Dr Hannah Skoda
I work on the cultural and social history of the later Middle Ages.
I blog about what I do at ideasnowandthen.blogspot.co.uk and https://historyformychildren.com/
My interests lie principally in the social and cultural history of the later Middle Ages: hitherto, I have focused mainly on France, but I am now working comparatively with material from late medieval England, Italy and Germany. I am particularly interested in constructions of deviance; nostalgia; and legalism in this period, and enjoy collaborations with anthropologists and literary scholars.
Research Interests
- History of nostalgia
- History of misbehaviour, particularly amongst medieval students
- History of late medieval slavery
My first book focused on popular violence in later medieval northern France. I worked on the interconnections between different forms of violence, from tavern brawls to domestic violence to urban uprisings, and looked at legal and cultural constructions of 'deviance', and the role of emotions in provoking outbursts of brutality.
My current research focuses on nostalgia in the later Middle Ages. The fourteenth century is often labelled as a century of catastrophe. A fairer assessment describes profound socio-economic, cultural and political changes which had the potential to transform ways of thinking. Many contemporaries responded in profoundly nostalgic terms, harking back to ‘the good old days’, whether the time of their grandparents, or a more nebulous lost golden age. My work examines nostalgia across the social spectrum. Recent anthropologists and philosophers highlight the counter-intuitively hopeful aspect of such an attitude. In many ways, a cross-cultural concept, it was articulated in powerful, lyrical and often subversive ways in the fourteenth century.
I also work on the misbehaviour of fifteenth-century students at the universities of Oxford, Paris and Heidelberg. 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. The source material ranges from student poems and letters, to sermons and legal material.
Violence and conflict are obviously of great contemporary relevance, as well as essential to an understanding of the complexities of medieval society. Disentangling the relationships between what people did, what they said they did, and what other people said about these actions is extremely challenging, but can substantially deepen and nuance our understanding.
Further interests include Joan of Arc's emotional world; the history of sufficiency; and the legalism of property and ownership, particularly in the context of medieval slavery. Late medieval slavery is the more unsettling and often un-acknowledged underside of the Renaissance: I am interested in recovering the stories and experiences of slaves. Their humanity continues to resonate across the centuries through the surviving legal material.
Featured Publications
Medieval Violence: Physical Brutality in Northern France, 1270-1330 (Oxford Historical Monographs) (Oxford University Press, 2012)
Current DPhil Students
Teaching
Masters students supervision in late medieval social and cultural history
I am keen to supervise graduate students researching the social and cultural history of later medieval Europe, particularly England, France and Germany, with the history of education and of conflict, history of nostalgia, and history of slavery forming areas of special interest.
I currently teach:
Prelims |
FHS |
Gen II. Approaches | Gen VI and VII |
HBI II and III | HBI II and III |
OSS Early Gothic France | Disciplines |
Crime and Punishment | SS Joan of Arc |
FSS Crusades and Flanders | |
Italy in the Quattrocento |
Publications
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Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1750, by Michelle A. McKinley
June 2018|Journal article|The English Historical Review -
Introduction
January 2018|Chapter|Legalism Property and Ownership"The book is in many ways the product of wonderfully stimulating weekly discussions and papers at the Oxford Legalism seminar, now in its ninth year .Law -
Introduction
January 2018|Chapter<p>Beginning with theories of absolute property, this introduction considers the merits of a more composite view, namely the ‘bundle of rights’ concept. Anthropologists discuss the relationships between people at the heart of property regimes, but personhood must also be seen as embedded in the things owned. The ideas of rules and control are key, and the concept of control at a distance provides useful conceptual purchase. Property is a complex idea to articulate, and natural law, religious and political frameworks of property are interwoven. Moreover, property is shaped by economic prerogatives, and its management shapes the relationship between the individual and the community, and the preservation of common resources. Property is, then, thoroughly embedded in social contexts, which in turn can render property highly unstable and contingent. It is precisely because of these kinds of tensions that legalism is so often invoked in order to manage and even create property relations.</p> -
Legalism
January 2018|c-book<p>In this volume, ownership is defined as the simple fact of being able to describe something as ‘mine’ or ‘yours’, and property is distinguished as the discursive field which allows the articulation of attendant rights, relationships and obligations. Property is often articulated through legalism as way of thinking which appeals to rules and to generalising concepts as a way of understanding, responding to, and managing the world around one. An Aristotelian perspective suggests that ownership is the natural state of things and a prerequisite of a true sense of self. An alternative perspective from legal theory puts law at the heart of the origins of property. However, both these points of view are problematic in a wider context, the latter because it rests heavily on Roman law. Anthropological and historical studies enable us to interrogate these assumptions. The articles here, ranging from Roman provinces to modern-day piracy in Somalia, address questions such as: How are legal property regimes intertwined with economic, moral-ethical, and political prerogatives? How far do the assumptions of western philosophical tradition explain property and ownership in other societies? Is the ‘bundle of rights’ a useful way to think about property? How does legalism negotiate property relationships and interests between communities and individuals? How does the legalism of property respond to the temporalities and materialities of the objects owned? How are property regimes managed by states, and what kinds of conflicts are thus generated?</p> -
People as Property in Medieval Dubrovnik
January 2018|Chapter<p>This article addresses a particularly troubling form of property: slavery in fifteenth-century Dubrovnik. The practice of slavery depended upon law: its articulation lay at the intersection of the Roman law of the <italic>ius commune</italic>, canon law, local customary and statute law, and natural law. The texture of these different legalistic frameworks provided ways of articulating the problems, discursive and ethical, of treating people as property. The essay explores these tensions by looking at slave contracts, and practices of manumission: slaves could purchase their freedom with their own property (<italic>peculium</italic>). Both manumission and <italic>peculium</italic> were inflected by <italic>favor libertatis</italic>, the acknowledgement that the rigidity of law was a problematic way to deal with people. Further tensions are explored in the context of the criminal liability of slaves. Finally, the essay turns to the range of contracts from outright slavery to indentured labour, and asks how this spectrum problematizes concepts of property.</p>