Coinage and Economy of the Early Medieval Mediterranean

Michael J. Kelly

Dr. Michael J. Kelly is Visiting Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature and Judaic Studies at the State University of New York at Binghamton (Binghamton University). His research intersects the history of the late antique and earlier medieval Mediterranean, particularly Visigothic Iberia, with philosophy of history and critical theory. Michael received his Ph.D. in History in 2015 from the University of Leeds, where he wrote a thesis titled Writing History, Narrating Fulfillment. Michael is the General Director of the international open-access project  Networks and Neighbours and, with Dolores Castro, General Editor of the associated digital series Visigothic Symposia. He is also co-director, with Paulo Pachá, of Capitalism’s Past. He has published works in history, philosophy and literature, including Theories of History: History Read Across the Humanities, edited with Arthur Rose (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). Prior to Binghamton, he was Associate Lecturer of Early Medieval History at the University of York (UK) and taught critical historiography at Leeds Trinity University and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

 

Andrew Kurt

 

 

Dr. Andrew Kurt is a scholar of Visigothic numismatics and Associate Professor of History at Clayton State University in Georgia. He received his Ph.D. in 2002 from the University of Toronto, where he specialized in medieval Spain. He has taught courses in Medieval European history, Islamic history, Middle East regional studies, and Christian-Muslim Relations. His forthcoming book, Minting, State and Economy in the Visigothic Kingdom: From Settlement in Aquitaine through the First Decade of the Muslim Conquest of Spain (Amsterdam University Press, in press), examines the Visigothic monetary system in relation to the political and economic circumstances of the kingdom and of the surrounding states of late antiquity. A related article is his Festschrift contribution “The Places and Purposes of Minting in the Earliest Medieval Kingdoms,” in Brian Catlos, ed., A World of Economics and History: Essays in Honor of Professor Andrew M. Watson (Publicacions de la Universitat de Valencia, 2009), 33-54. He is the author, also, of “Lay Piety in Early Medieval Iberia: Liturgical and Para-Liturgical Forms,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 8.1 (2016): 1-37, which addresses how popular piety can be approached in this era. Another of his research areas is the intersection of European and Muslim interests in Ethiopia from 1300 to 1600 and travels between Mediterranean Christendom and the Horn of Africa region. An article he published on this topic is “The Search for Prester John, a Projected Crusade, and the Eroding Prestige of Ethiopian Kings, c. 1200 to c. 1540,” Journal of Medieval History 39.3 (Sep. 2013): 297-320.