Event Details

History Department Research Seminar Series

The History Department is pleased to host Dr Dan Armstrong (University of St Andrews) who will deliver the paper 'Papal Authority and Schism in the Eleventh Century: Clues from and Anglo-Norman Manuscript of Canon Law'.

In his paper, Dan will consider the clues that we can glean from an Anglo-Norman manuscript of Canon Law about the dynamic changes occurring in the second half of the eleventh century. The Norman Conquest of England and the rise of a group of papal reformers in Rome were crucial moments that reshaped the very fabric of Europe. To gain a window into this period of dramatic transformation, the paper will consider a selection of documents inserted into Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury’s manuscript of Canon Law. These documents shed interesting new light on attitudes in Anglo-Norman England to papal authority and schism.

Dr Dan Armstrong is a St Leonard’s Associate at the University of St Andrews, having previously been a Royal Historical Society Centenary Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research and a member of the European Research Council grant ‘Civil Law, Common Law, Customary Law’. Dan is a historian of the High Middle Ages, whose research focuses on the role of personal influence and networks in the exercise, spread, and negotiation of papal power at the periphery of Europe. His first article, recently discussed on the BBC History Extra podcast, challenged the current scholarly orthodoxy that the papacy sanctioned the Norman Conquest of England. Dan is the lead editor of a forthcoming book on Borders and the Norman World: New Frontiers in Scholarship, due to be published by Boydell in 2023.