Dr Marcus Meer

Marcus Meer joined UCL in 2025, after several years as a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute London. He previously taught at Durham University, King’s College London, and the University of Düsseldorf. He is historian of the later Middle Ages with a particular interest in intersections of economic and cultural history, the communicative construction of identities, institutions, and spaces, and antagonisms and convergences of urban, monastic, and noble culture. His research has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).

His current project investigates the role of money in the chronicles of monasteries, cities, and courts written in England, the Low Countries, and the northern parts of the Holy Roman Empire between the late thirteenth and the early sixteenth centuries. The project suspects that institutional chronicles employed a monetary rhetoric with an eye on morally acceptable economic thought and evidence-based governmental practice. In this sense, money was an argument for and against the status quo and thus, like the writing of history in general, a tool in processes of institutional decision-making. At the same time, this monetary rhetoric contributed to the construction of identity promised by a shared past that was marked by (economic) glories as well as crises.

With a similar interest in how medieval people communicated their vision of society and their identity, he organised, together with Len Scales (Durham), an international conference dedicated to political iconoclasm in the Middle Ages. The event was funded by the Thyssen Foundation and the proceedings are currently forthcoming with Boydell & Brewer.

His doctoral work, too, was concerned with questions of visual culture, analysing the social and political functions of heraldic signs in the urban societies of later medieval England and Germany. 

Major publications

• Heraldry in Urban Society: Visual Culture and Communication in Late Medieval England and Germany, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2024
• ‘Seeing Proof of Townsmen on the Move: Coats of Arms, Chivalric Badges, and Travel in the Later Middle Ages’, Journal of Early Modern History 25.1–2 (2021), 11–38
• ‘Reversed, Defaced, Replaced: Late Medieval London and the Heraldic Communication of Discontent and Protest’, in: Journal of Medieval History 45.4 (2019), 618–645

For a full list of publications and positions, see Marcus Meer’s ORCID profile.

Teaching

• Making Medieval Europe 1150–1350 (HIST0033)
• Sin in the Middle Ages: c.400–c.1550 (HIST0804)
• Conscience and Authority in the Age of Chaucer (HIST0089)
• Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Documents (MDVL0006)

Contact information

Email: m.meer@ucl.ac.uk 

Office: G.03, 23 Gordon Square

Student support & feedback hours: Tuesdays and Fridays, 12-1pm. Please book a slot here.

Student support & feedback hours are an opportunity for students to chat with their module tutors about their ideas, any support they might need with the module, and to go through feedback from their assessments. 

Qualifications

PhD Durham, 2020

Fellow of the Royal Historical Society