Monday 16 March 2026 at 16h
Prof. Dr. Miri Rubin
Queen Mary University of London
Lecture in English, organized in cooperation with the History Department and the Center for Urban History (UAntwerp).
Miri Rubin holds the 2026 Raymond van Uytven Chair for Urban History.
Lecture in room C.102, Prinsstraat 13,
2000 Antwerp.
The lecture will be followed by a reception.
Free admission.
Register via Google Forms.
This visit to the University of Antwerp, a centre of excellence in urban history situated within a medieval city, is a fitting occasion to revisit the questions we are currently asking about cities. Medieval cities are emerging increasingly as diverse, in the composition of their populations, in the religious services they supported, in the materials they used for work and for pleasure, in the many social bodies that sought to make them safe. If all this is true, what kind of chronology – what narrative can we produce – to capture both continuity and change. Miri Rubin shall attempt some suggestions.
Miri Rubin is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London. Her broad research interests treat the religious cultures of later medieval Europe, with a particular focus on urban life. Among her books are Charity and Community (1987), Corpus Christi (1991), Gentile Tales (1999), Mother of God (2009), and Cities of Strangers (2020). Miri has held leadership roles in research at Queen Mary, acted as President of the Jewish Historical Society of England, has been elected as Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, and in 2026 will become the President of the Ecclesiastical History Society.