Valérie Theis

Valérie Theis is a professor of medieval history. She is a member of the Institute of Modern and Contemporary History (IHMC-UMR 8066) and is currently the deputy director of the ENS for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

She works on the political and social history of Europe, from the central Middle Ages to the early modern period.

She is particularly interested in the development of the use of writing for governmental purposes, with a predilection for the study of accounting, the history of medieval archives and the history of surveys. Until now, her work has mainly been based on papal archives and on the archives of local communities in the south of France and Italy.

Through the study of this documentation, the aim is to work on different scales on the social effects of the policies of territorial domination and government of the populations developed by the institutions exercising temporal power, to study the social milieus that oversaw the implementation of these policies, and to try to grasp what representations of space and territories were expressed in the writings that they produced.

Based on medieval accounts, she has also worked on the economic and social history of the construction industry from a long-term perspective.