Perth Charterhouse Contributors

Dr Lucy Dean

• email: lucy.dean@uhi.ac.uk

Lucy Dean is a senior lecturer at the Centre for History at UHI, focusing on late medieval and early modern Scotland and its connections to Europe. Her research, publications and teaching centre on interconnected themes and methods of ritual, ceremony, kingship, power and authority, courtly display, material culture, gender (particularly masculinity), the life cycle and public history. Her first monograph, Death and the Royal Succession in Scotland, c.  1214–1543: Ritual, Ceremony and Power was published in July 2024. She co-edited Medieval and Early Modern Representations of Authority in Scotland and the British Isles (2016), The Routledge History of Monarchy (2019), and is currently co-editing a special issue of Royal Studies Journal on ‘Material Culture and Built Heritage: Manifestations of Scotland’s Royal Past, Present and Future’ (2025) as well as contributing to a new Routledge textbook on Exploring Monarchy in Medieval Europe. 

She is co-investigator on the Perth Charterhouse Project, which she has been involved with since its inception in 2016, and has worked in collaboration with Culture, Perth and Kinross on a variety of activities in association with the project. In particular, she has been working with the Perth and Kinross archive team, based in the AK Bell Library in Perth, to support their mission to widen participation and engagement with their collections. This has included running skills workshops to empower people and break down barrier to using medieval materials and collaborating on the ‘From Foundations to Echoes in the Records: The Charterhouse and its place in Perth’ Exhibition to accompany the Christ’s Poor Men: Perth’s Charterhouse of the Vale of Vertu and the History, Archaeology and Culture of the Carthusian Order in Medieval Britain Symposium (May 2022). She received a Geoffrey Barrow Award (2017) to support research into the King James VI Hospital Records (housed at the National Records of Scotland), which contain a significant number of Charterhouse records, and supported the archives in applying for and hosting an SGSAH intern to work on the incorporated guilds records. She was also on the advisory committee for the reinterpretation of the Stone of Destiny at the new Perth Museum, and has also collaborated with Historic Environment Scotland, Royal Collections Trust and National Museums of Scotland. 

Richard Oram

• email: r.d.oram@stir.ac.uk

Richard Oram is Professor of Medieval and Environmental History at the University of Stirling.  A graduate of the University of St Andrews (MA (Hons) Medieval History with Archaeology and PhD Medieval History), he joined the University of Stirling in 2002.  His research focuses on secular and ecclesiastical lordship and architecture in the medieval and early renaissance periods, on historic climate change and subsistence crises in the North Atlantic region, and on the social and cultural responses to epidemic disease in the Middle Ages.  He has published widely on issues of land, lordship and environment, cultural resilience and climate-driven change in late medieval Scotland, on energy supply crises and fuel transitions in the period c.1150-c.1850, and on the institutions of the Church and church architecture in pre-Reformation.  He is a former council-member of the Historic Environment Advisory Council for Scotland and is now a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Museums of Scotland. 

He has been co-investigator on the Charterhouse Project since its inception in 2016 and has been proactive in driving forward local collaborations with Culture Perth and Kinross, Perth and Kinross Council, Peth and Kinross Heritage Trust and others. He has undertaken numerous commissioned projects for Historic Environment Scotland on historic sites, and was instrumental in the development of the Corpus of Scottish Medieval Parish Churches database. 

Dr Gavin Lindsay

Dr Gavin J Lindsay (PhD) is a freelance consultant archaeologist with almost 20 years professional, academic and voluntary experience in the archaeology, museums and heritage sector. Trading as All Ages, he specialises in delivering archaeological education, interpretation and research projects to both domestic and international clients that have included the US National Park Service and National Geographic. He specialises in community-based approaches and operates across the spectrum of Scottish archaeology but is most at home working with the material legacies of conflict, notably from the Roman period and World War Two. 

Gavin grew up and was primarily educated in Perth where his interest in archaeology was first ignited. Since then he has studied archaeology at the University of Durham (BA), the University of the Highlands and Islands (MA), and University of Aberdeen (PhD) conducting research on islands across the globe from the Atlantic cliffs of Orkney to the Pacific jungle of Peleliu. Over the years Gavin has also been an employee of Perthshire-based archaeology and heritage organisations such as Perth and Kinross Heritage Trust, Alder Archaeology and the Scottish Crannog Centre. Employers from further afield include Orkney Museums, the Orkney Research Centre for Archaeology, Island of Hoy Development Trust and Aberdeen City Council. Gavin lives in Perthshire with his wife and two young sons.