A Historical Map of St Andrews - speaker Professor Margaret Connolly

Margaret Connolly is Professor of Palaeography and Codicology, which means that she teaches students how to read old handwriting and how to understand medieval manuscripts. Much of her interdisciplinary teaching is with graduate students and uses original materials from the university’s Special Collections. Her own research concerns Middle English and literature from the age of Geoffrey Chaucer. She is interested in the scribes who made medieval books and the readers who read them, including readers after the Middle Ages – that was an area explored in her latest bookSixteenth-Century Readers, Fifteenth-Century Books (2019).

She spent the first part of her career as a lecturer at University College Cork in the Republic of Ireland, but she is a St Andrews graduate, married to another St Andrews graduate, so St Andrews is very much like home, though they actually live in Ceres.

Michael Brown is Professor of Scottish History and Director of the Institute of Scottish Historical Research. He first came to the University of St Andrews as an undergraduate in 1983. He worked at the universities of Aberystwyth, Strathclyde, University College Dublin, and Aberdeen before returning to St Andrews in 1997.

Amongst his books are The Wars of Scotland (2004)and Bannockburn: The Scottish Wars and the British Isles (2008). He also co-edited the volume of essays Medieval St Andrews: Church, Cult, City (2017) which drew together  the work of scholars on the origins and history of the city until the Reformation and which grew out of a course on the history of Medieval St Andrews which continues to attract enthusiastic groups of students and allows everyone to get out of the classroom.