Manon Banoun is a Postdoctoral fellow in the department of Archaeology at Université Paris 1. Her work focuses on urban medieval Jewish communities in Northern France, specifically medieval Jewish quarters. In her dissertation, she examined their spatial characteristics, by investigating consistent patterns regarding their location, morphology, and internal organization, as well as the evolution of these parameters from the 11th to the 14th century. The aim of her research was to understand how Jews lived in the city in medieval times as members of a particular religious community, the mechanisms of adaptation developed by the latter to the existing material conditions in the urban environment, and its involvement in the urban development that characterized this period. During her PhD, she specialized in building archaeology, as well as spatial analysis using GIS softwares. Since 2023, she has been leading an archaeological study of Rouen’s “Maison Sublime”.
Within the Contending with Crises team, her postdoctoral research project questions the fate of the buildings confiscated from the Jewish communities by the Crown of France after their expulsion from the kingdom in 1306. The aim of this study is to understand how those buildings, both private and public, were recovered and reused by local authorities in the xivth century Capetian kingdom. To this end, she aims to continue and finish the archaeological study of the “Maison Sublime”, and to compare the results with other archaeological remains in France.