Rate My Professor Beth Spacey

Dr Beth Spacey is a Lecturer in Medieval History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry within the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Queensland. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts, Masters by Coursework, and Doctor of Philosophy in Medieval History from the University of Birmingham, completing her PhD in 2017. Her doctoral research was funded by the United Kingdom's Arts and Humanities Research Council from 2012 to 2015. Prior to her appointment at the University of Queensland in 2018 as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, she held Teaching Fellowships at the University of Birmingham from 2016 to 2017 and at Trinity College Dublin in 2017. In her current role, she contributes to teaching in medieval history, including courses such as HIST2411 and WRIT3613.

Beth Spacey is a historian of medieval religious cultures, specialising in the crusades and the history of the Latin East, with broader interests in the European and Mediterranean world of the Middle Ages. Her research focuses on miracles and the supernatural, masculinities, landscapes, gender, violence, environment, and colonialisms as depicted in medieval Latin Crusade narratives. Her ongoing project investigates attitudes towards nature and God's Creation in crusade texts. Key publications include her monograph The Miraculous and the Writing of Crusade Narrative (Boydell & Brewer, 2020; paperback edition 2023). Recent book chapters encompass 'The root of bitterness: crusade and the eradication of heresy from the Occitanian landscape in Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay’s Historia Albigensis' (2024), 'The natural and biblical landscapes of the Holy Land in Jacques de Vitry's Historia Orientalis' (2024), 'Miracles and crusade narrative in the first Old French Crusade Cycle' (2022), and 'Narrating “new wonders”: divine agency, crusade and Afonso I of Portugal's 1147 conquest of Santarém' (2022). Notable journal articles are 'Visionary masculinities: emotion and the experience of the miraculous in Latin narratives of the first crusade' (Emotions: History, Culture, Society, 2020), 'A land of horror and vast wilderness: landscapes of crusade and Jerusalem pilgrimage in Arnold of Lübeck's Chronica Slavorum' (Journal of Medieval History, 2021), co-authored 'Introduction: landscapes of conflict and encounter in the crusading world' (Journal of Medieval History, 2021), and 'Refocusing the First Crusade: authorial self-fashioning and the miraculous in William of Tyre’s Historia Ierosolymitana' (The Journal of Religious History, Literature and Culture, 2019). She has also published book chapters on martyrdom and masculinities, such as 'Martyrdom as masculinity in the Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi' (2019), and contributed public-facing articles to The Conversation on topics like medieval earthquakes and lunar eclipses.