David R. Winter

B.A., M.A. (McMaster), Ph.D. (Toronto)

Associate Professor and Chair

Current Projects:

• I have just finished as one of the principal organizers of Scientiae Belfast 2019 (June 12-15). This annual conference draws more than 150 scholars and explores emerging epistemologies in Europe between ca. 1400 and 1800. In addition to helping to organize the conference, I participated in a session on “teaching the uncanny.” We are planning to develop the session into a monograph-length project on teaching the devil and other elements of the “unreal.”
• I will be in the West Fjords, Iceland, studying the Icelandic language in August 2019. I will also be meeting with Viðar Hreinsson (Reykjavik Academy, Stefansson Arctic Institute) to explore Strandir and Árneshreppur, and to discuss the development of a summer programme (in Iceland) focussing on the environmental humanities in the early modern period. My own contribution will centre on the life and works of Bishop Oddur Einarsson (d. 1630), author of the Qualiscunque descriptio Islandiae.
• Together with Richard Raiswell (PEI), Mikki Brock (Washington and Lee), Sarah Hughes (Temple), Peter Dendle (Penn State, Mont Alto), and Kathryn Morris (King’s, Halifax), I am organizing a major conference on the history of the devil–tentatively called Devil 20/20–to be held in Halifax, Canada, in November, 2020.
• I will be on sabbatical from July 2020 to June 2021. My intention is to begin work on an English translation of Oddur’s Descriptio.

Research Interests:

• Western Europe in the Middle Ages and early modernity (ca. 1100-1650 CE), exemplaria and pastoral handbooks, the history of the devil, Iceland.

Teaching Interests:

• The Middle Ages, Late Antiquity, Ancient Greek and Roman civilization, ecclesiastical and cultural history, demons and spirits, Iceland.

Publications:

• Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period (with Michelle D. Brock, Washington and Lee, and Richard Raiswell, PEI). Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
• “Theory and Practice in Early Modern Epistemologies of the Preternatural” (with Michelle D. Brock), in Michelle D. Brock, Richard Raiswell, and David Winter (eds), Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period. Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 3-19.
• “Three short exempla concerning the purity of Master Gerard ‘la Pucelle’,” Opuscula: Short Texts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (forthcoming, 2019).
• “Becket and the Wolves: Imagining the Lupine Welsh in a Thirteenth-Century Latin Preaching exemplum from Llanthony Secunda Priory,” in Tristan Sharp and others (eds.), From Learning to Love: Schools, Law, and Pastoral Care in the Middle Ages. Essays in Honour of Joseph W. Goering (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2017), 590-612.
• “Marking the City for Christ: spatiality and the ‘invention’ of Utrecht’s medieval cross of churches,” in Meredith Cohen and Fanny Madeline (eds.), Space in the Medieval West: Places, Territories and Imagined Geographies (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), 77-99.
• “Preaching the Demonic Family in the West Country: An account of the devil and his mother in an early thirteenth-century example book from Llanthony Secunda Priory,” in Richard Raiswell and Peter Dendle (eds.), The Devil in Society in Premodern Europe (Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies Publications, 2012), 137-165.
• “Master Wiger of Utrecht’s Liber exemplorum sub titulis redactorum,” The Journal of Medieval History 38, no. 4 (December 2012), 443-471.
• “The Life and Career of Master Wiger of Utrecht (fl. 1209-1237):  an Early Convert to the Order of Friars Minor,” The Journal of Medieval History, 31 (March 2005), 71-126.

Recent Papers:

• “Stop Making Sense: Struggling with demons in the classroom,” Scientiae 2019, Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, June 13, 2019.
• “Demons as environmental threat in the Íslendingasögur (Icelandic Family Sagas),” St. Paul’s College, University of Manitoba. Winnipeg, November 21, 2018. Invited talk.
• “On the beach: the preternatural origins of drift whale conflicts in the later Icelandic sagas (ca. 1350-1450),” Scientiae 2018, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, May 18, 2018.
• “Shattered thresholds, the flensing of demons, and northern liminalities in Grettis saga,” Scientiae 2017, University of Padua, April 21, 2017.
• “Slipping between the Branches of the Fairy Tree: Joan of Arc, the Inquisitors, and the Longaevi,” Scientiae 2016, St. Anne’s College, Oxford University, July 6, 2016.

Works in Progress

• The Llanthony Stories: Study and Text (under review).
• The Devil in the Middle Ages: A Reader (with Richard Raiswell, UPEI) (under contract).
• The Qualiscunque descriptio Islandiae of Oddur Einarsson: Text and Translation.
• The Devil in the Classroom: Strategies for teaching the preternatural and the occult (with Michelle D. Brock, Peter Dendle, Cassandra Gorman, and Richard Raiswell).

Courses Taught:

• 54:153    World History to 1500
• 54:154    World History since 1500
• 54:260    Early Medieval Europe
• 54:261    Ancient I: The Ancient Near East and Greece
• 54:262    Ancient II: The Roman World
• 54:264    The High and Late Middle Ages
• 54:343    History of Iceland
• 54:369    The Crusades
• 54:374    History of European Women I: 500 BCE to 1500 CE
• 54:378    The Viking World
• 54:450    History of the Devil
• 54:462    Reading the Sagas
• 54:463    Medieval Popular Religion