The Medieval Ritual Landscape: Archaeology, Material Culture and Lived Religion

The Medieval Ritual Landscape Project (MeRit) will shed new light on everyday religion in the English Middle Ages (c.1000-1600 CE). Complementary sources of archaeological evidence (excavated artefacts and metal-detected finds) will be analysed at different scales (macro-scale national and transnational, and micro-scale regional perspectives) to illuminate how medieval people expressed their own religious agency, largely unrecorded by written sources. The project will adopt an interdisciplinary research framework, combining archaeological, historical and digital humanities approaches, to reveal how the material practices of lived religion intersected with gender, family and community. It will consider changes in belief over time and in response to social crises and religious transitions, such as the Black Death and the long Reformation, taking a deep time perspective on the religious beliefs and agency of ordinary medieval people. It will consider regional variation in ritual practices and religious identity, through detailed contextual studies of three regional case studies (Kent, Norfolk, North Yorkshire), selected to provide direct comparisons with continental Europe. It will place the English evidence in comparative perspective with Dutch and Danish public finds data, to evaluate the extent to which medieval north-western Europe shared a common repertoire of religious objects and ritual practices.

The project will unlock the potential of English medieval public finds data (over 325,000 medieval finds recorded by the PAS, the Portable Antiquities Scheme) and pioneer transnational analysis of European public finds, with relevance to archaeological citizen science across Europe. It will create an integrated database of medieval religious artefacts, including both public finds (metal-detected objects) and excavated archaeological evidence, to enable innovative spatial-statistical analyses to map ritual practices in the medieval landscape. The project will employ GIS mapping techniques to interrogate spatial relationships of religious objects in relation to settlements and natural or cultural features in the landscape, as well as potential clustering of finds that may reveal intentionally 'placed deposits' and the reuse of earlier ritual landscapes. Change over time will be considered through probabilistic 'aoristic' analyses using Monte Carlo simulation, to test patterns in religious material culture in relation to social and demographic trends, such as the development of parishes, pilgrimage, the Black Death, and the Reformation. Social Network Analysis will be used to elucidate and compare regional patterns in the circulation of pilgrim souvenirs and other religious objects. We will interrogate medieval textual sources to gain deeper understanding of who conducted ritual practices, for what reasons and in what spaces, as well as clerical attitudes and commentaries on these lay practices. Comparative insights will be gleaned from public finds recording schemes in Denmark (DIME, Aarhus Universitet) and the Netherlands (PAN, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), in addition to the rich data set for medieval pilgrim souvenirs from the Kunera Project (Radboud Universiteit, NL).

MeRit will deliver parallel strands of impact and outputs addressing i) everyday religion in the Middle Ages; and ii) the use and significance of public finds today, to reach beneficiaries beyond academia, including: citizen scientists, heritage professionals, the public and the Portable Antiquities Scheme. Working with museums and PAS Finds Liaison Officers (FLOs), we will establish a partnership group of 'citizen archaeologists' with whom we will co-produce finds recording guides and creative approaches to object biographies. The PAS will gain long-standing benefits from partnership with the project, including reciprocal knowledge exchange to improve the quality of future medieval finds recording, data cleaning, and legacy materials for the PAS website.