Leverhulme Research Fellowship awarded to Birkbeck academic
Dr Caroline Goodson, Senior Lecturer in Medieval History and Archaeology at Birkbeck, has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.
Dr Caroline Goodson, Senior Lecturer in Medieval History and Archaeology at Birkbeck, has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for 2016-17.
The Fellowship will enable Dr Goodson – based in Birkbeck’s Department of History, Classics and Archaeology – to pursue research into places of agriculture in the cities of Italy in the early Middle Ages, such as vegetable gardens, orchards and vineyards, among churches, monuments, houses and city walls.
“Scholars have previously taken the evidence for urban gardening as a sign of just how deprived the early medieval economy was, that the ancient baths, theatres, and fora should be given over to cabbage patches and apple trees,” said Dr Goodson, talking about her research.
“I take a different approach. I see the presence of urban gardening as evidence for the importance of controlling food resources in this period. To own a plot of cultivated land in a city – whether it was a separate plot, like an allotment, or a garden and orchard next to a house – was a very important safeguard against the instability of rural crop yields, or the irregularity of markets.
“The identification of how gardens came to be in the city, and who owned them, and what they did with them provides us with an entirely new view of society and politics in medieval cities and converging economic interests around them.”
The Fellowship will enable Dr Goodson to travel to Italy to consult with currently unpublished material on the locations and scale of these gardens, as well as consulting texts from libraries in Oxford and London.
“A few early medieval gardens have been excavated in Rome, Naples, and Florence, and in some cases palaeobotanical and paleopedological analysis permits us to know what was grown there, and what the soil was made of,” said Dr Goodson.
“I intend to survey recent urban archaeology to see about whether any more of these areas can be identified, to integrate the material evidence with the textual evidence,” she added.
The Department of History, Classics and Archaeology is renowned as a centre of original and influential research that is characteristically transnational and comparative in approach.
In the most recent national Research Excellence Framework (2014), the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology was ranked 7th among all history departments in Britain (THS research intensity table), with 85% of its research portfolio deemed of world leading or internationally excellent quality.
Further information
- Dr Caroline Goodson
- Information for prospective students in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology
- School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy
- Leverhulme Fellowship announcement