Marie-Charlotte Dubois (°2001) is joining SHOC as a PhD researcher. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts in History (2022) and Master of Arts in History (2023) at KU Leuven. She is specialized in medieval history. In her master's thesis she studied the position and adaptability of Bruges craftsmen in the clothing industry during the late Middle Ages. Since November 2024 Marie-Charlotte is also secretary of the Vlaamse Werkgroep Mediëvistiek.
In November 2023, she started a doctoral research project on the early development of urban communities in the Southern Netherlands and Northern France. The research is part of the FWO project “A Pragmatic Reality: The Performance and Codification of Collective Agency in the ‘Age of Freedom’ of Urban Communities in the Southern Low Countries and Northern France (Late 11th – Early 13th Centuries)”. This research project is supervised by Els De Paermentier, Jan Dumolyn, Dirk Heirbaut (Ghent University) and Bart Lambert (VUB).
This project proposes an interregional comparative study of ca. 150 typologically varying so-called ‘borough charters’ dated pre-1200 granted to cities and communes in the southern Low Countries and northern France during the pioneering phase of their development. The methodology relies on three approaches which will examine interrelations between people, documents and contexts from an anthropological perspective: 1) a pragmatic-documentary analysis, with a context-reconstruction in which law and liberties were written down during the experimental period of pragmatic literacy and record-based government; 2) a political and socio-economic analysis, aiming to untangle the ‘collectiveness’ within early-stage urban communities; 3) a legal historical analysis, with the goal to consider the charters as the consolidation of medieval expectations of law in the power struggle between rulers and subjects.