Department of History
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About the department
Research
Lifelong Learning
Mr David Harry
Teaching Fellow in History
Office: 2.06, Cotham House
Phone: +44 (0)117 33 10437
Email: david.harry@bristol.ac.uk
Research Interests
My research interests lie in the devotional exchange between the cloister and the world in late medieval and Early Modern England and Northern Europe. In particular I work on the reception of monastic writings by secular audiences and the role of regular devotion in shaping parish piety. The aim of my research is to break down traditional boundaries between “elite” and “popular” religion in the late medieval Church and to place Latin and vernacular devotional texts within their broader historical context. My background is in English Literature and I am enthusiastic about novel and interdisciplinary ways of approaching the past. I am also interested in late medieval responses to death, early print culture and popular preaching in pre-Reformation England. I am currently working on several projects including a study of the reception of the Pricke of Conscience in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Pricke of Conscience was arguably the most popular English devotional text of the later Middle Ages, yet it has been woefully neglected by generations of medievalists. My research aims to generate new interest in the text and examine how it was read – and by whom – before and during the Reformation.
Undergraduate Teaching
- Lecturer and seminar tutor: 'Introduction to Medieval History'
- Special Topic: 'The Cultural History of the Book (First Year Special Topic)
- Lecture Response Unit: 'Revels and Riots: Popular Culture in Early Modern England'
- Special Subject: 'Drink and Disorder in Early Modern England'
- Reflective History Unit: 'Propaganda'
Postgraduate Teaching
- Coordinator 'Themes in Cultural and Intellectual History'
- Option 'The Good, The Bad and the Handsome? Power, Patronage and Piety in Fifteenth-Century Burgundy'
Selected Publications
‘Learning to Die in Yorkist England: Earl Rivers’ Cordyal’, in The Yorkist Age: Proceedings of the 2011 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. by Hannes Kleineke & Christian Steer, (Donington: Shaun Tyas, Forthcoming, 2013)