Dr. Mireille J. Pardon
Assistant Professor of HistoryHistory
Biography
Dr. Mireille J. Pardon is a social and cultural historian interested in violence, social control, and judicial ritual in late medieval and early modern Europe. She graduated from Yale University with a Ph.D. in History in 2020 and spent 2017–2018 at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven as a Visiting International Scholar funded by a Belgian American Educational Foundation fellowship. Her dissertation investigated the changing perception of lethal violence in fifteenth-century Flemish cities and its effects on judicial practice. She is currently working on a book project, tentatively titled The Invention of Homicide: Crime, Honor, and Spectacular Justice in Late Medieval Flanders. In addition to her book project, she is interested in how medieval legal systems interacted with non-human animals, the environment, and the boundaries of (in)humanity, as well as how broader concepts of gender and sexuality impacted legal culture.
At Berea College, she teaches courses on the medieval world, from travel and translation to crime and confession. She is especially interested in showing students the diversity of medieval society and helping them develop their research and writing skills.
Outside of academia, she has a love-hate relationship with running and vegan baking.
Degrees
- B.A., Princeton University, 2014
- M.A., Yale University, 2017
- M.Phil., Yale University, 2017
- Ph.D., Yale University, 2020
Publications & Works
Pardon, Mireille. “The Female Body in Judicial Display: Pillories, Processions, and Public Shaming in Flanders, 1400-1520,” in Worlds of Conflict: Violence in the Early Modern Period, edited by Colin Rose and Amanda Madden. New York: Routledge. (forthcoming)
Pardon, Mireille. “Non-human Execution, Objectification, and the Rise of Bodily Punishment in Late Medieval Flanders,” in End Game: Exile and Execution in Medieval and Early Modern Society, edited by Larissa Tracy and Gila Aloni. Leiden: Brill. (forthcoming)
Pardon, Mireille. “Gender, Physical Violence, and Reconciliation in Late Medieval Bruges.” Historical Journal Groniek no. 235 (2024): 176–187.
Pardon, Mireille. “Gendered Executions and the Exceptional Repression of Sodomy and Suicide in Late Medieval Flanders,” in Death and Gender in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods, edited by Enrique Fernandez, 135–159. Leiden: Brill, 2024.
Pardon, Mireille. “The Crowd’s Two Faces: Keeping the Peace and Fearing the Stranger in Late Medieval Flanders.” The Journal of Medieval History, vol. 49, no. 2 (2023): 275–290.
Pardon, Mireille. “The Nuclear Family, Urban Life, and Patterns of Prosecution in Late Medieval Flanders.” Medieval People: Social Bonds, Kinship and Networks, vol. 37 (2022): 37–59.
Shoemaker, Karl, Mireille Pardon, and Sara McDougall. “‘Abortion Was a Crime’? Three Medievalists respond to ‘English cases dating all the way back to the 13th century corroborate the treatises’ statements that abortion was a crime.’” The Docket, vol. 5, no. 2 (2022).
Pardon, Mireille. “Necessary Killing: Crime, Honour, and Masculinity in Late Medieval Bruges and Ghent,” in Patriarchy, Honour, and Violence: Masculinities in Premodern Europe, edited by Jacqueline Murray, 71–92. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2022.
Pardon, Mireille. “Louis Guyon’s Wolf-Boy of the Ardennes: Motherhood and Magic in Early Modern France.” The Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 50, no. 3 (2019): 41–59.