Areas of expertise: medieval and early modern Europe; history of emotions; legal history; Middle English literature; gender and sexuality; medievalism; love.
Email: [email protected]
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 colonial Australia. Her monograph The Law of Love in Fourteenth-Century England (contracted with Manchester University Press) identifies a historically contingent formal principle of love as a universal cause. She argues that for Middle English reading communities, statements about love were generally evaluative claims with political and legal as well as interpersonal significance.
Clare has published articles and chapters and edited multiple volumes and journals, including A Cultural History of Gender in The Global Middle Ages (Bloomsbury, 2026); Queens, Queenship and Natural Resource Management in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1800 with Prof 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 is an editor for the interdisciplinary journal Emotions: History, Culture, Society, published by Brill, and currently helps convene the Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society seminar series. She has taught broadly across humanities and law subjects, including at The University of Sydney, The University of New South Wales, The University of Western Australia, and WEA Sydney (the Workers’ Educational Association).
Clare was previously a Research Associate on the ARC Discovery Project ‘A History of Early Modern Natural Resource Management’ led by Prof Susan Broomhall in the Gender and Women’s History Research Centre. She was also previously an Associate Investigator at The University of Western Australia at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.
Publications
Books
- The Law of Love in Fourteenth-Century 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).
- A Cultural History of Gender in The Global Middle Ages, Volume Three in A Cultural History of Gender, general ed. Susan Broomhall (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
- ‘Feudalism as Comparative Jurisprudence: F. W. Maitland and Medievalism in Australian Land Law.’ law&history 12.1 (2026): 1–30. Awarded the Sir Francis Forbes Society Prize for Australian Legal History.
- ‘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
- With Aylin Malcolm, “The Non-human World: Theories and Sources for Socially Engaged Gender History” in A Cultural History of Gender in The Global Middle Ages, Vol. 3, A Cultural History of Gender, ed. Davidson and Broomhall, 165–183. London: Bloomsbury, 2026.
- “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.
