Dr Eliza Hartrich
Late Medieval History (c. 1300-c. 1500)

Profile

Biography

BA (Hons) Modern History, Oxford
MA Medieval History, Durham
DPhil History, Oxford

Dr Hartrich is Lecturer in Late Medieval History (c. 1300-c. 1500). Before joining York in 2023, she was a Scouloudi Doctoral Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, a Fellow-by-Examination at Magdalen College Oxford, and a Lecturer at the University of Sheffield and University of East Anglia.

Eliza's research focuses on towns in the British Isles during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. More broadly, she is interested in interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to urbanism, rebellion, networks, archives, and empire.

Research

Overview

Eliza is a historian of later medieval towns. She explores the institutions and complex relationships engendered by the concentration of people in urban areas, and investigates the ways in which urban social and political structures contributed to the functioning of larger 'states'. Eliza's first monograph, Politics and the Urban Sector in Fifteenth-Century England, 1413-1471 (OUP, 2019), created a new model for assessing the impact of a collective 'urban sector' on English politics during the Wars of the Roses era. This research prompted further publications on the application of Social Network Analysis (SNA) and other contemporary social science theories to medieval records. In addition, Eliza has published a number of articles that examine interactions between urban and royal government in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, including pieces on rebellions, councils, charters, and rituals.

Eliza is a devotee of local archives, and her work explores how processes of record-making and record-keeping helped to structure political hierarchies in the later Middle Ages. She has been involved in projects on comparative histories of urban record-keeping in France, Scotland, and Germany, as well as being a Council Member of the Norfolk Record Society. She is keenly interested in any research related to the social history of the archive and the materiality of historical records.

Eliza is now working on a new research project, entitled 'An Urban Empire: Towns of the English Empire and the Practice of Colonial Politics, 1370-1500', which focuses on towns under English control in late medieval Ireland, Wales, and France. She is looking at the ways in which people used urban citizenship to define ethnicity and gender norms during a period of waning English imperial power. In drawing attention to the role of towns and local institutions in a medieval empire, Eliza seeks to contribute to the study of historical empires, which typically focus on the ancient and modern periods. 

Teaching

Undergraduate

An example of modules taught:

• HIS00125I Historical Thinking
• HIS00172I Ireland and Wales, c. 1300-1500: Ethnicity and Identity during the ‘Ebb-Tide’ of English Rule
• HIS00146H Empires

Postgraduate

An example of modules taught:

• HIS00178M All the City’s a Stage? Performance and Ritual in Late Medieval Europe