of Victoria
BA (McGill), MA, PhD (Berkeley)
Early Modern European History, Social and Cultural History, Criminal Justice, Gender History
Summer 2024: No office hours
Born and raised in Toronto, I have since lived in Switzerland, France, India, Japan and the United States. Along the way, I graduated with a B.A. from McGill University in 1990 and a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 1999. I began teaching at the University of Victoria in 2002.
UVic Expertise Database Profile
Books:
The Trial of Jeanne Catherine: Infanticide in Early Modern Geneva (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021).
Laughing Matters: Farce and the Making of Absolutism in France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).
Laughing Matters Secondary Bibliography *Winner of the 2008 Roland H. Bainton Book Prize for History/Theology awarded by the Sixteenth Century Society and shortlisted for the Wallace Ferguson Prize for best non-Canadian History Prize, Canadian Historical Association.
Edited Works:
Guest editor with Megan Armstrong of the forum “Communities and Religious Identity in the Early Modern Francophone World,” French Historical Studies 40:3 (2017): 381-473.
Recent Articles:
“She Said, He Said in a Seventeenth-Century Infanticide Trial,” in Making Stories in Early Modern Italy and Beyond: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth S. Cohen and Thomas V. Cohen. Edited by John Christopoulos and John Hunt. Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2024, 99-116.
“Turning a Blind Eye: Infanticide and Missing Babies in Seventeenth-century Geneva,” Law and History Review 39 no. 2 (May 2021): 255-276.
“Torture and Punishment in Reformation Geneva,” in Companion to the Reformation in Geneva. Edited by Jon Balserak. (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 322-344.
“Violence and Justice in Europe: Punishment, Torture and Execution,” Cambridge World History of Violence. Edited by Robert Antony, Stuart Carroll, Caroline Dodds Pennock. Vol. 3, ch. 20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, 389-407.
“Gender and the Prosecution of Adultery in Geneva, 1550-1700,” in Women’s Criminality in Europe, 1600-1914. Edited by Manon van de Heijden, Marion Pluskota and Sanne Muurling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, 91-113.
Spanish translation of 2017 “Consistories and Civil Authorities” as “Consistorios y los autoridades civiles” in Fe y castigo en la Europa del Antiguo Régimen. Translated by Doris Moreno. Edited by Gretchen Starr-Lebeau and Charles Parker. Madrid: Catedra, 2020, 88-99.
“Consistories and Civil Authorities,” in Judging Faith/Punishing Sin: Inquisitions and Consistories in the Early Modern World. Edited by Gretchen Starr-Lebeau and Charles Parker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, 66-76.
“Local Officials and Torture in Seventeenth-century Bordeaux,” in Social Relations, Politics and Power in Early Modern France. Robert Descimon and the Historian’s Craft. Edited by Barbara B. Diefendorf and Michael Wolfe. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2016, 61-86.
“Adultère, indices médicaux et recul de la torture à Genève (XVIIe siècle),” Genre et histoire 16 (Fall 2015).
“Calvinist Comedie and Conversion during the French Reformation: La comedie du Pape malade (1561) and La comedie du Monde malade et mal pense (1568),” in French Renaissance and Baroque Drama: Text, Performance and Theory. Edited by Michael Meere. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2015, 63-82.
“Rites of Torture in Reformation Geneva,” Past and Present (2012) n. 214, supplement 7, Ritual and Violence: Natalie Zemon Davis and Early Modern France, 197-219.
Topics include:
Justine Semmens, PhD “Sex Crime Appeals at the Parlement of Paris, 1565-1655”
Meghan Kort, MA, “The Girls Who Spoke for God: Vocation and Discernment in Seventeenth-Century France”
Axel Schoeber, PhD, “Gerard Roussel: An Irenic Religious Change Agent”
Caitlin Copage, MA, “The Violence of Innocents: Children in the Wars of Religion in France”
Lisa Kuncewicz, MA, “'In this Book There is Nothing of Ours': Women's Spiritual Biographies in Seventeenth-Century France"
Meaghan Trewin, MA, “Cuisine, Customs and Character : Culinary Tradition and Innovation in Eighteenth-Century France”
Axel Schoeber, MA, “The Aspiration of the Cercle de Meaux in the 1520s”
Sheena Sommers, MA, “Infanticide Trials at the Old Bailey”