Historian Taylor Aucoin

I’m a cultural, social and economic historian of medieval and early modern Britain. Thematically, my research focuses on how people valued and spent their time, especially through work, play and leisure.  In this vein, I have four main areas of expertise:

  • Carnival and festivity
  • Football, sport and leisure
  • Work, labour relations and economic change
  • Legal courts, processes and records (especially quarters sessions and church courts)

I’m interested in how practices and traditions within these spheres intersected with social relations, identities, structures and politics in the past: how people used such practices to shape their social worlds.  

I completed my PhD at the University of Bristol, with a thesis on medieval and early modern Shrovetide, Britain’s pre-Lenten Carnival. I am now an Honorary Fellow in History at the University of Edinburgh, where I previously held a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship researching the social and cultural history of football in Britain before 1800.

Prior to joining Edinburgh, I was a postdoc at the University of Exeter on the European Research Council-funded project ‘Forms of Labour: Gender, Freedom and Work in the Preindustrial Economy’.

You can access my thesis here, or read more generally about my research here and in my blog posts below. And do come along to Merry Shrovetide, a public festival of events about the premodern history of Pancake Day and Carnival in England, Scotland and Wales.

Corner Craftsman and the logo are literal representations of my name: a tailor in the corner. The logo is adapted from Jost Amman’s 16th-century woodcut of a tailor’s shop. This website began life as a promotional page for Merry Shrovetide. I renamed it Ludicrus Histories: Medieval and Early Modern Festivity and Play as a platform to share my research, but this title became rather anachronistic as my interests diversified . 

Recent Blog Posts