So, introducing myself. As mentioned above, my name is Lola; I love 1980s horror movies, gothic literature, mortuary science, primates, and getting tattoos. I also love studying crime - I'm currently a first-year criminology undergraduate at the University of Leeds; this doesn't sound like a subject that relates much to Medieval armour, and I won't pretend that the topic comes up often in my lectures. However, my interest in crime and legal issues has a lot more in common with history than you might think. Contrary to what most people assume when you say you're a criminology student, I have no interest in a career in law enforcement (or being a lawyer). Social research is where my interests lie (though the first job I ever wanted was to be a mortician, I quickly realised funeral services weren't for me). What interests me about crime is its social aspects: who we decide to criminalise, and the power that criminalisation has to maintain an oppressive status quo. There's a lot more sociology involved in studying crime than just law, and this inevitably leads to studying the history associated with the social landscape.
History has for a long time been essential to my efforts not to take for granted the political environment I exist in - and the Medieval period is rich with political insight into both the origins of the modern world and the long transition from antiquity. I can't say that warfare has been my preferred historical topic in the past (the constant pivot from war to war throughout high school and A level history wore me out after a while). The way military history was taught to me was always, I felt, overly technical - it lacked those human stories behind the dates and locations and specific muskets soldiers used. But that is the point of this upcoming project: to reevaluate the Royal Armouries' extensive Medieval collection and tell the story of specific objects from the perspective of the people who made and handled them, and the lives they lived.
This project intends to go further than standard technical descriptions, bringing objects to life by experimenting with alternative methods of learning about armour and weaponry, using a creative approach to explore the social context and experiences of those past peoples involved in combat and warfare. All of the research conducted will centre on what armour and weaponry tell us about Medieval culture and the complex ethical, political, and gendered implications of having these in a museum collection. We want to engage a new, younger audience with the Royal Armouries collection by retelling military history in a way that doesn't shy from those complicated human stories and how they reflect on the present.
I am, to put it lightly, stoked to be working on this, and will update on the specifics of the project as it develops. Until then -