Medieval History and Psychology

Medieval history and psychology is an unusual pairing that brings together the study of the distant human past with the scientific investigation of the human mind. Medieval history examines the societies, cultures, religions, and political formations of Europe and the wider world roughly between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, a period of a thousand years in which the world was transformed by the spread of Christianity and Islam, the development of feudal structures, the Crusades, plague, the emergence of universities, and the early movements that would eventually give rise to modernity. Psychology, meanwhile, asks what is constant in human psychology across time, examining perception, cognition, motivation, and behaviour through empirical methods.

At St Andrews this four-year full-time programme includes a year abroad. The psychology component introduces you to a broad range of areas studied by psychologists, grounding you in the theoretical foundations and modern developments of the discipline, with emphasis on practical classes and research techniques from the start. The medieval history component develops your ability to read, interpret, and analyse historical sources, to construct arguments from evidence, and to place events and cultures in their broader contexts.

The combination may seem to connect two very different kinds of knowledge, but the pairing reflects a genuine intellectual point: understanding what human beings are requires both the long view that history provides and the rigorous investigation of psychological processes that science enables.

Graduates find careers in education, research, heritage and museums, social care, clinical and educational psychology (with further training), journalism, policy analysis, and the civil service. The psychological training provides the Graduate Basis for Chartership with the British Psychological Society, opening routes to postgraduate professional training. Many graduates also continue to postgraduate research in psychology, medieval studies, or related fields, or pursue professional training in teaching, social work, or clinical psychology.