Dr Hannah Skoda
Dr Hannah Skoda
Tutorial Fellow in History
Email: Hannah Skoda
Teaching
I teach late medieval history, both British and European. As well as the outline papers for this period, I cover more specialised areas based on close examination of primary source material. These include a special subject on Joan of Arc, an art-historical further subject on Flanders and Italy in the fifteenth century, and optional subjects on crime and social control in later medieval England, and on cultural and political developments in early Gothic France.
I am keen to supervise graduate students researching the social and cultural history of later medieval Europe, particularly France and Germany, with the history of education and of conflict forming areas of special interest.
Research
My own research focuses on popular violence in later medieval northern France. I work on the interconnections between different forms of violence, from tavern brawls to domestic violence to urban uprisings, and look at legal and cultural constructions of ‘deviance’, and the role of emotions in provoking outbursts of brutality.
My other strand of 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.
Publications
I am currently completing a book on violence in later medieval France for Oxford University Press. Other publications include:
- ‘Violent Discipline or Disciplining Violence? Domestic Violence in Late Thirteenth- and Early Fourteenth-Century France’, Cultural and Social History Journal, 2009
- ‘Representations of disability in the thirteenth-century Miracles de Saint Louis’ in Joshua Eyler, ed., Essays on Disability in the Middle Ages (Ashgate, 2010)
- ‘Anger in Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio’, in John Barnes, ed., Dante and the Emotions (University College, Dublin), forthcoming.
- ‘Differentiation or Destruction? The Effects of Violence on Human and Social Bodies in Dante’s Commedia’, in John Barnes, ed., War in Dante (University College, Dublin), forthcoming.
