Our people

Dr Clare Davidson

Areas of expertise:  medieval history; 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 an interdisciplinary cultural and legal historian of late medieval and early modern Europe. Her research is also concerned with historical reception in the British Empire and the significance of narratives about the past that continue to shape Australian law. Her monograph Love in Late Medieval England (contracted with Manchester University Press) explains vernacular concepts of loue, desire, and sexuality in fourteenth-century England while more broadly analysing the historical reception of medieval love. She is editor of The Global Middle Ages, the third volume of A Cultural History of Gender (Bloomsbury, 2025); editor with Professor Susan Broomhall of Queens, Queenship and Natural Resource Management in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1800 (Routledge, 2025); and editor with Dr Jessica Lake, a 2025 special issue of History Australia focused on gender and law in Australia and New Zealand. She is currently researching the relationship between emotion, corporations, and property and family law in late medieval England; love and desire in Middle English literature; early modern historical receptions; and legal medievalism in judgments of the High Court of Australia.

Select Publications
Books

• Love in Late Medieval England (Manchester: Manchester University Press) (under contract).
• Editor, The Global Middle Ages, Volume Three in A Cultural History of Gender, ed. Susan Broomhall (London: Bloomsbury, 2025) (in production).
• Editor with Susan Broomhall, Queens, Queenship and Natural Resource Management in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2025).

Articles

• ‘Cultivation and commodification: regulating gendered status and settler colonial title to land’, Australian Historical Studies 56.2 (2025): 1–18. 
• Editor with Jessica Lake, Regulating Gender: New Histories of Women and Law in Australia and New Zealand, Special Issue of History Australia 21:3 (2024).
• 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: The Ethical Challenges of Chaucerian Scholarship in the 21st Century Special Edition 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,” in The Global Middle Ages, Vol. 3, A Cultural History of Gender, eds. S. Broomhall and C. Davidson (London: Bloomsbury) (in production).
• “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, eds. S. Broomhall and C. Davidson. New York: Routledge.
• 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, eds. S. Broomhall and C. Davidson. New York: Routledge.
• “‘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. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter (Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture Series 67) (2019): 151–173.

Reports

• With Arlie Loughnan, “Australia,” in Jenny Earle and Katy Swaine Williams, eds. 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).

Accolades and Awards

• 2024 Sir Francis Forbes Society for Australian Legal History Prize for the paper ‘F.W. Maitland on feudal orders: towards an analytical legal medievalism’ given at the 43rd Annual Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society.
• 2019 ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Honorary Research Fellowship.

Select Public engagement

• ‘From Chaucer to chocolates: how Valentine’s Day gifts have changed over the centuries’ The Conversation, 13 February 2023.
• With Arlie Loughnan and Sarah Murray, ‘The royal commission must find ways to keep veterans out of jail’ The Conversation, 14 Feb 2022.
• With Boyda Johnstone, ‘“I wanted it to be a comedy”: The Saintliness of Margery Kempe’ Los Angeles Review of Books, 6 October 2018.