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Staff Profiles

Dr Luc Racaut

Lecturer in History

  • Email: luc.racaut@ncl.ac.uk
  • Personal Website:
  • Address: ARMB 2.26
    Armstrong building
    Â鶹´«Ã½
    Â鶹´«Ã½-upon-Tyne
    NE1 7RU

Background

Publications

Podcasts


Qualifications

B.A., History Single Honours, May 1992, University of Sheffield
M.Phil., History, May 1995, University of Sheffield
Ph.D., History, May 1999, University of St Andrews

Previous Positions

Lecturer in History, Crichton Campus of the University of Glasgow, 2000-03

Memberships

Fellow of the

Languages

French


 

Research

Research Interests

Luc Racaut has published extensively in the field of the history of printing and religious reform during the French Wars of Religion. His most recent publications outline how Catholic reform was pursued in print in general and the role that printers played in particular. Demand for vitriolic material discouraged printers from producing works devoted to more progressive aims such as the instruction of the literate laity. In this respect the burgeoning market for printed books served as a brake on the Catholic Reformation in France that was otherwise served by prolific and successful authors.

Current Work

The body in pain, in late medieval representations of the passion and public executions, served a didactic function and followed a code that was well understood. Wounds were liminal places not simply between the inside and the outside, but between the corporeal and the spiritual. The stigmata received by St Francis was a visible sign of his imitation of Christ, an outward sign of his inner election. In an inversion of this ‘sacred woundedness’, the perpetrators of violence on the bodies of heretics during the wars of religion were looking for visible signs of damnation or corruption inside their bodies - literally - worlds inside out. By the end of the sixteenth century the namelessness of the victims of massacres, and the shapelessness of their bodies, could no longer be reconciled with tales of individual martyrs that had featured in Protestant martyrologies to that point.

Future Research

It remains to be established how early modern perceptions of the body fit in the wider context of the development of personhood and individualism which seem to characterize contemporary identity. This question flows into a much wider debate in the historiography about the role of material culture in shaping identity and one's sense of self.

Funding

In 2009 Luc Racaut was the recipient of a British Academy small research grant which allowed for a research assistant to be employed full time for 6 months to work on the 'World Inside Out' project. This project was further funded by the British Academy and the Northern Centre for the History of Medicine in 2010-11.

Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching

HIS1027 European History
HIS2084 Europe's Reformations
HIS3228 Imagined Futures
HIS3000 Reading History
HIS3020 Writing History

Postgraduate Teaching


HIS8053 Conflict in European History: Case Studies
HIS8128 Disease in History

History PhD

Publications

  • Articles

    • Racaut L. . Œuvres et Critiques 2013, 38(2), 83-94.
    • Racaut L. . French History 2010, 24(1), 20-39.
    • Racaut L. . History: The Journal of the Historical Association 2010, 95(318), 159-176.
    • Racaut L. . The Historical Journal 2009, 52(1), 23-41.
    • Racaut L. . Histoire, Economie et Société 2005, (2), 163-170.
    • Racaut L. . Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 2005, 96, 198-220.
    • Racaut L. . French History 1999, 13(3), 261-279.
    • Racaut L. . Northern History 1997, 33, 73-87.

  • Authored Books

    • Racaut L, Ryrie A. . Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.
    • Racaut L. . Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.

  • Book Chapters

    • Racaut L. . In: Daubresse S; Haan B, ed. La Ligue et ses frontières : Engagements catholiques à distance du radicalisme à la fin des guerres de Religion. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015, pp.229-241.
    • Racaut L. . In: Salesse, F, ed. Le bon historien sait faire parler les silences: Hommage à Thierry Wanegffelen. Toulouse: Méridiennes, 2012, pp.311-330.
    • Racaut L. . In: Véronique Castagnet, Olivier Christin and Naïma Ghermani, ed. Les Affrontements religieux en Europe: du début du XVIe au milieu du XVIIe siècle. Villeneuve d'Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2008, pp.244-257.
    • Racaut L. . In: Véronique Castagnet, Olivier Christin and Naïma Ghermani, ed. Les affrontements religieux en Europe: du début du XVIe au milieu du XVIIe siècle. Villeneuve d'Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2008, pp.165-176.
    • Racaut L. . In: Benjamin Franks; Stephen Harper et al, ed. The Quest for the Wicker Man: History, Folklore and Pagan Perspectives. Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2006, pp.56-69.
    • Racaut L. . In: Bonney R; Trim DJB, ed. Persecution and Pluralism: Calvinists and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe 1550-1700. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006, pp.65-87.
    • Racaut L. . In: Raymond A. Mentzer, Andrew Spicer, ed. SOCIETY AND CULTURE IN THE HUGUENOT WORLD 1559-1685. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp.29-43.
    • Racaut L. . In: Jackson M, ed. Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002, pp.18-34.
    • Racaut L. . In: Parish H; Naphy WG, ed. Religion and superstition in Reformation Europe. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002, pp.154-169.
    • Racaut L. . In: Cameron K; Greengrass M; Roberts P, ed. The adventure of religious pluralism in Early Modern France : papers from the Exeter conference, April 1999. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2000, pp.115-127.

  • Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)

    • Racaut L. . In: Médialité et intépretation contemporaine des premières guerres de Religion. 2014, Paris: De Gruyter.

  • Review

    • Racaut L. . Historical Journal 2009, 52(4), 1075-1083.