Dr Edmund Wareham

BA, MSt, DPhil (Oxon)

Academic Profile

I undertook undergraduate and graduate studies in History and German at Jesus College in Oxford and the universities of Trier and Freiburg im Breisgau in Germany. My research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung and the German History Society. I then became a Postdoctoral Research Associate on ‘The Nuns’ Network’ project, funded by the Gerda-Henkel-Stiftung, and held a non-stipendiary Fulford Junior Research Fellowship at Somerville College. I then moved to St Edmund Hall where I was the Cowdrey Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow in History. Alongside this role I was also the Richard C. Kessler Reformation Collection (Virtual) Research Fellow at the Pitts Theology Library, University of Emory.

I am also a Departmental Lecturer in Early Modern European Social and Cultural History and convene the Faculty’s Early Modern German Culture Seminar.

Research Interests

I am a historian of late medieval and early modern Germany who is interested in the effects of religious change on the lives, values and beliefs of ordinary women and men. As part of ‘The Nuns’ Network’ project I contributed to the ongoing edition of nearly 1,800 letters written in Latin, Low German and a characteristic mixture of both languages by the Benedictine nuns of Lüne between 1460 and 1555. This built on my doctoral work, a microhistorical study of the Cistercian convent of Günterstal, near Freiburg im Breisgau, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. At St Benet’s I will be working on two projects: the destruction of convents and monasteries in the German Peasants’ War (1524-5) and Reformation debates about vows and oaths.

Selected Publications

Passional of Christ and Antichrist. Antithesis of the Life of Christ and Antichrist in Pictures , ed. & tr. Edmund Wareham, Ulrich Bubenheimer and Henrike Lähnemann, Treasures of the Taylorian Series One: Reformation Pamphlets 4 (Oxford: 2021).

‘The Openness of the Enclosed Convent: Evidence from the Lüne Letter Collection’, in Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum (eds), Openness in the Middle Ages (Berlin: 2021) [in press].

‘Cash for Access: Convent Entry, Simony, and the Limits of Reform in a South-West German Cistercian Convent’, in Eva Schlotheuber and Sigrid Hirbodian (eds), Zwischen Klausur und Welt. Autonomie und Interaktion spätmittelalterlicher geistlicher Frauengemeinschaften (Vorträge und Forschungen 91) (Ostfildern: 2021) [in press].

With Henrike Lähnemann, Eva Schlotheuber, Simone Schultz-Balluff, Philipp Trettin and Lena Vosding (eds), Netzwerke der Nonnen. Edition und Erschließung der Briefsammlung aus Kloster Lüne (ca. 1460-1555), Wolfenbüttler Digitale Editionen [http://diglib.hab.de/edoc/ed000248/start.htm] (7 September 2021).

Review of: Peter Marshall, Martin Luther and the Invention of the Reformation, in English Historical Review 134 (2019): 1290-1291.

With Racha Kirakosian and Nicole Eichenberger (eds), Oxford German Studies 43.4 (2014), Special Issue: ‘The German Middle Ages in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries: Reception and Transformation’.

‘‘Wann du fromm lebst / so wirst du nimmer trawrig’: Professor Jodocus Lorichius (1540-1612) and the Cistercian Nuns of Günterstal’, Oxford German Studies 43.4 (2014): 362-379.