Robin Fleming

Robin Fleming (* 1956 ) is an American medieval historian.

She studied from 1976 at Westfield College, University of London and at the University of California, Santa Barbara , where she earned her bachelor's degree in history in 1977 and her doctorate in 1984. From 1986 to 1989 she was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, from 1989 Assistant Professor, 1992 Associate Professor and from 1998 Professor at Boston College . She has been the Chair of the History Faculty since 2012.

Fleming deals with English history in the late Roman and early Middle Ages, early medieval material culture, the Domesday book and English legal history before common law , historiography in the early Middle Ages, reception of the Middle Ages in the 19th century. In particular, she examines the transition at the end of Roman rule in Great Britain using both archaeological finds and text sources, for example the decline in metalworking skills.

In 2013 she became a MacArthur Fellow .

She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London , a member of the Medieval Academy of America and the American Historical Association, and was President of the Charles Homer Haskins Society.

Fonts

• Kings and Lords in Conquest England, Cambridge University Press, 1991
• Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise c. 400 to 1070, Penguin, 2010
• Domesday Book and the Law: Society, and Legal Custom in Early Medieval England, Cambridge, 1998

Some essays:

• Recycling in Britain after the Fall of Rome's Metal Economy, Past and Present, 217 (2012), 3-45.
• Elites, Boats and Foreigners: Rethinking the Rebirth of English Towns, in Città e campagna prima del mille, Atti delle Settimane di Studio, 56 (2009), 393-425.
• Writing Biography on the Edge of History, American Historical Review, 114 (2009), 606-14.
• Acquiring, Displaying, and Destroying Silk in Late Anglo-Saxon England, Early Medieval Europe, 15 (2007), 127-58.
• Bones for Historians: Putting the Body Back in Biography, in David Bates (editor): Writing Medieval Biography: Essays in Honor of Frank Barlow, Woodbridge, 2006, 29–48.
• with Andrew Lowerre: MacDomesday Book, Past and Present, 184 (2004), 209-32.
• Lords and Labor, in Wendy Davis (Editor): The Short Oxford History of the British Isles, vol. 3: Britain and Ireland in the Ninth through Eleventh Centuries, Oxford 2003, 107-138.
• Christ Church Canterbury's Anglo-Norman Cartulary, in Anglo-Norman Political Culture (1997), 83-155.
• Picturesque History and the Medieval in Nineteenth-Century America, American Historical Review (1995), 1061-1064.
• Rural Elites and Urban Communities in Late-Saxon England, Past and Present 141 (1993), 3-37
• Monastic lands and English defense in the Viking Age, English Historical Review 100 (1985), 247-265

Web links

• Homepage
• Biography at the MacArthur Foundation