information, please contact Kirsteen.McCue@glasgow.ac.uk.

This project is funded by the Carnegie Trust. For more information, please contact Pauline.Mackay@glasgow.ac.uk.

The Edinburgh Gazetteer: Radical Networks and Journalism in 1790s Scotland’ is funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and will analyse the networks of 1790s Scotland as evidenced by the short-lived Edinburgh Gazetteer. The Gazetteer, which was printed in the capital from November 1792 to January 1794, is a radical, post-French Revolution journal which offers a lens through which to read the turbulent Scottish 1790s. As well as covering high-profile cases, including the trials of Louis XVI and Maurice Margarot, the journal features contributions by Robert Burns; detailed accounts of Scottish sedition trials, especially those of Thomas Muir and William Skirving; reporting on reform societies, including the Friends of the People; and radical responses to the abolition debate. This project brings the radical reporting of the Edinburgh Gazetteer into clear focus and will produce a new online edition of the Gazetteer which will be accompanied by notes and illustrative material.

For more informatoin, please contact Rhona.Brown@glasgow.ac.uk.