Join us for this History Undergraduate taster lecture to get a taste for what studying at university will be like.
Date: Thursday, 26th September2024
Time: 17:00 – 18:00 (BST)
Who is this lecture open to?: Year 12 and 13 students, parents, teachers and advisers
Where: Virtual Webinar
Speaker: Dr Stephen Spencer, Assistant Professor in Medieval History
Lecture Title: Why did medieval people do things? Studying motivation in history
Why did people of the past behave in certain ways? This is a question that historians of all
periods have asked. Yet motivation is such an individualistic, personal matter, and one that can involve a complex web of factors, therefore trying to reconstruct the motives of people of the past – let alone the distant past! – is fraught with methodological challenges. This taster lecture explores several of those challenges, how they can be overcome, and the value of studying the forces and factors that drove people. We will do so by considering the case study of the crusades – a series of holy wars that aimed to conquer sacred territory in the Holy Land, above all the city of Jerusalem. Why did so many western Europeans, who were surely aware that crusading was an immensely dangerous business, participate in the crusades?