Tracey Billado, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor
Department of History

Tracey L. Billado, Ph.D. specializes in the history of the social, political and legal culture of the central Middle Ages in Europe, with a focus on conflict, violence, and dispute-processing in France. She also has an interest in palaeography, codicology and archival studies which she pursued as a graduate exchange student at the École Nationale des Chartes (Sorbonne) in Paris. Her current research focuses on the relationships among lay lords, ecclesiastical lords, and peasants in western France. Her current project is a study of what 11th-century monastic scribes called "evil customs" (taxes, tolls, peasant labor services, rights over justice). A close examination of these conflicts, she argues, provides a new and different picture of eleventh-century lordship and also illuminates the legal culture of a time often presumed to have been lawless and excessively violent. Not surprisingly, many of the classes that she has previously taught at Seton Hall, Cornell University, and Emory University have focused on medieval conflict, violence, and noble culture. She has also taught a course on cinematic representations of the Middle Ages, and a class on medieval heresy and persecution.