B.A. History Dalhousie University
M.A. History Queen's University
Expanding upon my M.A. thesis, my research is primarily focused on the development of Latin Christian sexual ethics during the High Middle Ages. I am investigating how sustained conflict between Muslim and Christian communities in Iberia and the Levant gave rise to a diverse range of pejorative stereotypes regarding Muslim sexual practices that were used by Catholic chroniclers and polemicists to contest the religious validity of their confessional rivals. I am examining how these allegations were utilized by contemporaries to legitimize the ideological validity of the early Crusades, and how these claims provoked a self-reflexive awareness among Catholic writers regarding the dangers of their own "dissident" sexual behavior. The Council of Nablus in 1120 has been particularly important in my research as I see it as an unprecedented legislative milestone in terms of lay and ecclesiastical collusion in the governance of Latin Christian sexual conduct.