Dr James Drysdale Miller

I am a historian of the societal and cultural transformations which created Central Medieval Europe, with a particular interest in relics and the nascent kingdoms of France and Italy. I completed my DPhil in Medieval History at University College in 2024, with a dissertation entitled 'Text and Object: Fleury and the Relics of St Benedict, c. 750-c. 1140' and I return to Oxford after a year as a Rome Scholar at the British School at Rome. My doctoral studies were supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Clarendon Trust. Before coming to Oxford, I studied for a BA and MPhil in the department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge.

Research Interests

My research focusses on relics and their venerators and uses this potent combination of textual and material culture to examine ideas of community, the nature of religious authority, and the interaction between popular devotion and intellectual currents. I am currently revising my first book based on my doctoral research. This book examines the role which relics of played in the life of the monastic community of Fleury across four centuries. By unpicking the reciprocal relationship between material relics and hagiographical texts, I examine how medieval venerators 'got to know' their saints and argue that whether relic cults flourished or floundered was contingent on local circumstances outside the control of ecclesiastical elites.

While at Christ Church, I am also working on a new project, 'Bones of Power and Contention: Reappraising the Politics of Relics in Central Medieval France and Italy', which explores the interaction between political power and spiritual authority and asks how objects mediated and shaped the interactions between secular rulers and religious communities. Alongside these projects, I maintain a more general interest in manuscripts, texts and their transmission.

I have taught on a range of both British and European history papers for Oxford's History Faculty and Cambridge's Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic.  At Oxford this has included tutoring for the Prelim papers 'History of the British Isles 1, 300-1100', 'European and World History I, 370-900', and 'Approaches to History'.  I have also supervised for 'Insular Latin Literature' and supervised and lectured for 'The Brittonic-speaking peoples from the fourth century to the twelfth' at Cambridge.