Frances Andrews is a historian of medieval Europe, with a particular focus on the history of Italy and of medieval religion. Her previous research has ranged from heresy and religious orders to the nature of urban government, from medieval Rome and the career of a revival preacher (Venturino da Bergamo), to the influence of Joachim of Fiore. More recently she has worked on the experience of voluntary recluses, modern and medieval (involving illuminating conversations with long-term prisoners in Terni and Viterbo) and has published a brief essay designed to achieve a more inclusive account of medieval ‘urban religion’. At present she is completing a study of the paid employment of professed religious by the communal governments of late medieval Italy. She teaches and supervises on topics relating to urban (particularly communal) history, religious life, the papacy, liturgy, sermons, the history and archaeology of medieval Rome, and the cultural history of inclusion and exclusion, sexuality and emotions.

Former doctoral students

• Miriam Buncombe (co-supervised with Prof Bettina Bildhauer), The Uses of Ritualized Acts in late Medieval Mystical Texts
• Guy Fassler, Conflict management on the streets in the fourteenth century: a case study of Bologna in context
• Emily E. Graham, The patronage of the Spiritual Franciscans : the roles of the Orsini and Colonna cardinals, key lay patrons and their patronage networks
• Chantal Gustaw (co-supervised with Dr Robert Wilson), Reading Paul and Dante in the Fourteenth Century
• Abigail Hartman, The Cellites and their Death Charity in the Later Middle Ages
• Robert Houghton (co-supervised with Prof Simon Maclean), Representations of collective action in Mantua and Parma, c. 1000-c.1120
• Catriona Howie, Abbatial elections: the case of the Loire Valley in the eleventh century / Catriona 
• Gillian Jack (co-supervised with Dr Emily Michelson), 
  Sex, salvation, and the city : the monastery of Sant'Elisabetta delle Convertite as a civic institution in Florence, 1329-1627
• Holger Kaasik, Patterns of commemoration in central Italy : manuscript calendars and social time in Perugia, Assisi and Gubbio, c. 1100–1500
• Áron Kecskés (co-supervised with Prof Justine Firnhaber-Baker) Lordship in the eastern Campania, c. 1053-1127 
• Peter King, A Late Mediaeval Confession Manual, its Author and Context
• Kimberley-Joy Knight, The Gift of Tears in the Late Middle Ages
• Alessia Meneghin, The Second-hand Clothing and Rag-trade in Late Medieval Prato and Florence
• Angela Montford, Health, Sickness, Medicine and the Friars in the 13th and 14th Centuries
• Hailey OHarrow (co-supervised with Dr Vicky Turner) Emotional Patterns in 12th- and 13th- Century Chansons de Geste and Monastic Sources
• Jamie Page (co-supervised with Prof Bettina Bildhauer) Prostitutes as Testifying Subjects in Late Mediaeval Germany
• Anna Peterson (co-supervised with Prof Justine Firnhaber-Baker), Hospitals and Leprosaria in 13^th-century Narbonne and Siena
• Eleonora Rava (informal co-tutelle, University of Siena-Arezzo): Pisan wills
• Justine Trombley (co-supervised with Prof Chris Given-Wilson), The Latin Manuscripts of Marguerite Porete’s Mirror
• Enrico Veneziani, The ecclesiology of the papacy of Honorius II (1124-1130), with a preliminary calendar of letters 
• Stefan Visnjevac, Preachers and governance in fifteenth-century Italian towns : a comparative investigation of three case studies
• Steven Watts, 'Let us run in love together' : Master Jordan of Saxony (d. 1237) and the participation of women in the religious life of the Order of Preachers

Mediaeval Italy (11th to 15th centuries); medieval religion; doubt; urban history; medieval Rome; manuscripts, religious, social and ecclesiastical history