Anne-Frédérique Provou is a doctoral student. Her thesis is entitled “Innovating without Saying So? Reforming City in the Low Countries in the 15th Century,” as part of the Sinergia research project “Capturing the Present before the Age of Presentism in Northwestern Europe (1348-1648)“. This work aims to explore the ability of cities in French-speaking Flanders to innovate administratively and politically in a culturally conservative context that fostered mistrust of the new. Anne-Frédérique examines this contradiction and the way in which magistrates and city officials managed to “make the old new” in the name of a necessarily changing present. She examines how they instrumentalised the idea of reform, which was a powerful religious and political ideal at the end of the Middle Ages.
Her research dissertation, which she defended in June 2021, allowed her to specialize in urban and political history of the late Middle Ages, while also developing strong skills in medieval palaeography by editing the first surviving register of deliberations for the city of Saint-Omer (1448-1472). A digital edition of the source is forthcoming. Anne-Frédérique Provou teaches medieval paleography at the University of Lille. She taught history/geography at the Lycée Louis Pasteur in Lille, after obtaining the agrégation externe d’histoire in 2023.