Dr Tom Hamilton
Associate Professor (Early Modern European History)
Thursday 8 May 2025, time 3pm (TBC), Geoffrey Manton Building, MMU, LT6

We are delighted to announced that Dr Tom Hamilton will deliver HaCC’s annual lecture in 2025. The paper explores how a dramatic trial for rape, homicide, and theft contributed to a wider struggle for justice and an end to violence in France after the Wars of Religion. In 1599, the widow Renée Chevalier prosecuted the military captain Mathurin Delacanche for atrocious crimes against the villagers who lived around her château near the cathedral city of Sens. The documents generated by this case – and others like it – demonstrate how people throughout the society of the Old Regime did not consider rape and pillage as inevitable consequences of war, and denounced soldiers’ illicit violence when they were given the chance. As a result, the early modern laws of war need to be understood not only as the idealistic invention of great legal thinkers, but also as a practical framework that enabled magistrates to do justice for plaintiffs and witnesses, like Chevalier and the villagers who lived under her protection.