Hannah Skoda
Associate Professor of Medieval History, University of Oxford
I am an associate professor of medieval history at St John's College, University of Oxford. I research the social and cultural history of the later Middle Ages and am particularly interested in the ways in which people respond to challenges and suffering: oppression, violence and extreme change. I am a 2014 Philip Leverhulme Prize winner. My research interests are wide; I have written on violence, slavery, ideas of sufficiency in the Middle Ages, Dante, medieval students, law, Joan of Arc and medieval saints.
EXPs by Hannah Skoda
We very often tend to miss out this period in the 14th and 15th centuries, when huge numbers of people were being trafficked around the Mediterranean and living stories of extraordinary suffering and often extraordinary resilience as well.
It is not surprising that we would see a wave of nostalgia in the 14th century. It is a century of a whole series of cataclysmic events, but more than this, it is also a century in which the pace of change seems to accelerate beyond recognition.
In the Middle Ages, motherhood is seen in straightforwardly biological terms. Once one starts to dig a little deeper, it very quickly becomes a lot more interesting than that.