Centre for Medieval Studies
Dr John Lee
John completed his BA and MA degrees at the University of Durham and his PhD at the University of Cambridge. He teaches a variety of courses in medieval and local history for the Centre for Lifelong Learning at the University of York.
Research interests
John’s research interests are in the economy and society of medieval England, and local and regional history. His work has ranged from studies of merchants and fairs, and towns and their hinterlands, to religious commemorative practices and the estates of the Knights Templar.
Recent publications
The Medieval Clothier (Boydell, 2018), a major new study of the cloth-making trade in England and the clothiers who increasingly controlled much of its production.
https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781783273171/the-medieval-clothier/
Commemoration in Medieval Cambridge (Boydell, 2018), co-edited with Christian Steer, explores how the people of this university town chose to be remembered after their deaths, and the ‘market’ for the commemoration of the dead.
https://boydellandbrewer.com/
Compassionate Capitalism. Business and Community in Medieval England (Bristol, 2020), by Catherine Casson, Mark Casson, John Lee and Katie Phillips, examines Cambridge’s sophisticated urban property market during the thirteenth century and how profits were reinvested into the local community through charitable giving.
https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/compassionate-capitalism
‘“Tis the sheep have paid for all”: Merchant Commemoration in Late Medieval Newark’, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society, 19 (2017).
‘Medieval local history from published records: a case-study of the manor, market and church of Masham, Yorkshire’, The Local Historian, 45 (2015)..
‘Weedley not Whitley: repositioning a preceptory of the Knights Templar in Yorkshire’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 87 (2015).
John’s full list of publications is available here https://york.academia.edu/JohnLee