About

Benjamin joined the University of Bristol in 2015 as a Lecturer in Medieval History. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2018, and to Associate Professor (Reader) in 2022. In 2024, he became Professor of Medieval History.

Benjamin received his PhD from the University of Bamberg, Germany. Prior to his appointment at Bristol, he held postdoctoral positions at the Universities of Bamberg, Cambridge, and Ghent. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS) and the Higher Education Academy/AdvanceHE (FHEA), a councillor of the Bristol Record Society, and a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Peer Review College.

Benjamin edits the series Bristol Studies in Medieval Cultures and is on the comité de rédaction of the peer-reviewed, open-access journal Tabularia: Sources écrites des mondes normands médiévaux.

Benjamin's research interests are medieval European history and historiography, with a special focus on manuscript studies, palaeography and codicology, book history, and cultural memory.

He is the creator of the online exhibition History and Community: 20 Exhibits from Downside Abbey, which runs until 2025.

Major publications

Monographs

• The Aynho Cartulary and its Documentary Culture: Study, Text, and Translation (w/ R. Allen; Boydell, 2025)
• Abbatial Authority and the Writing of History in the Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 2023)
• Publishing in a Medieval Monastery: The View from Twelfth-Century Engelberg (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
• Michaelskirche, Fulda (w/ N. Baumann et al.; Schnell & Steiner, 2023)
• The Bristol Merlin: Revealing the Secrets of a Medieval Fragment (w/ L. Tether and L. Chuhan Campbell; ARC Humanities Press/Amsterdam University Press, 2021)
• Dudo of Saint-Quentin’s Historia Normannorum: Tradition, Innovation and Memory (Boydell & Brewer/York Medieval Press, 2015)

Edited volumes

• The Cambridge Companion to the Age of William the Conqueror (Cambridge University Press, 2022)
• History & Community = special issue of The Downside Review (Sage, 2021)
• A Companion to the Abbey of Le Bec in the Central Middle Ages (11th–13th Centuries) (w/ L. Gathagan; Brill, 2017)
• Record, Relate, Remember: Narrative Constructions of Memory and Generation in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (w/ H. Brandt et al.; University of Bamberg Press, 2012)

Virtual bookshelf

Linguistic profile

• German (native speaker)
• English (bilingual)
• French
• Dutch
• Latin (classical and medieval)
• Medieval vernaculars (various)

Contact

Office: 2.42, 13 Woodland Rd

Email: benjamin.pohl@bristol.ac.uk