Tuesday 29 April 2025 – Rachael Haslam (University of York): Tracing Trust and Distrust: A Network and Linguistic Analysis of Late-Medieval Church Court Disputes

This seminar is 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm BST live on Zoom at https://zoom.us/j/92645117342, and later posted to our YouTube channel.

Session chair: TBC

Abstract: This paper considers preliminary findings from research exploring trust and distrust dynamics in late-medieval England. Drawing from church court witness depositions, the study combines network and linguistic analysis to examine trust and distrust in disputes. By creating abstract network visualisations of interpersonal connections and investigating trust language in testimonies, it aims to clarify how late-medieval individuals understood trust and distrust, who exactly was excluded from trust in the late Middle Ages and why this might have been and whether words and actions relating to trust shifted over the period 1300-1500. This moves away from a focus on individuals to concentrate on the spaces between them. Additionally, the work will offer a critical approach towards network and linguistic methods in history.

Through a case study of one late-medieval dispute, visualised using network analysis and examined for trust language, this paper will highlight how trust functioned in a period often considered a time of ‘crisis’, with rapid depopulation, war, persecution and climate change. The case study will demonstrate that analysing trust using digital humanities methods can reveal how individuals felt about uncertainty and how they overcame it, contributing to discussions on late-medieval social relationships and contemporary understandings of historical trust.