Matilda Sidel

The research I am undertaking for my Master’s focuses on the uncertainty surrounding the law of the sea in the Spanish empire, c. 1492-c.1600. Bearing in mind preceding Roman and Castilian legal corpuses and medieval theological discussions that pertained to the sea, my project will mainly turn to vernacular treatises popular among the reading public: navigation guides, travel accounts and histories of Atlantic expansion. I will be looking for hints at uncodified customs and assumptions about behaviour at sea, particularly those revealing how political categories – subjecthood, sovereignty, national loyalty to name a few – mattered or were translated and transformed on board ship and in maritime spaces that as yet remained legally ambiguous. 

At the moment, I’m especially interested in marrying a cultural approach with the intellectual history of the global, imperial, and 'trans-national’, or rather ‘inter-political', as well as thinking about space, migration, religion and cross-cultural encounter.

I completed my BA in History at Clare College, Cambridge, and am now on the Early Modern History (1500-1700) MSt  strand, funded by the John Walsh/Hamish Scott History Studentship at Jesus College.

I can be reached by email at matilda.sidel@jesus.ox.ac.uk