We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2025 Schallek Fellowship is Jack McCart of the University of Toronto.

His research topic “The Material Cultures of Memory: Death, Patronage, and Self-Presentation in Later-Medieval London,” explores the types of self-presentation that were embedded in Londoners’ activities as patrons, donors, and benefactors. It is interested in questions of how medieval Londoners defined themselves as patrons and sought to shape the posthumous memory of their patronage. It considers here their material interventions, commemorative foundations, and the documentary strategies they used to establish and sustain them. Urban patronage, whether concentrated within the parish or ward or at ecclesiastical sites as prominent as Old St. Paul’s or Greyfriars London (which have attracted considerable scholarly attention), functioned both as an effort to secure the soul’s salvation and as a form of conspicuous social display. Methodologically, therefore, this study takes cues both from the extensive historiography of death and commemoration (in England as well as continental Europe) and more recent interest in the textual, material, and spatial strategies of demarcating status and identity within premodern urban environments. By approaching Londoners’ patronage through the lens of self-presentation and foregrounding its financial bases, it draws attention to how patrons’ and benefactors’ legacies were, then as now, often carefully and deliberately shaped.

Jack McCart is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies. His research explores trade, testamentary pratice, and material culture in England, c. 1200–1500. He is particularly interested in death and commemoration, commercial and credit networks, and the patronage and provenence of material objects and manuscripts. Forthcoming material explores these themes within London and its orbit. His research has been supported previously by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Toronto, most recently through the John Munro Doctoral Fellowship in Medieval Economic History.