About

Benjamin is Professor of Medieval History in the Department of History. Having received his PhD from the University of Bamberg, he held academic positions at Bamberg, Cambridge, and Ghent before coming to Bristol in 2015. His research interests are medieval European history and historiography, with a focus on manuscript studies, palaeography and codicology, and cultural memory.

Benjamin's current research focuses on professional scribes and their networks in the medieval English countryside, c.1100–1350. He has been elected a Visiting Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford for the spring/summer of 2026 (Trinity Term).

Benjamin co-edits the series Bristol Studies in Medieval Cultures and serves on the comité de rédaction of the peer-reviewed, open-access journal Tabularia: Sources écrites des mondes normands médiévaux. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS) and the Higher Education Academy/AdvanceHE (FHEA), a councillor of the Bristol Record Society, and a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Peer Review College.

Major publications

Monographs

• The Aynho Cartulary and its Documentary Culture: Study, Text, and Translation (w/ R. Allen; Boydell, 2025)
• Abbatial Authority and the Writing of History in the Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 2023)
• Publishing in a Medieval Monastery: The View from Twelfth-Century Engelberg (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
• Michaelskirche, Fulda (w/ N. Baumann et al.; Schnell & Steiner, 2023)
• The Bristol Merlin: Revealing the Secrets of a Medieval Fragment (w/ L. Tether and L. Chuhan Campbell; ARC Humanities Press/Amsterdam University Press, 2021)
• Dudo of Saint-Quentin’s Historia Normannorum: Tradition, Innovation and Memory (Boydell & Brewer/York Medieval Press, 2015)

Edited volumes

• The Cambridge Companion to the Age of William the Conqueror (Cambridge University Press, 2022)
• History & Community = special issue of The Downside Review (Sage, 2021)
• A Companion to the Abbey of Le Bec in the Central Middle Ages (11th–13th Centuries) (w/ L. Gathagan; Brill, 2017)
• Record, Relate, Remember: Narrative Constructions of Memory and Generation in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (w/ H. Brandt et al.; University of Bamberg Press, 2012)

Virtual bookshelf

Linguistic profile

• German (native speaker)
• English (bilingual)
• French
• Dutch
• Latin (classical and medieval)
• Medieval vernaculars (various)

Contact

Office: 2.42, 13 Woodland Rd

Email: benjamin.pohl@bristol.ac.uk