Welcome

Greetings, worthy webfarer! Welcome to the Barbarians Are Hungry.

I began this site in 2013 as a food blog and revived it as a research blog in 2020. It is a personal academic blog. This means that I share my research, reading, and writing on late antiquity and the early Middle Ages in an informal way. My aim is to convey how and why I do history, alongside my conclusions, confusions, and discoveries, in a style that is clear and engaging for any interested reader.

This blog lands somewhere between the pen trials medieval scribes made in their manuscripts and a Renaissance commonplace book. Ultimately, it is a collection of musings on history, books, crafts, poems, recipes and other lovely things that inspire me as a scholar and a person.

I hope what I share here surprises, amuses, or delights you. Thank you for taking the time to read and visit!

About Me

My name is Dr Hope Williard and I am a historian of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. From September 2023 to August 2025, I am a postdoc on the project Lettercraft and Epistolary Performance in Early Medieval Europe, 476–751 CE at Utrecht University.
 
a white woman wearing a brown and white patterned skirt, a tan top, and a navy sweater stands in a very large open fireplace
Me in the kitchen fireplace at Gainsborough Old Hall

 
As a late antique and medieval historian, I am fascinated by how people used literature to cope with change. My publications focus on letter writing, friendship, and literary culture in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages--a time once known as the "Dark Ages". My research journey has taken me all over the world and on fellowships at the John Rylands Library, Manchester and Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, where I researched the role of female library workers in the study of medieval manuscripts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. You can read more about this project here. My first book, Friendship in the Merovingian Kingdoms: Venantius Fortunatus and His Contemporaries, was published by ARC Humanities Press in 2022. It can be purchased here or wherever books are sold. 

As a lecturer, my teaching has focused on the premodern Mediterranean world. At Utrecht University, I will teach the course Ancient Literature and History for the UCU honors college in spring 2024. From 2016 to 2023, I taught ancient, late antique, and medieval history to undergraduates at the University of Lincoln, as well as medieval Latin for the MA Medieval Studies. Prior to coming to Lincoln, I taught  late antique and medieval history to undergraduates and medieval Latin to graduate students at the University of Leeds.

From 2017 to 2023, I was an academic subject librarian at the University of Lincoln, supporting teaching, learning, and research across a baker’s dozen of subjects in the arts and humanities. More information about my work can be found here. In 2022-2023, I held a Professional Practice Fellowship sponsored by Research Libraries UK, where I researched how PhD students in history learn and use digital skills. Progress and findings from this project were shared on my teaching blog, Learning Experiences and will appear in forthcoming publications.

I enjoy meeting new people! You can connect with me on academia.edu or LinkedIn or by email.
 

A Note on Sharing and Copyright

Please note that all posts on this blog are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This license requires that any users of my materials:
  • attribute the material to its author and provide a link back to the original post
  • do not make money from reusing, adapting, or sharing these posts
  • share, reuse, or adapt my material under the same license (CC-BY-4.0)
My posts often feature poems I like, and I do my best to follow principles of academic integrity and the rules of copyright law when sharing any intellectual or creative work that is not my own. If you have concerns or questions, please comment on the relevant post to let me know. I will look into things and amend the post if needed.
 
Just in case it needs saying, all opinions shared on this blog represent my own views and not those of my employer or any other organisation.
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