Dr Hannah Skoda

Fellow and Tutor in Medieval History

St John's College

01865 (2)87187

hannah.skoda@sjc.ox.ac.uk

I work on the cultural and social history of the later Middle Ages.

I blog about what I do at ideasnowandthen.blogspot.co.uk

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 and Germany. I am particularly interested in constructions of deviance; nostalgia; and legalism in this period, and enjoy collaborations with anthropologists and literary scholars.

I am on research leave until September 2017, funded by a Leverhulme Prize.

See page on St John's College website

See personal blog

Medieval Violence: Physical Brutality in Northern France, 1270-1330 (Oxford Historical Monographs) (Oxford University Press, 2012)

Medieval Violence provides a detailed analysis of the practice of medieval brutality, focusing on a thriving region of northern France in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. It examines how violence was conceptualised in this period, and uses this framework to investigate street violence, tavern brawls, urban rebellions, student misbehaviour, and domestic violence. The interactions between these various forms of violence are examined in order to demonstrate the complex and communicative nature of medieval brutality. What is often dismissed as dysfunctional behaviour is shown to have been highly strategic and socially integral. Violence was a performance, dependent upon the spaces in which it took place. Indeed, brutality was contingent upon social and cultural structures. At the same time, the common stereotype of the thoughtlessly brutal Middle Ages is challenged, as attitudes towards violence are revealed to have been complex, troubled, and ambivalent. Whether violence could function effectively as a form of communication which could order and harmonise society, or whether it inevitably degenerated into chaotic disorder where meaning was multivalent and incomprehensible, remained a matter of ongoing debate in a variety of contexts. Using a variety of source material, including legal records, popular literature, and sermons, Hannah Skoda explores experiences of, and attitudes towards, violence, and highlights profound contemporary ambiguity concerning its nature and legitimacy.

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 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.

I am also writing a book about the development of something akin to a sense of nostalgia in the later Middle Ages. A variety of social groups engaged with the trope of harking back to a golden age as a way of processing their reactions to the rapid social, political and economic changes which characterise the period.

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.

I am currently on research leave funded by a Leverhulme prize.

Legalism: Property and Ownership

2018
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Book

© The several contributors 2017. 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?.
Literarische Texte und Darstellungen

2018
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Chapter
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Universitäre Gelehrtenkultur vom 13.–16. Jahrhundert
People as property in medieval Dubrovnik

2018
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Chapter
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Legalism: Property and Ownership

© Hannah Skoda, 2017. 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 ius commune, 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 (peculium). Both manumission and peculium were inflected by favor libertatis, 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.
Anger in Inferno and Purgatorio

2017
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Chapter
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Dante and the Seven Deadly Sins

CONTENTS: John Took (U College London), Dante, pride and the gentle dialectic of love; Daragh O'Connell (UCC), Envy at the court of vice; Stefano Cracolici (U Durham), Dante on wrath; Hannah Skoda (St John's College, Oxford), Anger in ...

Literary Criticism
Collective violence and popular justice in the later Middle Ages

2017
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Chapter
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Global Lynching and Collective Violence Volume 1: Asia, Africa, and the Middle East

In the first book of a two-volume study, Michael J. Pfeifer collects essays that look at lynching and related forms of collective violence in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
Collective violence and popular justice in the later middle ages

2017
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Chapter
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Global Lynching and Collective Violence: Volume 2: The Americas and Europe
Collective Violence in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Oxford

2017
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Chapter
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Student Revolt, City, and Society in Europe From the Middle Ages to the Present

This edited collection studies the role of students as a critical mass within their urban context and society through examples of student revolts from the foundation period of universities in the Middle Ages until today, covering the whole ...

City and town life
Collective violence in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century oxford

2017
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Chapter
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Student Revolt, City, and Society in Europe: From the Middle Ages to the Present
Conflict, Friction and Contact in Medieval Oxford

2016
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Chapter
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Defining and Redefining Space in the English-Speaking World Contacts, Frictions, Clashes

Focusing on the material conditions of such contacts, frictions, and clashes, this volume particularly explores their essentially spatial nature, highlighting the stakes of such definitions and redefinitions of space.
Heresy, Inquisition and Life Cycle in Medieval Languedoc

2015
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Journal article
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ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW

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

Period:

Medieval

Region:

Specialism:

Faculty / Department:

Faculty of History

Supervision:

College:

St John's College

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Medieval Violence: Physical Brutality in Northern France, 1270-1330 (Oxford Historical Monographs) (Oxford University Press, 2012)

Lorenzo Caravaggi

Pablo Gonzalez Martin

Lucia Akard

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Dr Hannah Skoda

All

Academics

Researchers

Doctoral Students

Members and Associate Members

Administrative Staff

Medieval Violence: Physical Brutality in Northern France, 1270-1330 (Oxford Historical Monographs) (Oxford University Press, 2012)

Legalism: Property and Ownership

Literarische Texte und Darstellungen

People as property in medieval Dubrovnik

Anger in Inferno and Purgatorio

Collective violence and popular justice in the later Middle Ages

Collective violence and popular justice in the later middle ages

Collective Violence in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Oxford

Collective violence in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century oxford

Conflict, Friction and Contact in Medieval Oxford

Heresy, Inquisition and Life Cycle in Medieval Languedoc

Current DPhil Students

Lorenzo Caravaggi

Pablo Gonzalez Martin

Lucia Akard