Susan Kilby

Contact

• workTrent Building
  University Park
  Nottingham
  NG7 2RD
  UK
• Susan.Kilby@nottingham.ac.uk

Biography

Susan is a medieval historian interested in the complexity of peasants' relationships with local landscape, ranging from their economic interests through to more culturally informed ideas, including conceptual notions of the landscape adopted by different community groups, the survival of cultural memory, and the landscape as a repository for local cultural capital. She is especially concerned with disentangling peasants' views of their local environment from those of elites, which have tended to prevail within the historical record. Contemporary place-names form a key part of the evidence for understanding medieval attitudes toward local landscapes, and Susan loves nothing more than getting stuck in to a nice set of medieval field-names.

Expertise Summary

Later medieval manorial documents and charters. Later medieval palaeography. I am principally interested in the medieval rural environment, and in peasants' relationship with the landscape. My work is predominantly inter-disciplinary.

Selected Publications

• RICHARD JONES and SUSAN KILBY, 2021. Mitigating riverine flood risk in medieval England. In: CHRISTOPHER GERRARD, PAOLO FORLIN and PETER J. BROWN, eds., Waiting for the End of the World?: New Perspectives on Natural Disasters in Medieval Europe Routledge.
• SUSAN KILBY, 2020. Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape: A Study of Three Communities University of Hertfordshire Press.
• KILBY, SUSAN, 2019. Fantastic beasts and where to find them: the Romanesque capitals of St Kyneburgha's church, Castor, and the local landscape Church Archaeology. 19, 53-72
• CARROLL, JAYNE and KILBY, SUSAN, 2019. Preparing the ground: finding minor landscape names in medieval documents The Local Historian. 49(4), 276-300

• View all publications

• JOHN BAKER, JAYNE CARROLL and SUSAN KILBY, 2022. Place-Names, People and Landscape in Medieval Staffordshire. In: IAN ATHERTON, MATTHEW BLAKE, ANDREW SARGENT and ALANNAH TOMKINS, eds., Collections for a History of Staffordshire: Local Histories: Essays in Honour of Nigel Tringham 4:27. Staffordshire Record Society. 115-132
• RICHARD JONES and SUSAN KILBY, 2021. Mitigating riverine flood risk in medieval England. In: CHRISTOPHER GERRARD, PAOLO FORLIN and PETER J. BROWN, eds., Waiting for the End of the World?: New Perspectives on Natural Disasters in Medieval Europe Routledge.
• SUSAN KILBY, 2020. Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape: A Study of Three Communities University of Hertfordshire Press.
• KILBY, SUSAN, 2019. Fantastic beasts and where to find them: the Romanesque capitals of St Kyneburgha's church, Castor, and the local landscape Church Archaeology. 19, 53-72
• CARROLL, JAYNE and KILBY, SUSAN, 2019. Preparing the ground: finding minor landscape names in medieval documents The Local Historian. 49(4), 276-300
• MARK GARDINER and SUSAN KILBY, 2018. Perceptions of medieval settlement. In: C. GERRARD and A. GUTIERREZ, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Later Medieval Archaeology OUP. 210-225
• SUSAN KILBY, 2017. Divining medieval water: the field-names of Flintham in Nottinghamshire Journal of the English Place-Name Society. 49, 53-89
• RICHARD JONES, REBECCA GREGORY, SUSAN KILBY and BENJAMIN PEARS, 2017. Living with a trespasser: riparian names and medieval settlement on the River Trent floodplain Journal of Post-Classical Archaeologies. 7, 33-64
• SUSAN KILBY, 2015. Mapping peasant discontent: trespassing on manorial land in fourteenth-century Walsham-le-Willows Landscape History. 36(2), 69-88