York 1190: Jews and Others in the Wake of Massacre was organised by Sarah Rees Jones and Sethina Watson of the Centre for Medieval Studies and the Department of History.

The conference was supported by the British Academy, the Jewish Historical Society of England and the Royal Historical Society. The Borthwick Institute republished the essays of Barrie Dobson on anglo-jewish history for the occasion: The Jewish Communities of Medieval England . We are publishing a collection of essays relating to the theme of the conference and developing further related research projects.

Friday, 4 November 2011

England's Immigrants, 1330-1550: Religious and Racial Minorities.

Professor Mark Ormrod (University of York) and colleagues have recently won funding for a large new project on the alien subsidies which will include two fully-funded PhDs. The second of these is described as follows:
"Religious and Racial Minorities in England, 1330-1550
This PhD project will take an interdisciplinary approach to the treatment of Jews, Moslems and black North Africans in late medieval England. While some traditions of medieval studies assume that these peoples were entirely absent from late medieval England, there is good evidence, to be captured by the project, of small numbers of such minorities being part of the social fabric of the period. The student will help to collect and database the relevant material drawn from historical sources: full training will be provided in the research and technical aspects of this work. The student will then be encouraged to develop his/her interests in, and approaches to, this material. A special feature of this interdisciplinary project is the interface between the empirical evidence of racial minorities’ presence in late medieval England and imaginary representations of the ‘other’ in literature and art. "

Further details here:

'England's Immigrants, 1330-1550',