Dr Hannah Boston

Hannah Boston is a Nigel Burn Research Fellow at the Faculty of Divinity and a Research Fellow Elect at Clare Hall.

She received her doctorate in Medieval History from the University of Oxford in 2018, where she also took her M.St. and M.A. She has worked as a Field Archaeologist at MOLA, Lecturer in Medieval History at Magdalen and Queen’s College, Oxford, and held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Lincoln 2023-6. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Dr Boston’s work centres on lordship, legalism, loyalty, and documentary culture in England during the Central Middle Ages. Her research addresses the production and use of charters as expressions of legal thought and regional identity. Previous work has addressed the prevalence of multiple allegiances in twelfth-century English society, arguing for the shifting and flexible nature of seigneurial relationships and the coexistence of these with other sources of power and identity.

Her current research focuses on forgery, memory, and environmental change in the land registers of Crowland Abbey (Lincs.), and is kindly supported by the Lincoln Record Society. Many of the abbey’s supposed early records are known forgeries of the late medieval period. This project seeks to analyse these forgeries, both for their sources and date, and for the house’s understanding of its own history, identity, and relationship to its landscape.