My Research

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  My research focuses on medieval legal and environmental history, and has appeared in the Revue Historique, French Historical Studies, and Law and History Review. My current projects center on customary law, early property law, civil law jurisdiction, and community-based woodland management (or forest law). My work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Society for French Historical Studies, and UW’s Institute for Research on the Humanities. An essay on “The Transformation of Traditional Woodland Management” won the American Society for Environmental History’s Alice Hamilton prize for best article of 2009.

  Selected Publications:

• With Abigail P. Dowling, eds. Conservation’s Roots: Managing for Sustainability in Preindustrial Europe, 1100-1800. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. See here.
• “The Medieval Roots of Woodland Conservation: Northern France and Northwestern Europe, ca. 1100-1500.” In Conservation’s Roots: Managing for Sustainability in Preindustrial Europe, 1100-1800, ed. Abigail P. Dowling and Richard Keyser, 203-29. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020.
• “Wood for Burning: The Continuity of Woodland Management in Medieval and Early Modern France.” In Environmental History in the Making. Vol. I: Explaining, ed. Estelita Vaz, Cristina Joanaz de Melo, and Ligia M. Costa Pinto (Basel, Switzerland: Springer, 2017), 307-20. Available here.
• “Agreement Supersedes Law, and Love Judgment: Legal Flexibility and Amicable Settlement in Anglo-Norman England.” Law and History Review 30.1 (Feb., 2012): 37-88. Available here.
• “The Transformation of Traditional Woodland Management: Commercial Sylviculture in Medieval Champagne.” French Historical Studies 32 (2009): 353-84. Available here.
• “La transformation de l’échange des dons pieux: Montier-la-Celle, Champagne, 1100-1350.” Revue Historique 628 (2003): 793-816. Available here.

See also my academia.edu page.