Professor Trevor Dean

 

Job Title: Assistant Dean Email Address: T.Dean@roehampton.ac.uk

The history of my research

Main areas of research
• the social and political history of the princely state of Ferrara in the later Middle Ages
• the history of crime and justice in the same period

Ferrara
This was my doctoral research, under the supervision of Philip Jones, and resulted in my first book (Land and Power, OUP). A number shorter pieces on Ferrarese history followed. The latest of these - a study of Ferrarese chronicle-writing - was published in 2006 (in Phaeton's Children, ed. Looney & Shemek).

Crime and justice
With the assistance of research fellowships from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, I have completed several projects on crime and criminal justice, first in Ferrara, then in the neighbouring city of Bologna, and eventually more widely in Italy and Europe. To date, this work has produced three books, one co-edited collection (Crime, Society and the Law ) and numerous papers, on revenge, insult, domestic violence, theft, fornication and pacification.

My source-book, The Towns on Italy in the Later Middle Ages was published by Manchester University Press in 2000.

I am now working on three projects, including a cultural history of the weather in later medieval Italy. I organised a panel on this at the Society of Renaissance Studies conference, Dublin 2008.

My obituary of Philip Jones can be read here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/philip-jones-476531.html

I am one of the co-organisers of the research seminar on late-medieval
and early modern Italy at the Institute of Historical Research (University of London). For the latest programme of seminars, please click here: http://www.history.ac.uk/ihrseminars/seminar.php?series=128

We are always pleased to hear from potential speakers with suggestions for seminar papers.

Selective list of publications:

Land and Power in late medieval Ferrara: The Rule of the Este
1350-1450 (Cambridge: CUP, 1987)

Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy, ed. T. Dean and
K. Lowe (Cambridge: CUP, 1994)

'The Courts', Journal of Modern History Supplement, 67 (1995),
pp. 136-51

Clean Hands and Rough Justice: An Investigating Magistrate in
Renaissance Italy (with D.S. Chambers), (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1997)

'Marriage and mutilation: vendetta in late-medieval Italy', Past &
Present, 157 (Nov. 1997), pp. 3-36

'Fathers and daughters: marriage laws and marriage disputes in Bologna
and Italy, 1200-1500', in Marriage in Italy: 1300-1650, edited
with Kate Lowe (Cambridge: CUP, 1998)

Crime in Medieval Europe (Longman, 2001)

‘Wealth distribution and litigation in the medieval Italian countryside: Castel San Pietro, Bologna, 1385’ Continuity & Change, 17 (2002), pp. 333-50

‘Domestic violence in late-medieval Bologna’, Renaissance Studies, 18 (2004), pp. 1-17

‘Gender and insult in an Italian city: Bologna in the later Middle Ages’, Social History, 29 (2004), pp. 217-31

Crime and Criminal Justice in Late Medieval Italy, CUP 2007

'Theft and gender in late medieval Bologna', Gender and History, 20 (2008), pp. 399-415

The Italian City-Republics, with Daniel Waley, 4th edition, Longman 2010, 235pp.

'Philip James Jones 1921-2006', Proceedings of the British Academy, 161 (2009), pp. 207-31

Teaching Expertise

My teaching expertise falls into two distinct, but related, areas:

1. Ancient history and literature, for the BA in Classical Civilisation

2. Late medieval and Renaissance history for the BA in History and the MA in Historical Research.