Professor Alice Rio
Chichele Professor of Medieval History
University Academic Fellow from 2025
I am currently writing a narrative history of early medieval Europe through the experiences of a handful of women who travelled from one European region to another - using the most expansive possible definition of “Europe”, from Iceland to the Caucasus and from Iberia to the Baltic. Taking the point of view of women who were in some ways the bearers of a minority culture within their households seemed a good way to write a narrative of this period while avoiding both Great Men and exceptionalist national trajectories.
- Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader, and finally Professor of Medieval History, King’s College London (from 2009 to 2025)
- Osborn Fellow and College Lecturer in Medieval History and Culture, Sidney Sussex Cambridge (from 2007 to 2009)
- Weston Junior Research Fellow in History, New College, Oxford (from 2006 to 2007)
- PhD in History, King’s College London (from 2003 to 2006)
- social, economic and cultural history of early medieval Europe
- early medieval legal cultures and legal practitioners
- slavery, serfdom, debt and obligation
- women, family and gender
- comparative history
- Slaving and the Funding of Elite Status in Early Medieval Europe (ca. 800-1000 AD), Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture Series 21, Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies (Bonn, 2024). 75 pp. https://doi.org/10.53179/9783868934663
- ‘Corporal punishment at work in the early middle ages: the Frankish kingdoms, 6th-10th centuries’, International Review of Social History 68 (2023), Special Issue 31: Christian de Vito and Adam Fagbore eds, Punishing Workers, Managing Labour, 73-92. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859023000019
- ‘Nearly-not miracles of the Carolingian era: a hypothesis’, Haskins Society Journal 32 (2021 for 2020), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781800104471.002
- Slavery After Rome, 500–1100 (Oxford University Press, 2017; paperback 2020). 298 pp. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198704058.001.0001
- Legal Practice and the Written Word in the Early Middle Ages: Frankish Formulae c. 500–1000, Cambridge Medieval Life and Thought Fourth Series 73 (Cambridge University Press, 2009; paperback 2011). 312 pp. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511581359 .
- The Formularies of Angers and Marculf: Two Merovingian Legal Handbooks, Translated Texts for Historians 46 (Liverpool University Press, 2008). 320 pp. https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781846311598
- Co-editor, Past & Present.