My current research is following two tracks. The first concerns violence in medieval Europe. I am working on a book for Longmans Press that deals with the norms governing personal violence in the period between 600 and 1500 CE. I am aiming in particular to describe the changing pool of norms that people could draw on to legitimize or delegitimize violent acts. Drawing on current literature particularly in anthropology and political science on changes in social norms, I will track how the norms of violence competed with each other, and became dominant or disappeared, until those associated with a monopoly of violence by central authority began to prevail.
The second track concerns the use of written documents in Europe before the turn of the first millennium, particularly among lay people. This project reflects my ongoing interest in the sources for history themselves as objects of study. I am a charter member of a group of scholars, in North America, the UK, and Europe, who are studying evidence for the use of documents by lay people in a world in which writing has traditionally been seen as a preserve of the Christian clergy. I have already contributed one article that reaches positive conclusions about lay document use in my particular area (Europe north of the Alps in the eighth and ninth centuries) and have another in progress. The group intends to produce a jointly written book on the subject in the next few years.
Last updated: March 11, 2009 14:11
