University of Oxford

Post-Doc, History

Junior Research Fellow

Merton College

Thesis Title: 'Popular Violence in Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Century France' (now completed)

Advisors: Dr. Malcolm Vale
Dr. Gervase Rosser

About

I am currently working on a book based on material from my doctoral thesis which examined outbreaks of popular violence in late thirteenth and early fourteenth-century Paris and Picardy.  It explores how various types of illicit violence functioned as forms of communication, examining how these categories of violence interacted with each other, with other forms of officially sanctioned violence, military, judicial or religious, and with their cultural and social context.  The methodology is multi-faceted, involving examination of legal, literary, hagiographical, and theological sources, and exploring both how violence was carried out, and how it was received (revealed in lexical choices, literary topoi, legal disputes, hagiographical motifs, and so on).  Particular attention is paid to use of place and time; precise gestures; the relationship between the way acts of violence were perpetrated, and the way they were stereotyped by observers; use of individuals or groups, locals or strangers, children or adults; and forms of theatricality and play.

I am also working on fifteenth-century students at the universities of Oxford, Paris and Heidelberg: I am particularly interested in their misbehaviour.  Drawing on criminological models, my research examines the relationship between the negative stereotypes imposed upon students by a variety of commentators and observers, and the ways in which the students negotiated those stereotypes in their actual misbehaviour.

Further research interests include
- representations of violence in thirteenth century French literature
- moralities of violence in Dante's Commedia
- late medieval constructions of disability.
- practices of clothing and giving at the Court of Artois in the early fourteenth century
- poetic societies in medieval France

Contact Information

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Telephone: 07889 097 655