Patrick Lantschner

Christ Church

Supervisors: Dr Malcolm Vale and Dr Gervase Rosser

Thesis title:
The Logic of Political Conflict in the Late Middle Ages:
A Comparative Study of Urban Conflicts in Northern
France and Italy, c.1370–1440

College webpage

Research Interests

I am principally interested in two questions: firstly, how the polycentric framework of medieval politics shaped political ideas, cultures and processes; secondly, the extent to which different European polities shared common political, social and cultural histories.

For my doctorate I am working on urban political conflict in the late Middle Ages, a subject that is closely bound up with both these questions. I compare political conflict in the most urbanised regions of late medieval Europe, Northern France and Italy, and I am investigating to what degree the logic of political conflict was inscribed in the persistent pluralism of political institutions. My initial findings are that the meaning of political conflict was derived from a pluralism of legitimating norms, while coalitions of political actors crucially relied on the infrastructural support derived from multiple jurisdictional power bases both inside cities (like guilds, parishes or ecclesiastical institutions) and outside cities (like contending outside powers). I have also found that different configurations of political institutions gave rise to different cultures of conflict in late medieval cities, and I am presently working on how to reconsider the structural bases of politics in this light.

Projects

I am currently involved in co-organising a conference entitled ‘Contact and Exchange in Late Medieval Europe’ to honour the retirement of Malcolm Vale. I also collaborate with a team of historians and anthropologists of an interdisciplinary reading group on custom and non-state law.

Publications

‘The “Ciompi Revolution” Constructed: Modern Historians and the Nineteenth-Century Paradigm of Revolution’, Annali di Storia di Firenze (4, 2009), pp. 275–295