Dr. Peter Crooks

Biography

At undergraduate level, I have taught widely on Irish, British and European history from the later Roman Empire to the Reformation. In the Freshman years, I lecture on medieval Ireland (1014-1318), Britain (1066-1215), and the Hundred Years War. I also offer a group project option on 'Chivalry, War and Violence in the Middle Ages’ and co-ordinate the Senior Freshman module ‘Imagining History’, which offers students the opportunity to engage with history as it is presented in fiction and film. For Sophisters, I offer List 1 special subjects on both Irish and British history, which will normally be available in alternate years: 'Plantagenet Ireland, c.1327-99’; and 'Richard II: Kingship, Tyranny and Revolution’. My List 2 module - 'Medieval Globetrotters: Exploration and World Conquest in the Age of the Black Death’ - explores hemispheric interactions across Eurasia during a distinctive phase of world historical development. I am happy to supervise doctoral research projects on many aspects of political culture and society in late-medieval Ireland and the wider English world, particularly projects that exploit the rich records produced in the medieval English colony in Ireland. I currently supervise doctoral students working on aspects of the legal history and parliamentary culture of later medieval Ireland and the British Isles.

Research Interest

My primary research interest is in Ireland in the period 1171-1541 and, arising from that, in the wider 'English world' or 'Plantagenet empire' of which Ireland formed an important part. Before returning to Trinity in 2013, I was a Past and Present Society Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research and a Lecturer in Late Medieval History at the University of East Anglia. I am currently completing a monograph entitled England's First Colony: Power, Conflict and Colonialism in the Lordship of Ireland, 1361-1460. I am the principal editor of 'CIRCLE: A Calendar of Irish Chancery Letters, c.1244-1509' (https://chancery.tcd.ie/), a reconstruction of the Irish chancery rolls destroyed in the 1922 cataclysm at the Four Courts. A four-volume print edition of CIRCLE will appear with the Irish Manuscripts Commission. In September 2013, I co-founded (with Professor S. Duffy) the Trinity Medieval Ireland Series (TMIS), the first volume of which has been published as: The Geraldines and Medieval Ireland: The Making of a Myth. I am also interested in 'empire', not least as a means of subverting or complicating the narratives of centralization and uniformity that have dominated much research on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Europe. These are the centuries normally classified as 'late medieval', a problematic term used more for the purposes of sub-disciplinary gate-keeping than for any real meaning that it holds. The challenge of research on this period -- sandwiched as it is between the 'high medieval' and the 'early modern' -- is to understand and describe its historical developments without resort to narratives of either decline or anticipation. So long as 'medieval' is understood to be a chronological descriptor (and a Eurocentric one at that), rather than a value-laden term with an implicit developmentalist agenda, then its use need not foreclose on meaningful structural comparisons, whether synchronic or diachronic in perspective. I essayed a general interpretation of England's empire, which adopts such perspectives, in 'State of the Union: Perspectives on English Imperialism in the Late Middle Ages' (Past and Present, no. 211). In July 2014, together with David Green and W. Mark Ormrod, I co-convened the Harlaxton Medieval Symposium, which took as its subject 'The Plantagenet Empire, 1259-1453' (now published as Harlaxton Medieval Studies no. 26). My work on England's late-medieval 'empire' has sparked a research interest in the history of empires and colonialism more generally. With Timothy H. Parsons (Washington in St Louis), I am co-editor of Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2016).