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Overview

Dr Justine Trombley

Lecturer in European History, 1300-1500


Affiliations
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Lecturer in European History, 1300-1500 in the Department of History
Member of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 

Biography

PhD: University of St Andrews, 2014

2016-2017: Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, Canada

2018-2022: Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Department of History, University of Nottingham

I am a historian of late medieval religious culture, specialising in heresy and inquisition with a particular focus on the condemnation of heretical texts. My book, A Diabolical Voice: Heresy and the Reception of the Latin Mirror of Simple Souls in the Late Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 2023), presents a new reception history for the condemned mystical work The Mirror of Simple Souls. The Mirror was condemned as heretical in Paris in 1310 and its author, Marguerite Porete, was burned at the stake. My book demonstrates a continued trend of opposition directed at the Mirror long after this condemnation, centered specifically around its Latin translation, and which occurred simultaneously with an increasingly positive reception in other circles. Theologians, canon lawyers, inquisitors, and preachers continued to attack the Mirror as dangerously heretical, and entirely in ignorance of its initial condemnation.

My current research focuses on the condemnation of heretical texts in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries more broadly. I examine issues of procedure, knowledge, and memory of a condemnation and the impact these had on the circulation and suppression of condemned books. I am also interested in medieval perceptions of heretical books, and examine how the perception of books in relation to heresy developed and shifted over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and what this means for how we conceive of late medieval heresy as a whole.

Publications

Authored book

Chapter in book

Journal Article