Senior Lecturer

After growing up in New York, Charlie Briggs majored in history at Grinnell College in Iowa, before going on to receive his M.Litt. from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1993). After a decade and a half of teaching and administration at Georgia Southern University, where he was Professor of History, Briggs returned to the more amenable climes and landscape of the Northeast. A specialist in the intellectual and cultural history of Europe in the thirteenth through early sixteenth centuries, he teaches courses in late medieval and early modern European history, global history, historical methods, and the history of the book.

Briggs has published numerous books, articles, and chapters in the field of medieval and early Renaissance European intellectual culture, political thought, and historical writing. His current book project is a reassessment of the history of early Renaissance humanism, tentively titled Reframing Early Humanism: Scholasticism, Classicism, and the Languages of Politics, 1260–1350.

In addition to receiving research funding from the American Philosophical Society, he has been a Leslie Humanities Fellow at Dartmouth College, a Mellon Fellow at Saint Louis University, and Starr Foundation Visiting Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. In December 2011 he was named a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and in 2017 he was named UVM’s inaugural President’s Distinguished Senior Lecturer. He is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh during Spring term 2024.

 

Publications

 

Books:

The Body Broken: Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, 1300–1525. Revised and expanded second edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2020

A Companion to Giles of Rome. Co-edited with Peter S. Eardley. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016

The Body Broken: Medieval Europe 1300–1520. Routledge History of the Middle Ages. London and New York: Routledge, 2011

Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum: Reading and Writing Politics at Court and University, c. 1275– c. 1525. Cambridge Studies in Palaeography and Codicology, 5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999

The Governance of Kings and Princes: John Trevisa’s Middle English Translation of the De regimine principum of Aegidius Romanus, Vol. 1—Text. Co-edited with David C. Fowler and Paul G. Remley. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997

 

Articles and Chapters:

“‘Perfect justice weighs everything on a balanced scale’: Italian Friars on Equity, the Common Good, and the Commune, c. 1270–c. 1310.” In Addressing Injustice in the Medieval Body Politic: From Complaint to Advice, ed. Constant J. Mews and Kathleen Neal, pp. 283–310. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023

“Defenders of the Peace: The Political Thought of Marsilius’s Italian Dominican Contemporaries.” In Marsilius of Padua: Between History, Politics, and Philosophy, ed. Alessandro Mulieri, Serena Masolini, and Jenny Pelletier, pp. 215–52. Turnhout: Brepols, 2023

“The Mirror Compiled: Roger Waltham’s Compendium morale and Cary Nederman’s Medieval English Tradition of Political Thought.” In Rethinking Medieval and Renaissance Political Thought: Historiographical Problems, Fresh Interpretations, New Debates, ed. Chris Jones and Takashi Shogimen, pp. 109–29. London: Routledge, 2023

“Western Medieval Specula, c. 1150-c. 1450,” with Cary Nederman. In A Critical Companion to the “Mirrors for Princes” Literature, ed. Noëlle-Laetitia Perret and Stéphane Péquignot, pp. 160–96. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2023

“History at the Universities: Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris.” In Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500-1500, ed. Emily Steiner, Jennifer Jahner, and Elizabeth Tyler, pp. 258–75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019

“Introduction” and “Chapter 1: Life, Works, and Legacy.” In A Companion to Giles of Rome, ed. Charles F. Briggs and Peter S. Eardley, pp. 1-5 and 6-33. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016

“Moral Philosophy and Wisdom Literature.” In The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. 1, 800-1558, ed. Rita Copeland, pp. 299-321. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016

“Scholarly and Intellectual Authority in Late Medieval European Mirrors.” In Global Medieval: Mirrors for Princes Reconsidered, ed. Regula Forster and Neguin Yavari, pp. 26-41. Cambridge, Mass.: Ilex Foundation/Harvard University Press, 2015

“The Clerk.” In Historians on Chaucer: The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, ed. Stephen H. Rigby and Alastair Minnis, pp. 187-205. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014

“History, Story, and Community: Representing the Past in Latin Christendom, 1050-1400.” In The Oxford History of Historical Writing, Volume 2: 400-1400, ed. Sarah Foot and Chase F. Robinson, pp. 391-413. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012

“Moral Philosophy in England after Grosseteste: An ‘Underground’ History.” In The Study of Medieval Manuscripts of England: Festschrift in Honor of Richard W. Pfaff, ed. George H. Brown and Linda E. Voigts, pp. 359-88. Tempe, Arizona: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2010

“Knowledge and Royal Power in the Later Middle Ages: From Philosopher-Imam, to Clerkly King, to Renaissance Prince.”  In Power in the Middle Ages: Forms, Uses, Limitations, ed. Susan J. Ridyard, pp. 81-97. Sewanee, Tennessee: University of the South, 2010

“Literacy, Reading and Writing in the Medieval West.”  In The History of the Book in the West: 400AD-1455, ed. Jane Roberts and Pamela Robinson, pp. 481-504. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010; reprint of article, originally published in 2000

“Philosophi in Adiutorio Fidei: Pastoral Uses of Pagan Moral Teaching in the Later Middle Ages.” LATCH: A Journal for the Study of Literary Artifacts in Theory, Culture, or History 1 (2008) [Online]: 31-48

“Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the Later Medieval Universities: A Reassessment.” Rhetorica 25 (2007): 243-68

“Translation as Pedagogy: Academic Discourse and Changing Attitudes toward Latin in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries.” In Frontiers in the Middle Ages, ed. Outi Merisalo, pp. 495-505. Louvain-la-Neuve: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études Médiévales, 2006

 “Moral Philosophy and Dominican Education: Bartolomeo da San Concordio’s Compendium moralis philosophiae.” In Medieval Education, ed. Ronald B. Begley and Joseph W. Koterski, pp. 182-96. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005

“Teaching Philosophy at School and Court: Vulgarization and Translation.” In The Vulgar Tongue

Briggs_C_UVM-History

Areas of Expertise and/or Research

Intellectual & cultural history of later medieval Europe, world history and early European history

Education

  • Ph.D., UNC at Chapel Hill, 1993

Contact

Phone:
  • (802) 656-8312
Office Location:

Wheeler House, Room 300

Courses Taught

  • HST-125A
  • HST-225A
  • HCOL-086F