Guy Geltner

Guy Geltner is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Amsterdam. Mainly focused on Western Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries, my primary interests lie in the shifting boundaries of social order and disorder and the ways in which individuals, societies, and polities have sought to create, protect, and at times ignore them. Much of my work is based on records excavated from Italian city-state archives, which means that many of the questions I deal with concern an urban context. Both before and after the publication of my first book, The Medieval Prison: A Social History (2008), I have had a strong interest in the history, anthropology, and sociology of punishment, which led me to challenge some prevalent distinctions between modern and pre-modern practices. My most recent exploration in this field concerns the original creation of female wards in pre-modern prisons, and what that can tell us about the relations between gender, deviance, and punishment. My second monograph, The Making of Medieval Antifraternalism: Polemic, Violence, Deviance, and Remembrance (2012), is a study of opposition to the medieval mendicant orders and its role in mendicant memory. It explores resistance to friars in literature, church doctrine, civic law, and social action, and questions the traditional parallels drawn between the brethren's negative reception and other forms of coeval and later anticlericalism. Two further interests I am pursuing are the history of pre-modern public health, especially urban preventative measures, and the history of corruption in both civic and ecclesiastical milieus. Both topics are new to me as research fields, but I have begun publishing on the former, while the latter topic will be developed in the context of an FP7 project on anti-corruption funded by the European Commission.