A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe. An Early medievalist’s thoughts and ponderings.
By Jonathan Jarrett, lecturer at the University of Birmingham

A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe is famous for be the blog on the internet, which includes not only lots of links but also footnotes. Written by Jonathan Jarrett, currently Lecturer in medieval History at Birmingham (2013 -) he writes about his interest in Medieval History on his personal website:

“Although my personal interests are in early medieval history, particularly as found in charters or in Spain (especially Catalonia) and ideally both, I’ve taught and can teach a far wider spread, particularly British history of the pre-Norman period and have also done all right out of being able to work databases and code web-pages (current evidence not withstanding…). Despite the odd bit of electronic savvy, though, I remain firmly wedded to the early Middle Ages for a vocation…Part of the reason for that will be the interest I have, and think anyone can share, in the period, its events and people.

I’m not going to make huge claims about its modern-day relevance. That’s because firstly when history is put to serve modern purposes it usually seems to be misused, so those of us who are hooked on trying to close in on what really happened probably don’t want to end up doing that. The second reason is that, ultimately, the average person can lead a full, busy and fulfilling life without ever knowing, for example, whether King Arthur really existed, what the Vikings actually did, how King Harold really died at Hastings, why people went on Crusade, exactly how many masters a Reconquista man might serve or simply what there was to eat for dinner when you were a peasant (which all depends when you were a peasant of course). That doesn’t mean that knowing these things, or, where they’re not known, trying to find them out, isn’t fun. The question is really one of whether you’re interested in people or not.”