Walter Simons

Professor of History
Office: 407 Carson Hall
Office Phone: (603) 646-2992
Fax: (603) 646-3353
Email: Walter.Simons@Dartmouth.edu
Personal Webpage:  http://www.dartmouth.edu/~wsimons/Walter Simons, Professor of History.html

Address:

• Department of History
  Dartmouth College
  6107 Carson Hall
  Hanover, NH 03755

Courses

• 3: The History of Europe in Medieval and Early Modern Times
• 7: Eco's Echoes: The Middle Ages in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Baudolino
• 42: Gender and European Society from Antiquity to the Reformation
• 43: European Intellectual and Cultural History, 400-1300
• 44: Medieval France, 400-1494
• 96: Topics in Medieval History

Growing up in Bruges, one of the most beautiful medieval cities in Europe, Walter Simons never had any doubt in his mind that he wanted to be a medievalist. He was trained as a historian in Belgium and at the Center for Medieval Studies in Poitiers, France, before receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Ghent, Bruges' arch-rival from the Middle Ages. A very medieval academic peregrination brought him from his native Flanders to the United States, which he finds not very medieval but all the more fascinating. His research is devoted to the social environment of religious movements in the high and late Middle Ages, gender, mysticism, urban history, history of the Low Countries, and historical methodology; additional interests are popular culture, art, and the two world wars of the twentieth century. He is the author, most recently, of Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001, paperback 2003) and editor, with Miri Rubin, of The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. IV: Christianity in Western Europe, c.1100-c.1500 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2009). He is currently writing a book on a thirteenth-century woman, Elizabeth of Spalbeek.