Simon Maclean

Biography

Simon MacLean came to St Andrews in 2002 via a Research Fellowship at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Before that, he studied History at the Universities of Glasgow (MA, MPhil) and London (PhD).

Research Interest

His research deals with the Carolingian Empire, a huge political unit which included about a million square kilometres of Western Europe during the eighth and ninth centuries. He began his research career with a study of one of the last and least emperors of the Carolingian dynasty, Charles III ‘the Fat’ (d.888). This work kindled his interest in topics such as historical writing, political identities, and queenship. More recently, He've been working on the post-Carolingian era of the tenth and eleventh centuries. This is a fascinating period of European history in which we see elites and intellectuals attempting to negotiate the implications of the end of the empire (which died with Charles the Fat) and reconcile them with the fast-changing new world in which they lived. One of the oft-noted features of this era is the prominence of queens and other powerful women, and this was the subject of my most recent book Ottonian Queenship. He was a Principal Investigator on the HERA-funded research project After Empire: Using and Not Using the Past in the Crisis of the Carolingian Empire, c.900-1050. This runs from 2016 to 2019 and his role involves co-writing (with Prof Sarah Hamilton) a book on tenth-century Europe as a whole. This is my main current project.