Professor Steve Rigby
Contact Details
stephen.h.rigby@manchester.ac.uk
Extension: 53085
Room: S.2.20
Profile
I have three main areas if interest in my teaching and research. The first is medieval English social and economic history, particularly in the period 1086-1530. Much of my work, including my book on Medieval Grimsby and my edition of the Boston customs accounts, 1377-99, has explored urban economic development in the period after the Black Death and I have also published on town government and urban social and political conflict. My English Society in the Later Middle Ages attempted to provide an overview of the period and of the variety of sociological and economic theories with which historians have made sense of it. My Level II course on Town and Country in Medieval England relates to this aspect of my research as does my M.A. course on English Society in the Later Middle Ages.
My second area of research and teaching is late medieval English literature in its historical context. My Chaucer in Context was a survey of critical attempts to establish the social meaning of medieval literature, an area I also explored in my article on medieval defences of women for Chaucer Review and my discussion of literature as social ideology in the Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages. My Level III course on Literature and Society in the Age of Chaucer relates to this aspect of my research and this course is also available to M.A. students.
Finally, my third area of research has been the philosophy of history and the relationship between history and social theory. In particular, I have been interested in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of historical materialism and of Marxist historiography, an area I explored in my Marxism and History, Engels and the Formation of Marxism and in my article on Historical causation and the paper on Marx and Engels views on medieval society published in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. My Level III course Knowledge and Explanation: Issues in the Philosophy of History relates to this area of my research. In all these area of my work, I have tried to show how traditional medievalist scholarship and empirical historical research can be enhanced by an engagement with a variety of historical approaches.
I am continuing to research and publish in all three of my areas of interest. I am currently working on an article on urban population in late medieval England and my next major project will be two articles relating Chaucers work to the political and social conflicts of his day. In the longer term, I intend to offer an assessment of the impact of post-structuralist theory on the philosophy of history which is one of the key themes of my Knowledge and Explanation course.
I am very willing to supervise postgraduate students and Manchester is particularly well provided with library resources on medieval English history with excellent collection in the Universitys Main Library, the Deansgate Library, Chethams Library and the Central Reference Library.
Publications
i) Books:
Marxism and History: a Critical Introduction (Manchester University Press, 1987), vi + 314 pp.
Engels and the Formation of Marxism: History, Dialectics and Revolution (Manchester University Press, 1992), viii + 246 pp.
Medieval Grimsby: Growth and Decline (Hull University Press, 1993), ix + 224 pp.
English Society in the Later Middle Ages: Class, Status and Gender (Macmillan, 1995). xii + 408 pp.
Chaucer in Context: Society, Allegory and Gender (Manchester University Press: Manchester Medieval Studies, 1996), xii + 205 pp.
Marxism and History: a Critical Introduction (2nd edition, Open University set course-book, Manchester University Press, 1998), xviii + 314 pp.
The Overseas Trade of Boston in the Reign of Richard II (Lincoln Record Society, 93 (2005), xxxviii + 302).
ii) Edited collections
A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages (Blackwell, 2003), xviii + 665.
iii) Articles:
'Urban decline in the later middle ages: some problems of interpreting the statistical data', Urban History Yearbook (1979), pp. 46-59.
'The Grimsby lay subsidy roll of 1297', Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, 14 (1979), pp. 39-40.
'Urban decline in the later middle ages: the reliability of the non-statistical evidence', Urban History Yearbook (1984), pp. 45-60.
'Boston and Grimsby in the middle ages: an administrative contrast', Journal of Medieval History, 10 (1984), pp. 51-66.
'The customs administration at Boston in the reign of Richard II', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 58 (1985), pp. 12-24.
'"Sore decay" and "fair dwellings": Boston and urban decline in the later middle ages', Midland History, 10 (1985), pp. 47-61.
'Late medieval urban prosperity: the evidence of the lay subsidies', Economic History Review, second series, 39 (1986), pp. 411-6 (with replies by J. F. Hadwin and A. R. Bridbury, Ibid., pp. 417-22, 423-6).
'Urban "oligarchy" in the later middle ages', in J. A. F. Thomson, ed., Towns and Townspeople in the Fifteenth Century (Alan Sutton, 1988), pp. 62-86.
'Urban society in early fourteenth-century England: the evidence of the lay subsidies', in B. Pullan and S. Reynolds, eds, Towns and Townspeople in Medieval and Renaissance Europe: Essays in Memory of J. K. Hyde, B.J.R.L., 72 (1990), pp. 169-184.
'Marxism and the middle ages', History Today, 41/11, (1991), pp. 26-8.
'Marxism and the middle ages'. Reprinted in A. Ryan et al., After the End of History, (Collins and Brown, 1992), pp. 14-18.
'Historical causation: is one thing more important than another?', History, 80 (1995), pp. 227-42.
'Engels revisited', History Today, 45/8 (1995), pp. 8-10.
'Marxist historiography' in M. Bentley, ed., Companion to Historiography (Routledge, 1997), pp. 889-928.
'Approaches to pre-industrial social structure', in J. H. Denton, ed., Orders and Hierarchies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Macmillan, 1999), pp. 6-25.
'Engels after Marx: history', in T. Carver and M. Steger, eds, Engels After Marx (Pennsylvania State U. P., 1999), pp. 109-43.
'Medieval England: To have and have not', New Left Review, 236 (1999), pp. 154-9.
'Robin Hood' and 'Social classes and social conflict', in N. F. Cantor, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages (Viking, 1999), pp. 363-4, 390-2.
'Government, power and authority, 1300-1540', (with E. Ewan), in D. Palliser, ed., Cambridge Urban History of Britain, volume I (Cambridge U. P., 2000), pp. 291-312.
'The Wife of Bath, Christine de Pizan and the medieval case for women', Chaucer Review, 35 (2000), 133-65.
'"John of Gaunt's Palace" and the Sutton family of Lincoln', Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, 35 (2000), pp. 35-9.
'England: literature and society', in S. H. Rigby, ed., A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages (Blackwell, 2003), pp. 497-520.
'England: social conflict and popular politics', (with J. C. Whittle) in S. H. Rigby, ed., A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages (Blackwell, 2003), pp. 65-86.
'Serfdom' in J. Mokyr, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, volume 4 (Oxford U. P., 2003), pp. 463-7.
'Historical materialism: social structure and social change in the Middle Ages', Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 34 (2004), pp. 473-522.
'Society and politics', in S. Ellis, ed., An Oxford Guide to Chaucer (Oxford U. P., 2005), pp. 26-49.
'Historical causation: is one thing more important than another?'. Reprinted in M. Burns, ed. Historiography: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, vol. II (Routledge, 2005), 27: 226-42.
History, Discourse and the Postsocial Paradigm: a Revolution in Historiography?, History and Theory, 45 (2006), pp. 110-23.
'Marx, Engels and the Middle Ages', in N. Fryde et al., eds, Die Deutung der mittelalterlichen Gesellschaft in der Moderne (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2006), pp. 147-80.
'Social structure and economic change in late medieval England', in R. Horrox and M. Ormrod, eds, Cambridge Social History of England, 1200-1500 (Cambridge U. P., 2006), pp. 1-30.
'English society in the later middle ages: deference, ambition and conflict', in P. Brown, ed., A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c.1350-c.1500 (Blackwell, forthcoming).
'Ideology and utopia: prudence and magnificence, kingship and tyranny in Chaucer's "Knight's Tale"', in M. Davies and A. Prescott, eds, London and the Kingdom (forthcoming).
'Three estates' and 'Theoretical approaches to the middle ages' (economic and social history), in Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages (Oxford U.P., forthcoming).