Postdoctoral Researcher

Dr Hope Williard is a postdoctoral researcher on the NWO-Vidi project ‘Lettercraft and Epistolary Performance in Early Medieval Europe’, where she will be contributing to the design of the project database and researching the surprisingly wide range of people involved in letter exchange. She is social and cultural historian of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, focusing on the social and cultural role of letter writing. Her first book, Friendship in the Merovingian Kingdoms (ARC Humanities Press, 2022), uses literary and epistolary evidence to argue that medieval authors made and maintained friendships to foster community and connection, thus maintaining social cohesion at a time of significant political instability. Her other publications consider letter writing in a wide range of contexts, from the use of letters in the creation of elite intellectual networks to the ways that non-elite messengers might manipulate letter delivery for their own ends. Hope’s research increasingly uses the lens of materiality to explore the ways that marginalized members of medieval society—particularly lower-class people and women—interacted with texts.