Antoine Destemberg is associate professor in Medieval History at Artois University, researcher at the Centre de Recherche et d’Études – Histoire et Sociétés (UR 4027), and associate researcher at the Laboratoire de Médiévistique Occidentale de Paris (UMR 8589). He is also a member of the editorial board of the Revue historique (Paris) and the Revista de História da Sociedade e da Cultura (Coimbra).
His doctoral thesis defended at the University of Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne focused on the social imagination of Parisian scholars between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries and the strategies of honour they deployed to assert themselves as a community in the political and cultural landscape. This thesis was awarded the “Le Monde” prize for academic research (2011). Published with the title L'honneur des universitaires au Moyen Âge. Étude d'imaginaire social (Presses universitaires de France, 2015), it also received the Lantier Prize of the french Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (2017).
He as also published an Atlas de la France médiévale. Hommes, espaces et pouvoirs, du Ve au XVe siècle (Paris, Autrement, 2nd ed. 2020), co-directed (with Christine Bousquet-Labouérie) Écrit, pouvoirs et société en Occident aux XIIe-XIVe siècles (Angleterre, France, Italie, péninsule Ibérique) (Paris, Ellipses, 2019) and a tribute volume to Prof. Claude Gauvard entitled Faire jeunesses, rendre justice (Paris, Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2015).
His current research focuses on the history of medieval universities, the history of intellectual elites, and the thinking of social order in the late Middle Ages. He more especially works on a type of biblical manuscript known as Bible moralisée. These luxurious manuscripts were produced mainly in France and England during the 13th and 15th centuries. They are intended to deliver to a princely and royal readership a popularization of the biblical exegesis produced in the Parisian theological schools, as well as comments on political, social and cultural issues that are immediately relevant to them. In so doing, these scholars conveyed to their readers a vision of the social world and outlined a new moral sociology, in the specific context of the growing affirmation of the state in medieval Europe.
He benefits from a secondment to the CNRS during the academic year 2021-2022 and a one month visiting fellow at the MFO during Hilary Term 2022.
