Prof Lesley Abrams
Honorary Research Fellow
Academic Interests
I began my research with a study of Glastonbury Abbey and its archive in the pre-Conquest period, and I retain an interest in all apects of the Anglo-Saxon Church and anything to do with charters. Some of my research and publications have concentrated on the conversion to Christianity, whether of the English in the seventh century or Scandinavians in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh. I am interested in all aspects of the Scandinavian world in the early middle ages, including viking activity and the history of Scandinavia, and I have worked particularly on Scandinavians abroad, applying an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to issues of integration and interaction between incomers and established societies. My current project is a study of political baptisms and the conversion of vikings in ninth- and tenth-century Francia.
I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and Emeritus Professor of Early Medieval History and Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. I am also a member of the Editorial Committee of Viking and Medieval Scandinavia (2005- ) and a council member of the English Place-Name Society (2015- ).
Selected Publications
‘The Danelaw/Scandinavian England’, Proceedings of the XIXth Viking Congress, ed. C. Downham et al. (Liverpool, forthcoming)
‘Two Baptisms, Some Funerals, and Other Contexts of Interaction: Vikings and the Church in England in the Late Ninth Century’, in The Legacy of Medieval Scandinavian Encounters with England and the Insular World, ed. R. Dance, S.M. Pons-Sanz, & B. Schorn (Turnhout, in press, 2024/5)
‘Place-Names and Scandinavians in Ninth- and Tenth-Century Norfolk’, Anniversary volume of the Journal of the English Place-Name Society (forthcoming)
‘Cross-Cultural Oaths: King Alfred the Great, Emperor Leo V, and the Rus’ in Byzantium’, in Ποιμὴν καὶ Διδάσκαλος, Shepard and Teacher. Studies for Jonathan Shepard, ed. C. Zuckerman (forthcoming)
‘Remembered in Stone: Death, Commemoration, and Sculpture in Viking Age England’, Routledge Handbook of Death and Burial in the Viking Age, ed. A. Klevnäs and C. Ljung (forthcoming) (with Lilla Kopár)
‘Heirlooms and Stories as Technologies of Memory: Viking Armies and “Remnants of History”’, in Viking special volume (forthcoming)
‘Locations of Religious Encounter: the Scandinavian Diaspora in the Viking Age’, Studies in Church History (forthcoming 2025)
‘Wicing Batswegen: An Eleventh-Century Witness from Southwest England’, in Landscapes and Producers in Medieval England: Essays Presented to Rosamond Faith, ed. H. Boston and R. Purkiss (forthcoming 2025)
‘The Religious Life of Viking Armies’, in Viking Camps. Case Studies and Comparisons, ed. C. Hedenstierna-Jonson and I. García Losquiño (London, 2023), pp. 240-57
‘Vive la Différence? The Historical Value of Scandinavian Place-Names in England and Normandy’, Cameron Lecture (Nottingham, 2022) (https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/ins/cameron-lectures/cameron-lecture-2019.aspx)
‘The Study of Scandinavian Settlement in the Viking Age: Historiographical Perspectives on the Application of Place-Names in England and Normandy’, in Les historiographies des mondes normands. Construction, influence, évolution, ed. P. Bauduin and E. d’Angelo (Caen, 2022), pp. 207-31
‘The Scandinavian Encounter with Christianity Overseas: Diplomatic Conversions in the 9th and 10th Centuries’, in Viking Encounters. Proceedings of the 18th Viking Congress, ed. A. Pedersen and S. Sindbæk (Århus, 2020), pp. 30-42
‘Connections and Exchange in the Viking World’, Byzantium and the Viking World (ed. F. Androshchuk, J. Shepard, and M. White) (Stockholm, 2016), pp. 27-52
Bede, Gregory, and Strategies of Conversion in Anglo-Saxon England and the Spanish New World, Jarrow Lecture (2015)
‘The Conversion of Scandinavians in Britain and Ireland: an Overview’, in Vers l’Orient et vers l’Occident. Regards croisés sur les dynamiques et les transferts culturels des vikings à la Rous ancienne. Eastwards and Westwards: Multiple Perspectives on the Dynamics and Cultural Transfers from the Vikings to the Early Rus’, ed. P. Bauduin and A. Musin (Caen, 2014), pp. 327-37
‘Early Normandy’, Anglo-Norman Studies 35 (2013), 45-64
‘Diaspora and Identity in the Viking Age’, Early Medieval Europe 20:1 (2012), 17-38
‘Conversion and the Church in Viking-Age Ireland’, Proceedings of the Fifteenth Viking Congress, ed. J. Sheehan et al. (2009), pp. 1-10
‘King Edgar and the Men of the Danelaw', in Edgar, King of the English 959-975. New Interpretations, ed. D. Scragg (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 171-91
‘Germanic Christianities, 600-1100', Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 3, ed. T. Noble and J.M.H. Smith (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 107-29
‘Place-Names and the History of Scandinavian Settlement in England', Land, Sea and Home, ed. J. Hines et al. (Leeds, 2004), pp. 379-431 (with David N. Parsons)
