Rosamond McKitterick

As I’ve noted on here before, I was a fairly terrible student, at least for my first two years; too busy with music and writing and sport and student union stuff, and drinking substantially too much, and having a succession of unrequited crushes (which did fuel the music, to be fair). It didn’t help that it was Cambridge in the late 80s, so that advanced pedagogy and student support amounted to being given some suggested reading rather than just an essay title. The disconnect between weekly essay supervisions and end-of-year exams, with only the latter ‘counting’ for anything, meant that for the most part neither students nor supervisors took the former especially seriously except as a kind of disciplining technique: you will think about something historical for at least a couple of hours each week. The big exception for me came when I was sent to Rosamond McKitterick for supervisions in early medieval European history. It helped that the material (focusing very much on the earliest…