Dr John Merrington
How did people make sense of their own experience – of time, of space, and of the body – in the premodern world? Were such problems purely academic, or did they influence the everyday lives of medieval Europeans? These are the questions that animate my research. My first book (forthcoming with Oxford University Press) considers ideas about the five senses in the era after the fall of Rome. The senses – sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch – are a concept seductively familiar to us today. And yet, when as a doctoral student I began exploring the contexts in which medieval writers invoked the senses, I was confronted with the foreignness of the world that they inhabited. Medieval Europeans characterised the senses as the ‘windows of the soul’, the vulnerable entry-points through which temptations – or even malevolent spirits – might corrupt the interior condition.
My latest research addresses a remarkable paradox in the intellectual history of medieval Europe. Although we often imagine the Middle Ages as an era of social and cultural stagnation, the men and women of the period were in fact intensely preoccupied with the notion of progress. What were the foundations of medieval ideas of progress, and what were their social and political consequences?
Selected Publications
(OUP, forthcoming)
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History (2026). DOI
The English Historical Review (2025). DOI
Early Medieval Europe (2022). Winner of the Early Medieval Europe First Publication Prize for 2022. DOI