Areas of expertise: medieval and early modern Europe; history of emotions; legal history; Middle English literature; gender and sexuality; medievalism; love.
Email: Clare.Davidson@acu.edu.au
Location: ACU Melbourne Campus
ORCID ID: 0000-0001-9581-3618
Clare Davidson is a cultural and legal historian of late medieval and early modern Europe, and its reception in the British Empire and modern Australia. Her monograph Love in Late Medieval England (contracted with Manchester University Press) revises the significance of romantic love, desire, and sexuality in fourteenth-century England by recontextualising emotional statements found within medieval law and literature. Her current research examines the history of analytical traditions and institutions, specifically in medieval and early modern literary and legal culture, and the Australian reception of English law.
Clare has published articles and chapters and edited multiple volumes and journals, including The Global Middle Ages, the third volume of A Cultural History of Gender (Bloomsbury, 2026); Queens, Queenship and Natural Resource Management in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1800 with Professor Susan Broomhall (Routledge, 2025); and a special issue of History Australia focused on gender and law in Australia and New Zealand with Dr Jessica Lake. Clare has contributed research to criminal law reform and public advocacy initiatives. She is currently editing the Research Handbook on the Legal History of Family Law with Dr Henry Kha for Edward Elgar Publishing.
Clare was previously a Research Associate on the ARC Discovery Project ‘A History of Early Modern Natural Resource Management’ led by Professor Susan Broomhall in the Gender and Women’s History Research Centre. Her research focused on the relationship between cultural ideas of gendered status and the history of land law and corporate personality. She was also an Associate Investigator at The University of Western Australia at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, where she developed her work on love and desire in late medieval England.
Publications
Books
- Love in Late Medieval England (under contract, Manchester: Manchester University Press).
Edited Books
- Research Handbook on the Legal History of Family Law. Edited with Henry Kha (under contract, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing).
- The Global Middle Ages, Volume Three in A Cultural History of Gender, general ed. Susan Broomhall (in production, London: Bloomsbury, 2026).
- Queens, Queenship and Natural Resource Management in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1800. Edited with Susan Broomhall. New York: Routledge, 2025.
Edited Journals
- Special Issue of History Australia: ‘Regulating Gender: New Histories of Women and Law in Australia and New Zealand.’ 21.3 (2024). Edited with Jessica Lake.
Articles
- ‘Cultivation and commodification: regulating gendered status and settler colonial title to land.’ Australian Historical Studies 56.2 (2025): 1–18.
- With Arlie Loughnan and Sarah Murray, ‘Serving Those Who Serve: A Critical Assessment of the Need for a Veterans’ Treatment Court or List in Australia.’ Current Issues in Criminal Justice 34.2 (2022): 119–135.
- ‘Chaucerian Guilt and A Treatise on the Astrolabe.’ The Chaucer Review. Special Issue: The Ethical Challenges of Chaucerian Scholarship in the 21st Century. 56.4 (2021): 341–359.
- ‘Reading in bed with Troilus and Criseyde.’ The Chaucer Review 55.2 (2020): 147–170.
Chapters
- “Queen Elizabeth’s Mineral Grants: How Corporate Monarchy and Corporate Mining Structured Natural Resource Policy in Sixteenth‐Century England and Beyond” in Queenship and Natural Resource Management in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1800, ed. Broomhall and Davidson, 197–218. New York: Routledge, 2025.
- With Susan Broomhall, “Queens, Queenship, and Natural Resource Management in a More-than-Human Premodern World” in Queenship and Natural Resource Management in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1800, ed. Broomhall and Davidson, 1–67. New York: Routledge, 2025.
- “‘For wele or woo’: lyrical negotiations of the Middle English heart” in The Feeling Heart in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Meaning, Embodiment and Making, ed. Katie Barclay and Bronwyn Reddan, 151–173. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2019.
Reports
- With Arlie Loughnan, ‘Australia’ in Jenny Earle and Katy Swaine Williams, ed. Making self-defence accessible to victims of domestic abuse who use force against their abuser: Learning from reforms in Canada, New Zealand and Australia. United Kingdom: Centre for Women’s Justice, 2023.
